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        <title>ZDNet Blogs</title>
        <link>http://blogs.zdnet.com</link>
        <description>ZDNet Blogs Focus: Bill Gates</description>
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<title>The lighter side of Bill Gates</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=284</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 27 Jun 2008 04:56:28 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Zack Whittaker</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=284</guid>
<description><![CDATA[As you all probably know, considering the 2 year lead-up to today and the considerable press coverage, it's Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft. I'd like to take a slightly different spin on covering his career and life, by pointing out the stupid stuff, in the hope it will appeal to my target audience: the student. He's been shot by a US Army officer, he had been assassinated for a short while until they realised he hadn't, he had his credit card details stolen by a 19 year old hacker, he's posed provocatively for the cameras, awarded a useless knighthood by the Queen, he has been immortalised as a Simpsons character, been sued an awful lot by an awful lot of ... ]]>
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<title>Would Microsoft ever split itself up?</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1461</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:33:25 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Mary Jo Foley</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1461</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Conventional wisdom has it that Microsoft's brass would never choose to break up the company -- even in the name of making it more agile. After all, when Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, as part of the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust case against Redmond, ruled in 2000 that Microsoft should be forced to be halved (into an operating system and application company -- a judgement later overruled -- Chairman Bill Gates & Co. was dead-set against such a plan. But might a Gates-less Microsoft be rethinking whether a more decentralized Microsoft might be better able to fend off its growing list of competitors? In a July 27 article in the Wall Street Journal about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, there are hints that the ... ]]>
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<title>Will Bill Gates' departure usher in open source friendly era at Microsoft?</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2601</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:12:37 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Paula Rooney</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2601</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Will Microsoft become more open to open source with the departure of Bill Gates? It   s a tough call. Observers from both the open and closed source worlds say the exit of Microsoft   s longtime leader won   t usher in a GPL era at the company but it will likely accelerate what is already a changing attitude in Redmond.    We already see quite a different approach to dealing with OSS and OSS companies from Sam Ramji's group [which is] doing a great job in establishing dialog,    said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange and a former marketing exec at SUSE Linux.    With Gates' departure, the only mammoth remaining is Ballmer. With him away in a near future, Microsoft will definitely open up. They have to.    Gates'  exit will ... ]]>
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<title>Do you need to be a programmer to run a software company?</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1459</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:22:02 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Mary Jo Foley</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1459</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The parade of articles and blog posts on Bill Gates' legacy continue to roll out as Gates' last day as a full-time employee (June 27) rapidly approaches. Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Fog Creek Software -- and a one-time member of Microsoft's Excel team back in the early 1990s (Microsoft's "glory days") -- has a really great look back at the significance of the famed "BillG" reviews. It's Spolsky's take-away about surviving one of those reviews which most caught my attention: "What did I take from all this? Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company's software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and ... ]]>
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<title>Bill Gates' web experience: Byzantine, idiotic logic</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=855</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:03:22 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Michael Krigsman</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=855</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Analyzing IT program management failures with the perfect vision of hindsight often leads the observer through a senseless and convoluted maze of past decisions. Studying the Byzantine and idiotic logic behind many IT failures, one wonders, "How did we get here from there?" Bill Gates experienced this Tower of Babel when he tried to download two Microsoft consumer products (MovieMaker and Digital Plus Pack). The seattlepi.com released an internal Microsoft email where Bill described his experience. The email begins with Bill's summary, emphasizing how program management, the coordinating entity, has failed: I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues. Bill then details the complexities that prevented him from downloading the software: I ... ]]>
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<title>Is Bill Gates a secret cloud convert?</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=541</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:40:47 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Phil Wainewright</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=541</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I know I'm reading too much into this, but let's have a bit of fun in Bill Gates' final week on Microsoft's full-time payroll. He seems to be dropping hints that he's starting to realize that cloud is a better way of doing many of the things Microsoft always used to try and do on discrete servers and clients. The firmest clue comes as a result of journalist Todd Bishop unearthing an "email rant" that Gates wrote in January 2003 after attempting to download and install the video editing product Windows Movie Maker. Read the email in full for an uplifting sense of schadenfreude at the blow-by-blow account that led Gates to berate Windows product chief Jim Allchin with this withering ... ]]>
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<title>Is Microsoft accessible without Bill Gates?</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=123</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:06:14 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jennifer Leggio</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=123</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Bill Gates spent the last two years slowly disengaging as he prepared for his final departure from Microsoft at the end of this week. In doing so, he appears to have left the company   s technical direction in strong hands with Ray Ozzie, Craig Mundie and 22 Technical Fellows. However even with stepping out of his role he cannot escape the perception that he is still Microsoft   s sole visionary. The company is going to have to seriously step up its branding efforts     perhaps through social media     to prove that Microsoft has innovative vision and community staying power without Bill at the helm. Why? Even my 93-year-old grandfather knows who Bill Gates is. Ballmer? Maybe. Though he certainly has personality Ballmer ... ]]>
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<title>The Andrew Carnegie of our second gilded age</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2593</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:49:28 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Dana Blankenhorn</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2593</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This may be off-topic but having watched Bill Gates up close for nearly three decades, and being about the same age, I thought he deserved a little send-off. Unlike Andrew Carnegie, whose career his most approximates, he was not born poor. He is a scion of moderate wealth, a lawyer's son. But like Carnegie, he rejected his father's path, famously co-founding Micro-Soft as a Harvard drop-out. Again like Carnegie, Gates had one great idea. Carnegie's was integrated steel production. Gates' might be called integrated software production, starting with control of its base, the operating system, building dominant applications on top. Like everyone else I have some fond memories of Gates' rise. At an early Dvorak party, drinking tea, surrounded, but intensely curious on ... ]]>
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<title>How many people does it take to fill Bill Gates' shoes?</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1455</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:14:50 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Mary Jo Foley</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1455</guid>
<description><![CDATA[When Microsoft hired Ray Ozzie in 2005, Ozzie was one of three Chief Technology Officers at Microsoft. In 2006, Microsoft's then-Chief-Software-Architect (CSA) -- Bill Gates -- passed the CSA torch to Ozzie. But Ozzie is not Gates' sole replacement. Gates' CSA role is split officially between Ozzie and Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer. In a new video interview posted to Microsoft's Channel 9 Web site on June 23, Gates adds a third group of folks to the list of those who will be filling his shoes after he leaves Microsoft as a full-time employee this month. Gates told Channel 9's Charles Torre that Microsoft's group of Technical Fellows also will be helping to fill the technology-leadership void that his departure ... ]]>
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<title>Gates hints about Microsoft's cloud futures on his way out</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1454</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:45:52 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Mary Jo Foley</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1454</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' last as a full-time Microsoft employee, is being marked by   article after article covering every aspect of Gates' tech legacy. Not to take anything away from Gates and the significance of the company he started, but after a while, all these "top 10" legacy lists start sounding the same. (As do the bulk of the multiple   "exclusive" interviews with Gates and the other remaining lieutenants at Microsoft.) I've been wading through lots of the "Goodbye Gates" coverage over the past few days. An interview Gates did with former PC Magazine Editor Michael Miller caught my eye -- mostly because of a few interesting new hints about the future that it included. Gates emphasized that he still believes ... ]]>
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