Bill Gates: Delivering a digital future

IN JANUARY this year, the 32,000 employees of Microsoft Corporation, the world's most successful software company, received an e-mailed memo announcing a change at the helm. Mr. Bill Gates, the man who co-founded the company in a Seattle garage, 26 years ago, with fellow student Paul Allen, was relinquishing his post as CEO, in favour of a senior colleague, Mr. Steve Balmer. He would remain Microsoft's Chairman; but henceforth he was to be designated ``Chief Software Architect.''

It was another canny move in the career of the 45-year-old Harvard University dropout, who had steered the company to a pre- eminent position in the global software firmament: nine PCs out of 10 anywhere in the world ran on a version of Microsoft's ``Windows'' operating software.

Now, at the dawn of the new century, Mr. Gates had decided, seemingly, that it was time for a sharp course correction. The future of Information Technology rode on the Internet - and Mr. Gates envisioned a shift for Microsoft from its commanding position in the desktop operating systems business to a new dominance of the Web. After almost two decades when he played the role of Microsoft's business and marketing brain, it was time to slip back into being the ``Brash Bill'' of the early Seventies: the whizkid who began tinkering with computers before he was 13, and developed a programming language package for the world's first single-board microcomputer - the MITS Altair 8000-while still a college freshman.

When IBM put together the first Personal Computer in 1981, it asked the fledgling Microsoft to supply it with the necessary software. The result was PC-DOS ( for Disk Operating System) - later to be called MS-DOS - and the royalty from this product which was to finally go through seven updates, made millionaires out of the two young owners.

In the Eighties and Nineties, Microsoft did not so much innovate as acquire, improve or otherwise refurbish carefully chosen competitive products. ``Windows'' was a blatant lift of the graphical interface idea that Apple Computers pioneered. ``Excel'' was an imitation of the spread sheet market leader Lotus 1-2-3. ``MS Word'' was that old word processor Wordstar - with a whole lot of made-for-dummies interfaces.

The new souped-up Microsoft versions soon outsold many of the packages that inspired them - and clever marketing which packaged them into all-in-one suites ensured that in no time at all, Microsoft's commanding presence under the hood of PCs as the operating system translated into an equally large presence in the applications business. The logic was a runaway commercial success - till Microsoft tried the strategy one more time, creating the Web browser, ``Internet Explorer'' to take on Netscape's ``Navigator''.

Mr. Gates and Microsoft tried to bind Windows and Explorer tightly together as a stepping stone from desktop to the Web - and that's when the floodgates of opposition opened. Married in 1994 to co-worker Ms. Melinda French, Mr. Gates, has had to spend the last few years, facing an avalanche of legal suits challenging the company's alleged monopolistic practices. The January 2000 decision to reinvent himself as a software guru is tacit acknowledgement that all these courtroom battles are diverting him from his primary role as the company's key technology driver to an abrasive if reluctant street fighter, defending its interests from perceived raiders. His brief public interventions during the recent U.S. courtroom saga, saw him come across as hard edged and uncompromising. Clearly it is not what Mr. Gates is good at.

The legal tangles have, so far at least, not affected the company's bottom line and Mr. Gates is still comfortably the world's richest man heading one of America's richest corporations. Both Mr. Gates and his wife have been personally generous and have endowed over $17 billion in trusts for health and learning. After a high profile visit to India two years ago, he is reported to have set aside $ 1 million of his personal money for aiding educational initiatives here.

Can Mr. William H. Gates III, in his new avatar as Chief Software Architect, take Microsoft (or two Microsofts?) into a bright new future in Cyberspace? We will soon know. At any rate his personal vision - articulated in two lucidly written books, ``The Road Ahead'' (1995) and ``Business @ the Speed of Thought'' (1999)- is on record: There's still life in the personal computer -but increasingly it will be part - maybe a small part - of a new ``Digital Nervous System'' whose neurons stretch out to girdle the globe. Current hassles notwithstanding, it is a vision that Mr. Gates will almost certainly play a hand in delivering, before this decade is out.

Anand Parthasarathy

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