Most of the value that Gates created was as a pure manager. He was a programmer before, possibly amazing at it too, but I'd hardly say his role at Microsoft wa

Most of the value that Gates created was as a pure manager. He was a programmer before, possibly amazing at it too, but I'd hardly say his role at Microsoft was that of an engineer-manager. He regularly attended engineering meetings throughout his tenure as CEO (he says so in that Netflix mini-series about him) but by far his largest drivers for creating value were how he envisioned software eating the world (esp. the enterprise), and how he executed a commercial strategy to perfection to build a monopoly around that vision. Not to downplay the difficulty of building operating systems at scale, or that Microsoft might have made some impressive innovations in the 80s and 90s, but they always had a reputation for their products being "OK" at best, so I'd argue their dominant position was acquired through wheelin' and dealin' more than anything else.