Love him or hate him, Bill Gates was, and still is, the face of Microsoft. What Microsoft doesn’t want you to know though is that Gates has almost nothing to do with the company anymore.
That’s what comes across loud and clear in the recent Fortune overview of the world’s richest man. Instead of plotting out how to knock Apple back into the dirt or how to put Google in its place, Gates spends his days on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, stopping by the laboratories of Intellectual Ventures to talk blue-sky ideas every few weeks with Nathan Myhrvold, and dropping off or picking up his three kids from school.
Bill Gates? The great white-shark of computing doing the suburban dad routine!? Yes, yes he is, albeit I doubt he drives a mini-van.
While this is fine for Gates, it doesn’t bode well for Microsoft. As ace Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley, told me when we talked about the article, she liked the article “because it admits what MS doesn’t want out there: Gates is no longer really involved at the company. They are scared for that to be known even though to us it is obvious.”