Has he finally gone?
There have been articles about Bill Gates relinquishing control at Microsoft for so long that it seems that he has been leaving for years. I can’t begin to count how many posts and articles that I’ve seen. It got to be rather tiresome. John Dvorak puts it this way in Friday’s Market Watch:
Each and every day for the past few months hundreds, if not thousands of articles have been written about Bill Gates leaving Microsoft Corp. Today there were at least 1,100 redundant stories in the newspapers and Web sites of the world.
Of course, everybody has to speculate about where Microsoft is going to go without Gates being there every day. (He will still come in once a week.) Dvorak’s assessment is:
So what will change?
If the software giant slowly swings away from shrink-wrap computing and goes off into what is commonly called “cloud computing,” with applications rented over the Internet on an as-needed basis, then we can kiss the old Microsoft goodbye.
We should never forget that Microsoft’s success has never been a result of innovation or great ideas or helping people. It was the direct result of obtaining a monopoly position with its operating system and leveraging that position in every way it could to force its will on the industry.
It’s questionable whether Microsoft can manage a second act with that kind of leverage. Personally, I see the company drifting into slow decline, settling into a role and an excitement level not much different than, say, that of a Unisys Corp. or a Honeywell International Inc.
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