My first limousine ride interview with Bill Gates was in 1993, and ever since I have been painfully aware of the sin of solipsism–the idiotic belief that I am the center of the high-tech universe.
Compared with Binary Bill, I am like the small-time actor who had a one-line part as a dentist in “A Streetcar named Desire” with Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh.
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“What is the play about?” a friend asks the flea-bitten thespian.
“Well,” the actor says, “There is this dentist down in New Orleans. …”
So I cannot let pass Gates’ headline-grabbing announcement that he plans to step away from running Microsoft Corp. in order to devote himself full time to shoveling his ever-growing pile of money into charitable efforts.
After being paid to watch Gates for more than a decade, I think I can add something to the mare’s nest of questions this latest development poses.
First, some well-deserved words of praise.
Gates is rightly lionized as one of the greatest industrialists in American history, and his brilliant moves into philanthropy have been impressive from the get-go. The kind of innovation that built Microsoft returns with strategies like Gates’ laser-like focus on keeping children from dying in the Third World simply by providing vaccinations against malaria, AIDS and rotavirus.
There can be no doubt that the world will be a better place as Gates’ fantastic energy and burning brilliance focus on more innovative philanthropy schemes like the ones under way at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (www.gatesfoundation.org).
But I want to point out that Gates’ decision to depart from his major role at the helm comes as Microsoft faces a raft of confrontations with competitors worse than anything the company has ever faced, even back when it took on the global behemoth known as IBM Corp.
Let’s start with the fact that for all of its blustering, Microsoft remains a company focused on a fast-disappearing piece of digital real estate–the personal computer.
Almost all of the money that rolls in comes from sales of flavors of the Microsoft Windows operating system and business-productivity software like Microsoft Office. At a time when the PC clearly has peaked, Microsoft often seems perplexed.
After a decade of trying to make a success out of stripped-down versions of Windows, first for PDAs and now for mobile phones, Microsoft lags behind other providers, even as the world clearly is moving from the desktop and the laptop to the palm top and the pocket.
Every day Google and Yahoo eat Microsoft’s lunch in Internet search and Web advertising.
Efforts to expand into electronic games with the Xbox have met with lukewarm success.
Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs came out of nowhere to blindside Microsoft’s entertainment software by making the iPod-centric iTunes software the dominant program used for digital music and video. This takes a huge bite out of Microsoft’s Media Player built in to Windows.
Now, Google has begun an even more dangerous attack on Microsoft through a flurry of Web-based software releases that replace bread-and-butter products like Office with Internet-based alternatives given away for free, albeit with viewing Google’s paid advertising as part of the package.
Right now Google is letting beta users work with an online spreadsheet that matches Microsoft’s all-important Excel in handling the vast majority of tasks managed by this type of software.
Analysts expect that any day Google will unwrap Writerly, its Web version of the Microsoft word-processing program Word that is, after Windows itself, the most visible manifestation of the company on the planet.
Almost as an afterthought Google started giving away a program called Picasa that blows away Microsoft’s once-acclaimed home photo-editing-and-sharing system, now known as Digital Image Suite 2006.
Last week the Picasa attack got hotter with an update that lets users quickly move images from their digital cameras onto Google’s banks of Web servers to make them available to view and/or download by anybody.
That move came as it was disclosed that Google has a Manhattan Project-scale development under way in the tiny town of The Dalles, Ore., to fill buildings the size of football fields with server computers. With such a resource, Google can become an operating system in its own right, where customers get their programs from the Web instead of their own hard drives.
These server buildings are so crammed with computer innards that a four-story-high system of cooling towers is needed to manage the heat from all those motherboards from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Surely, Gates sees some irony here.
Microsoft changed the world by moving computing from huge IBM mainframes linked to workstation terminals into micro computers on individual desktops.
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Now, Google seems well on the way to replacing all of those Microsoft computers on the desktops with terminals connected by the Internet with Rose Bowl-size computers.
So what’s it all mean?
Well, see, there’s this columnist in Chicago …
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.