12 ms·

It's Time for Bill Gates to Come Back to Microsoft

115 points by hornokplease 15y ago

nextparadigms 15y ago
That depends. If he's going to have the same "Don't F&*% with Windows" attitude like he used to have in the past, when people came to him with such projects, then I doubt he'll do much better than Ballmer. Microsoft needs to let innovation get out of their labs regardless if it has to potential to kill Windows or not. The priority should be to make great products with no restrictions. Did Steve Jobs get his employees to f$%^ off when they came with the idea to make iOS that would potentially affect Mac sales in the future? I don't think so. The iPhone disrupts the iPod business, and the iPad disrupts the Macbook business (though it's still too early to see the effects). Microsoft wouldn't build anything that has the potential to disrupt Windows right now. That's why they'd rather wait over 2 years since the iPad launched to use the real Windows for tablets, instead of making a WP7 tablet version right away (which would have to be about as cheap as WP7 for phones).
- dman 15y ago
  Great points. btw http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ is a great resource for things that Microsoft should be doing. Ironically its written by someone who works at Microsoft and several people from Microsoft participate in the comments section.
  - chollida1 15y ago
    > btw http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ is a great resource for things that Microsoft should be doing. Ironically its written by someone who works at Microsoft I agree that minimsft is a great blog, but can you expand on how an employee having an opinion on how Microsoft should run it's business is ironic? Most of the premise of the blog is to have a smaller Microsoft, which is almost a universally accepted opinion in the company.
    - dman 15y ago
      Well minimsft is one employee but his posts receive comments from many other Microsoft employees. In my mind the irony is that people inside the company seem to agree completely on what needs to be changed - incentives structure, more risks, less political infighting and increased agility - however things are still as they are.
      - contextfree 15y ago
        Those are all pretty abstract. Agreeing on a concrete solution, other than e.g. "less political infighting ... achieved by giving my faction what it wants and telling those other idiots to shut up!", is a lot harder. The various points advanced in minimsft comments and elsewhere tend to be mutually contradictory if you actually think about them. e.g. stop depending too much on Windows/Office and focus on making totally new products even if it's risky? or stop wasting time and money on anything not immediately profitable and focus only on core strengths? I've seen both advocated on minimsft quite a few times.
- zmmmmm 15y ago
  > If he's going to have the same "Don't F&*% with Windows" attitude like he used to have in the past, when people came to him with such projects, then I doubt he'll do much better than Ballmer Anybody who takes over is going to encounter resistance to change on the Windows and Office front. I think that is actually by far the strongest reason that Bill could be the best person: authority. As you say, unless he recognizes the need for it it's pointless, but assuming he does, he's by far the best person for the job. If you're going to piss off people all up and down the company you need something special to bring the majority along with you. No outsider can come in and do that. Bill could, because he, unlike anyone else can legitimately lead from the front with genuine authority and vision.
qq66 15y ago
Tell that to all the blind kids with malaria he's working for now.
martythemaniak 15y ago
Gates shaped the PC industry, made a ton of money and left at pretty much the top of his game. Why would he abandon his much more important (and I'm sure, far more rewarding) current work to go and have another go at MS?
- kenjackson 15y ago
  He won't. It makes no sense to. But he does need to find a new CEO. I nominate Tim Cook. It would be a great chance for him to step out of Jobs' shadow. If Cook stays at Apple its always Jobs' company, far after Jobs' death. If he can turnaround MS, he becomes one of the giants in the history of the tech industry, next to Jobs and Gates. And note, Tim doesn't need the money. He'd be doing this to create his story.
  - protomyth 15y ago
    I am pretty sure the legal wrangling on that one would go on for years. Plus, Tim Cook is pretty much running Apple.
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      The other problem with my theory is that it would be kind of jerkish for Tim to leave with Jobs this sick. If Jobs were healthy it would be reasonable. But with Jobs sick (or worse) I don't think he could jump ship to a competitor. Oh well... Sinofsky, Rudder, Guthrie, Elop. I think, in no particular order, are the four that could take Ballmer's spot.
      - larsberg 15y ago
        Honestly, they don't need to take Ballmer's spot -- one of them should take BillG's old spot before all that CEO nonsense. That is, the old Chief Software Architect role, when he used to run around reviewing every product both creating a longer-term cohesive strategy for the software and instilling the fear of instant group dismemberment if you were not thinking deeply enough. While I personally like Guthrie, Rudder was a one-time personal technical assistant to BillG. That was a role where he basically rode shotgun on a couple years of BillG reviews. And that happened back in the 90s, when he wasn't yet drifting off towards the sunset...
rmason 15y ago
It's not going to happen but the guy makes a pretty compelling case. The bigger question is when Ballmer's dismal record begins to exceed Gate's loyalty to his friend. In the end the one who shows Ballmer the door will be Gates.
TomOfTTB 15y ago
The last thing Microsoft needs is Gates to come back. Comparing Microsoft’s dilemma to Apple and Steve Jobs isn’t an accurate comparison. Apple was almost out of business when Steve Jobs returned. When a company is practically out of business you can do things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Like destroy whole product lines (Newton), screw over partners (all the MacOS licensees) and even toss out your main product (MacOS in favor of OSX). Microsoft is still profitable. They still have tons of customers. You couldn’t, for example, replace Microsoft Windows with a whole new OS and get away with it. There is only one company in modern history that has grown to the size of Microsoft, started failing and then come back to achieve greater glory. That company is IBM. If Microsoft is to succeed they need to find someone like Lou Gerstner (who saved IBM). Gerstner succeeded not because he tried to return IBM to its former glory but because he saw a value in the individual components of IBM that no one had seen before. he saw that IBM could do everything technology wise and realized that opened the door to a successful consulting business. Microsoft needs that. Someone who can see the individual parts of Microsoft and combine them in a way no one’s ever thought of before. Someone who realizes the old vision isn’t working anymore and can move the company forward without being bound to it. Because being bound to the past is exactly what’s killing Microsoft right now and Gates is just as guilty of that as Ballmer is.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  Microsoft needs that. Someone who can see the individual parts of Microsoft and combine them in a way no one’s ever thought of before. What would keep this someone from just taking the page from the Jack Gerstner playbook for IBM?
  - roc 15y ago
    Well, if they really can and do see Microsoft's unique strengths, they'll notice that Microsoft is actually sitting on a world-class consumer-design group and a platform that could be painlessly [1] pruned down to a single cohesive media and social ecosystem. Simply moving Microsoft down the Enterprise/Consulting road would be a huge waste of that opportunity and would piss off any number of partners and third party developers. [1] It wouldn't involve screwing over partners, just clearing away the internal backbiting nonsense.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
protomyth 15y ago
Isn't there anyone left at Microsoft who could run the company? I know there has been some serious house cleaning / fleeing, but isn't there someone who could take over?
JMiao 15y ago
not sure you could classify the xbox effort as "scrappy." also, gates wanted xbox to run full-blown windows.
Hello_Nurse 15y ago
If they want a true leader they need someone from the younger generation who knows what our wants and needs are. A company that listens; that delivers a useful product that doesn't disappoint. As I stare at my 360 rebooting, yet again, I don't really see it happening anytime soon. We need a champion.
Apocryphon 15y ago
My favorite comment: "There aren't many people in the industry with the full gamut of experience, wisdom, vision, financial insight, and guts for risky moves. Perhaps they could offer the job to Woz? He might like the challenge of saving them."
Apocryphon 15y ago
What's Paul Allen up to nowadays?
- hubb 15y ago
  being a patent troll
- potatolicious 15y ago
  Sailing in his yacht and trying desperately to turn a tract of light industrial land into an annoying yet pathetically artificial high-end neighborhood. And failing at it.
- meow 15y ago
  Swimming around in self pity, trolling around with patents .. u know the usual...
HardyLeung 15y ago
I admire Bill Gates but I think bringing him back is a bad idea. He's so much more valuable being outside of Microsoft.
crux_ 15y ago
To echo a common opinion, I think the world needs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation more than it needs Microsoft.
- lotusleaf1987 15y ago
  I really don't think it's a zero sum trade and I think their contributions to society would be hard to compare. Microsoft although being a corporation, does facilitate a lot of communication and business processes and make a lot of things take less time than they once did. Also, I don't think the Foundation would be possible without MSFT's existence.
  - dmix 15y ago
    Either way Microsoft is a well oiled machine that can survive without Gates (at least for the next 10yrs or so). The charity is not a mature enterprise that can run itself.
runjake 15y ago
I don't agree with the author regarding Gates, but I'd like to see the Microsoft that fostered innovation and its engineers, again. I'd like to see them truly embrace open standards and interoperability. They no longer have the monopoly which made these unnecessary. A Microsoft that truly embraces (without "extending") & implements truly open standards is going to be a very potent beast.
orijing 15y ago
Do people here generally think that Bill has been much more valuable to society now that he's working at his Foundation? I think we need a visionary leader with his fiery passion and dogged persistence to tackle some of the biggest problems in the world: things like malaria, education, and energy.
teyc 15y ago
Bill Gates hired Ballmer because he needed a good COO, and Balmer was very good at it. However, MS had a Yahoo sized problem. They needed big hits, and this means they have to aim square at the middle, and not to the right of the adoption curve. Bill had tried being the chief architect thing but as the article alluded, the problem isn't that MS hadn't enough people with vision, but their product development/marketing pipeline is broken. They need a CEO with a fresh set of eyes to fix this process.
voidr 15y ago
Or they could just boot Ballmer and find someone competent, I'm just saying...
blinkingled 15y ago
Pundits, like people, want easy answers, sometimes to questions that are based on pure perception. Microsoft, based on all the facts, is doing just fine for a company of that size and diversity. They pulled a great Win 7 release, they are doing great in the Enterprise, doing great on the server, they missed out on the Mobile side but are on the right track now with Mango and Nokia partnership. Kinect/Xbox 360 stuff is also looking great. Sure there is not enough glitterati and magic in that anywhere, nor is Ballmer charming but those are non-important things. When Bill ran MSFT people hated them - it's easy to forget that. So if we are talking mind share, even then it doesn't make sense to have Bill come back and run it the way he did first time around. So what do people want Microsoft to achieve - look and act like Apple? Have more mind share? Stop doing uncool things like the Enterprise stuff? Or just have $600 share value? Unless they define that, I think this is just pointless blabber.
- astrodust 15y ago
  If you think Microsoft "is doing great" with Windows 7 then it's people like you that are dragging Microsoft down to an unprecedented level of irrelevancy. It's not about magic, it's not about glitter, it's not even about wild P/E. It's about using their massive base of resources to do something other than crank out derivative products for existing markets and rest on their own laurels. Today's Microsoft has no idea how to innovate. Yesterday's Microsoft was aggressive, produced new products that were competitive, and never shied away from a fight no matter how bloody. They were the Lance Armstrong of their day, always winning yet having people suspicious of their methods. If they're not careful, Computer Associates will beat them at their own game.
  - wglb 15y ago
    Perhaps I missed some reading somewhere, but I have never thought of Microsoft as a leader in Innovation. Execution, yes, but they have not been known as an innovator.
  - blinkingled 15y ago
    They did Kinect - that's not innovation for you? They took very different approach to Win Phone 7 - that's not innovation? And innovation doesn't have to involve stupidity - there is no real reason to, for example, throw away Windows and start over. At least not yet. And besides, that is not what makes Microsoft tick - it's hard core engineering and execution that makes them tick. The problem is, innovation doesn't have a formula. The fascination with "disruptive innovation" is admirable but building something no one has built before, doing things better and different than anyone else has before, creating new markets - these things are rare occurrences whose success depends on lot of things - timing, market needs, technical advances, some visionary having the right flash of vision that then is executed flawlessly etc. Point is it's far from easy and I don't think you can count anyone out because they haven't been disruptive for some time.
dstein 15y ago
I think they need to make some more drastic changes that that. They need to break up the company, and have several new CEO's. All their cash cows are tied to the personal computing industry, and it is coming to an end faster than they can turn the ship around with all the Windows and Enterprise baggage.
darrenkopp 15y ago
Seems to me forfeiting ~40 billion dollars wouldn't be a good move, and that's what would happen if Bill went back to Microsoft. Warren Buffet gave the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation billions of dollars on condition that Bill stop working at Microsoft and start working full time for the foundation. As much as I would like to see Bill back at Microsoft, I'd rather see him doing the amazing work that he is currently doing with the Gates Foundation. I would like to see Scott Guthrie become the new CEO and/or chief software architect at Microsoft.

115 points by hornokplease 15y ago

That depends. If he's going to have the same "Don't F&*% with Windows" attitude like he used to have in the past, when people came to him with such projects, then I doubt he'll do much better than Ballmer. Microsoft needs to let innovation get out of their labs regardless if it has to potential to kill Windows or not. The priority should be to make great products with no restrictions. Did Steve Jobs get his employees to f$%^ off when they came with the idea to make iOS that would potentially affect Mac sales in the future? I don't think so. The iPhone disrupts the iPod business, and the iPad disrupts the Macbook business (though it's still too early to see the effects). Microsoft wouldn't build anything that has the potential to disrupt Windows right now. That's why they'd rather wait over 2 years since the iPad launched to use the real Windows for tablets, instead of making a WP7 tablet version right away (which would have to be about as cheap as WP7 for phones).

dman 15y ago
Great points. btw http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ is a great resource for things that Microsoft should be doing. Ironically its written by someone who works at Microsoft and several people from Microsoft participate in the comments section.
- chollida1 15y ago
  > btw http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ is a great resource for things that Microsoft should be doing. Ironically its written by someone who works at Microsoft I agree that minimsft is a great blog, but can you expand on how an employee having an opinion on how Microsoft should run it's business is ironic? Most of the premise of the blog is to have a smaller Microsoft, which is almost a universally accepted opinion in the company.
  - dman 15y ago
    Well minimsft is one employee but his posts receive comments from many other Microsoft employees. In my mind the irony is that people inside the company seem to agree completely on what needs to be changed - incentives structure, more risks, less political infighting and increased agility - however things are still as they are.
    - contextfree 15y ago
      Those are all pretty abstract. Agreeing on a concrete solution, other than e.g. "less political infighting ... achieved by giving my faction what it wants and telling those other idiots to shut up!", is a lot harder. The various points advanced in minimsft comments and elsewhere tend to be mutually contradictory if you actually think about them. e.g. stop depending too much on Windows/Office and focus on making totally new products even if it's risky? or stop wasting time and money on anything not immediately profitable and focus only on core strengths? I've seen both advocated on minimsft quite a few times.
zmmmmm 15y ago
> If he's going to have the same "Don't F&*% with Windows" attitude like he used to have in the past, when people came to him with such projects, then I doubt he'll do much better than Ballmer Anybody who takes over is going to encounter resistance to change on the Windows and Office front. I think that is actually by far the strongest reason that Bill could be the best person: authority. As you say, unless he recognizes the need for it it's pointless, but assuming he does, he's by far the best person for the job. If you're going to piss off people all up and down the company you need something special to bring the majority along with you. No outsider can come in and do that. Bill could, because he, unlike anyone else can legitimately lead from the front with genuine authority and vision.

qq66 15y ago

Tell that to all the blind kids with malaria he's working for now.

martythemaniak 15y ago

Gates shaped the PC industry, made a ton of money and left at pretty much the top of his game. Why would he abandon his much more important (and I'm sure, far more rewarding) current work to go and have another go at MS?

kenjackson 15y ago
He won't. It makes no sense to. But he does need to find a new CEO. I nominate Tim Cook. It would be a great chance for him to step out of Jobs' shadow. If Cook stays at Apple its always Jobs' company, far after Jobs' death. If he can turnaround MS, he becomes one of the giants in the history of the tech industry, next to Jobs and Gates. And note, Tim doesn't need the money. He'd be doing this to create his story.
- protomyth 15y ago
  I am pretty sure the legal wrangling on that one would go on for years. Plus, Tim Cook is pretty much running Apple.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    The other problem with my theory is that it would be kind of jerkish for Tim to leave with Jobs this sick. If Jobs were healthy it would be reasonable. But with Jobs sick (or worse) I don't think he could jump ship to a competitor. Oh well... Sinofsky, Rudder, Guthrie, Elop. I think, in no particular order, are the four that could take Ballmer's spot.
    - larsberg 15y ago
      Honestly, they don't need to take Ballmer's spot -- one of them should take BillG's old spot before all that CEO nonsense. That is, the old Chief Software Architect role, when he used to run around reviewing every product both creating a longer-term cohesive strategy for the software and instilling the fear of instant group dismemberment if you were not thinking deeply enough. While I personally like Guthrie, Rudder was a one-time personal technical assistant to BillG. That was a role where he basically rode shotgun on a couple years of BillG reviews. And that happened back in the 90s, when he wasn't yet drifting off towards the sunset...

rmason 15y ago

It's not going to happen but the guy makes a pretty compelling case. The bigger question is when Ballmer's dismal record begins to exceed Gate's loyalty to his friend. In the end the one who shows Ballmer the door will be Gates.

TomOfTTB 15y ago

The last thing Microsoft needs is Gates to come back. Comparing Microsoft’s dilemma to Apple and Steve Jobs isn’t an accurate comparison. Apple was almost out of business when Steve Jobs returned. When a company is practically out of business you can do things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Like destroy whole product lines (Newton), screw over partners (all the MacOS licensees) and even toss out your main product (MacOS in favor of OSX). Microsoft is still profitable. They still have tons of customers. You couldn’t, for example, replace Microsoft Windows with a whole new OS and get away with it. There is only one company in modern history that has grown to the size of Microsoft, started failing and then come back to achieve greater glory. That company is IBM. If Microsoft is to succeed they need to find someone like Lou Gerstner (who saved IBM). Gerstner succeeded not because he tried to return IBM to its former glory but because he saw a value in the individual components of IBM that no one had seen before. he saw that IBM could do everything technology wise and realized that opened the door to a successful consulting business. Microsoft needs that. Someone who can see the individual parts of Microsoft and combine them in a way no one’s ever thought of before. Someone who realizes the old vision isn’t working anymore and can move the company forward without being bound to it. Because being bound to the past is exactly what’s killing Microsoft right now and Gates is just as guilty of that as Ballmer is.

stcredzero 15y ago
Microsoft needs that. Someone who can see the individual parts of Microsoft and combine them in a way no one’s ever thought of before. What would keep this someone from just taking the page from the Jack Gerstner playbook for IBM?
- roc 15y ago
  Well, if they really can and do see Microsoft's unique strengths, they'll notice that Microsoft is actually sitting on a world-class consumer-design group and a platform that could be painlessly [1] pruned down to a single cohesive media and social ecosystem. Simply moving Microsoft down the Enterprise/Consulting road would be a huge waste of that opportunity and would piss off any number of partners and third party developers. [1] It wouldn't involve screwing over partners, just clearing away the internal backbiting nonsense.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

protomyth 15y ago

Isn't there anyone left at Microsoft who could run the company? I know there has been some serious house cleaning / fleeing, but isn't there someone who could take over?

JMiao 15y ago

not sure you could classify the xbox effort as "scrappy." also, gates wanted xbox to run full-blown windows.

Hello_Nurse 15y ago

If they want a true leader they need someone from the younger generation who knows what our wants and needs are. A company that listens; that delivers a useful product that doesn't disappoint. As I stare at my 360 rebooting, yet again, I don't really see it happening anytime soon. We need a champion.

Apocryphon 15y ago

My favorite comment: "There aren't many people in the industry with the full gamut of experience, wisdom, vision, financial insight, and guts for risky moves. Perhaps they could offer the job to Woz? He might like the challenge of saving them."

Apocryphon 15y ago

What's Paul Allen up to nowadays?

hubb 15y ago
being a patent troll
potatolicious 15y ago
Sailing in his yacht and trying desperately to turn a tract of light industrial land into an annoying yet pathetically artificial high-end neighborhood. And failing at it.
meow 15y ago
Swimming around in self pity, trolling around with patents .. u know the usual...

HardyLeung 15y ago

I admire Bill Gates but I think bringing him back is a bad idea. He's so much more valuable being outside of Microsoft.

crux_ 15y ago

To echo a common opinion, I think the world needs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation more than it needs Microsoft.

lotusleaf1987 15y ago
I really don't think it's a zero sum trade and I think their contributions to society would be hard to compare. Microsoft although being a corporation, does facilitate a lot of communication and business processes and make a lot of things take less time than they once did. Also, I don't think the Foundation would be possible without MSFT's existence.
- dmix 15y ago
  Either way Microsoft is a well oiled machine that can survive without Gates (at least for the next 10yrs or so). The charity is not a mature enterprise that can run itself.

runjake 15y ago

I don't agree with the author regarding Gates, but I'd like to see the Microsoft that fostered innovation and its engineers, again. I'd like to see them truly embrace open standards and interoperability. They no longer have the monopoly which made these unnecessary. A Microsoft that truly embraces (without "extending") & implements truly open standards is going to be a very potent beast.

orijing 15y ago

Do people here generally think that Bill has been much more valuable to society now that he's working at his Foundation? I think we need a visionary leader with his fiery passion and dogged persistence to tackle some of the biggest problems in the world: things like malaria, education, and energy.

teyc 15y ago

Bill Gates hired Ballmer because he needed a good COO, and Balmer was very good at it. However, MS had a Yahoo sized problem. They needed big hits, and this means they have to aim square at the middle, and not to the right of the adoption curve. Bill had tried being the chief architect thing but as the article alluded, the problem isn't that MS hadn't enough people with vision, but their product development/marketing pipeline is broken. They need a CEO with a fresh set of eyes to fix this process.

voidr 15y ago

Or they could just boot Ballmer and find someone competent, I'm just saying...

blinkingled 15y ago

Pundits, like people, want easy answers, sometimes to questions that are based on pure perception. Microsoft, based on all the facts, is doing just fine for a company of that size and diversity. They pulled a great Win 7 release, they are doing great in the Enterprise, doing great on the server, they missed out on the Mobile side but are on the right track now with Mango and Nokia partnership. Kinect/Xbox 360 stuff is also looking great. Sure there is not enough glitterati and magic in that anywhere, nor is Ballmer charming but those are non-important things. When Bill ran MSFT people hated them - it's easy to forget that. So if we are talking mind share, even then it doesn't make sense to have Bill come back and run it the way he did first time around. So what do people want Microsoft to achieve - look and act like Apple? Have more mind share? Stop doing uncool things like the Enterprise stuff? Or just have $600 share value? Unless they define that, I think this is just pointless blabber.

astrodust 15y ago
If you think Microsoft "is doing great" with Windows 7 then it's people like you that are dragging Microsoft down to an unprecedented level of irrelevancy. It's not about magic, it's not about glitter, it's not even about wild P/E. It's about using their massive base of resources to do something other than crank out derivative products for existing markets and rest on their own laurels. Today's Microsoft has no idea how to innovate. Yesterday's Microsoft was aggressive, produced new products that were competitive, and never shied away from a fight no matter how bloody. They were the Lance Armstrong of their day, always winning yet having people suspicious of their methods. If they're not careful, Computer Associates will beat them at their own game.
- wglb 15y ago
  Perhaps I missed some reading somewhere, but I have never thought of Microsoft as a leader in Innovation. Execution, yes, but they have not been known as an innovator.
- blinkingled 15y ago
  They did Kinect - that's not innovation for you? They took very different approach to Win Phone 7 - that's not innovation? And innovation doesn't have to involve stupidity - there is no real reason to, for example, throw away Windows and start over. At least not yet. And besides, that is not what makes Microsoft tick - it's hard core engineering and execution that makes them tick. The problem is, innovation doesn't have a formula. The fascination with "disruptive innovation" is admirable but building something no one has built before, doing things better and different than anyone else has before, creating new markets - these things are rare occurrences whose success depends on lot of things - timing, market needs, technical advances, some visionary having the right flash of vision that then is executed flawlessly etc. Point is it's far from easy and I don't think you can count anyone out because they haven't been disruptive for some time.

dstein 15y ago

I think they need to make some more drastic changes that that. They need to break up the company, and have several new CEO's. All their cash cows are tied to the personal computing industry, and it is coming to an end faster than they can turn the ship around with all the Windows and Enterprise baggage.

darrenkopp 15y ago

Seems to me forfeiting ~40 billion dollars wouldn't be a good move, and that's what would happen if Bill went back to Microsoft. Warren Buffet gave the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation billions of dollars on condition that Bill stop working at Microsoft and start working full time for the foundation. As much as I would like to see Bill back at Microsoft, I'd rather see him doing the amazing work that he is currently doing with the Gates Foundation. I would like to see Scott Guthrie become the new CEO and/or chief software architect at Microsoft.