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Broadcast
14th January 2000
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GATES STEPS DOWN AS HEAD OF MICROSOFT
Bill Gates has
announced he is giving up the chief executive job at Microsoft. He
is handing that post over to company President Steve Ballmer.
Our reporter Aison Gee considers why Mr Gates no longer wants to be
in charge of Microsoft, and what light this sheds on the company's
fears that an antitrust trial verdict, due soon, may well decide to
break Microsoft up.
"The news that Bill Gates is stepping down as chief executive
of Microsoft broke just after the close of Wall Street on Thursday
afternoon. At a news conference in Seattle, Mr Gates said he would
be stepping down in favour of his long-time partner, Steve Ballmer,
so that he could spend more time thinking about developing new generations
of software.
"He said the desire to return to making software had been growing
for some years - and had been behind his decision to make Mr Ballmer
President of Microsoft in 1998.
"Today we are taking the next step. Today Steve is going to
step up to a new role. He will be CEO of Microsoft. I will take on
a new role that will allow me to spend almost 100 per cent of my time
on new technologies. I will be the chairman, the chief soft architect.
My commitment: working with the same energy that I brought to this
job over the past 25 years. It is a very exciting evolution for me
and I see it as a very good transition for the company."
In fact, Bill Gates has been letting Steve Ballmer take over some
of the strain of day to-day operations for a very long time. He recruited
Mr Ballmer from Procter and Gamble in 1980 - at the time the specific
reason given, according to the Microsoft Museum, was to ease the administrative
burden on Bill Gates. And the process of power transfer from Gates
to Bullmer has gone a long way: Mr Ballmer surveys the world of technology
now from the considerable vantage point of being both President and
Chief Executive of Microsoft.
 "We
certainly face challenges that is for sure. If you look at the tough
competitors we have out there such as Sun, IBM, Oracle, Linnux and
now AOL and Time Warner, in addition to the hundreds of internet start-ups
who are competing with aspects of what we do, it is a challenging
time. But I think the times when Microsoft has been faced with challenges,
is frankly often the time when we do our very best work.
"Software is our heritage - the key, we think, to the future.
In the years ahead it’s software that will be the driver for new opportunities
and we are dedicated to our roots and capabilities in software."
Reaction to Mr Gates' reduced role at Microsoft has been generally
positive. Some, like Rupert Goodwins, editor of the magazine IT Week,
thinks Mr Gates' decision may have been prompted by his unhappy experiences
representing Microsoft at last year's antitrust trial in Washington,
and a conviction inside Microsoft that the trial's verdict, due shortly,
will be to demand some kind of break-up of the company in the quest
for more competition.
"Nobody was quite expecting Bill Gates to hand over quite
so much power to Steve Ballmer. Although they are very similar, there
is no real difference between their outlook. It is fairly obvious
that something fairly radical is going to happen to them and with
Bill out of the way being chief software architect and Steve Ballmer
there looking after other bits of the empire, they are nicely positioned
to take over perhaps two separate sections of the new Microsoft."
Another interpretation of course, is that Mr Gates wants more time
either to himself, or for his growing charitable foundation. Rupert
Goodwins thinks that for a man still only in his early 40's, that
is unlikely. In fact he thinks Microsoft with Gates back exclusively
on making software could be an even more formidable force than it
is at present.
"Microsoft did well to pick up the internet. The internet
still has plenty of power to force Microsoft off the top notch if
other companies get in to use it to distribute software more efficiently
than Microsoft does.
"So this is part of Mircrosoft’s plan to stay ahead. Bill
Gates said this is one of the things he will be looking at, so they
are going to have software which will run on your telephone or toaster
or what-have-you, and it is very complex to build this stuff. Bill
Gates is going to give all his time to this, so this is going to make
the opposition rather worried."
There is of course a third explanation - as another analyst put it:
Bill had been getting bored with being chief executive and, when you
are worth $80 billion, you can always stop being bored if you want
to.
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Bill Gates has been getting bored with being chief executive
and, when you are worth $80 billion, you can stop being bored
if you want to.
Alison
Gee |
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| The
Markets: 00:13 GMT |
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FTSE |
6406.80 |
-11.00 |
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Dow Jones |
12525.7 |
-48.11 |
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Nasdaq |
2467.70 |
-9.91 |
| Data delayed at least 15 minutes. |
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