On June 27, William H. Gates III formally stepped aside from his day-to-day duties at Microsoft, the company he co-founded with Paul Allen in 1975, to spend more time with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has become one of the world's leading philanthropic organizations. Gates, 52, will remain chairman of the board at Microsoft and involved in selected projects in the months and years ahead.
Even though Gates' "transition," as Microsoft calls it, had been expected for some time, it is a milestone in the software industry's history. The change prompted me to reminisce about my own early encounters with Gates and to assess his contribution to the software business and what the future might hold for what is still one of America's most creative and innovative industries.
One of my enduring recollections of Gates is from the early 1980s when we were both attending what was then known as the National Computer Conference. I was covering the conference as software editor for Electronic News, the most important tech industry weekly newspaper in that era. It was a broiling hot day in Anaheim, CA, the site of the conference, which had become so large that tents had to be erected to hold the overflow exhibits and crowds. As I walked toward one of those tents, Gates, thin as a reed and shaggy haired, spotted me and ran over to talk.
The big story that I and other journalists were covering at the time was what operating system would dominate the then-emerging PC market. Would it be Microsoft's MS-DOS, CP/M from Digital Research, or a unix variant? Gates had no doubts about that question and wanted to be sure I knew his point of view.