For the giving away part, I give a lot of credit to Melinda (and Bill)
Gates.
What they really never knew how to do was "innovate"...
Ted Roche wrote:
On 6/19/06, jeff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
How does someone go from starting a business to becoming the richest
man in the world in 30 years by being a bad manager?
The business outgrows him. Bill Gates is a very smart man, and he made
some really good moves early on in the PC revolution. He still is no
fool, and I wish him a great and successful career with the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation. We are all depending on his success.
But the techniques he used to grow Microsoft -- the "Bill meetings"
the hands-on supervision -- just don't scale past a certain point, and
the industry changed. Bill wanted a computer on every desktop and he
got it. He wanted Windows on every computer, and he got close.
Information at your fingertips, check. I don't minimize his successes.
He amassed the largest fortune ever by a single individual, and his
company created more millionaires than ever done before.
But there came a point where Microsoft wasn't the scrappy little
startup any more, and it was time to become the industry leader,
setting "The Road Ahead" and moving everyone, friend and foe, partner
and competitor, towards a more mature industry. Microsoft knows how to
compete, and compete hard. They play hardball, they don't hesitate to
crush a competitor. They don't hesitate to cut off their competitor's
oxygen. What they don't know how to do is how to lead.
That's why it was time to go. And Bill was smart enough to recognize
that.
This isn't a sudden inspiration. He's been saying all along that he
models his life on Carnegie: amassing a fortune in the first half of
his life, and then giving it away in the second.
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