Is Bill Gates the Cure For What Ails Microsoft?

theodp writes "After reading the recent call for Steve Ballmer to step down, gdgt's Ryan Block concludes that it's time for Bill Gates to come back to Microsoft. 'I've long seen it as a foregone conclusion that Ballmer isn't the guy to be running what was until quite recently the world's preeminent technology company,' writes Block. 'The more pressing question is: who should replace him? I think we all know damn well who — but I'm not so sure he's available. Yet.' Block adds: 'I'm not saying Bill's going to leave his new gig as the world's greatest living philanthropist with aplomb, but the multi-billion dollar wheels at The Gates Foundation have been set in motion — and lest we all forget, the Foundation's endowment is tied directly to Microsoft's long-term success. It may just happen that Bill can help the Foundation more by securing Microsoft's future.'"

Comments

Re:Bill Gates

[cpu6502]

I don't think Bill Gates did anything miraculous. He sold MS-DOS to IBM, and then rode their success as the IBM PC became the default standard for computers. The PC "won" the computing battle therefore the microsoft OS won.

Basically he got lucky, and if he had picked somebody else, like Commodore or Atari or TI to sell his OS, then he'd be in the same place they are (bankrupt). Ever heard of Berkeley Softworks? No because even though they developed a nice GUI-based OS in 1985, they chose the wrong team (commodore) and disappeared off the planet.

Had they chosen IBM PC instead, maybe we'd all be using Berkeley Windows instead of MS windows. And Bill Gates would be in the same camp as Nolan Bushnell or Jack Tramel.