Gates looks back on 30 years at Microsoft - 盖茨回忆微软 30年一瞬间

Q: As you've been thinking about the transition, what are the kinds of things that have been on your mind the most?
A: Well, for 33 years I've worked at Microsoft and come in every day, and thought about the new things we need to do, and what's my personal role in that — [there's been] a lot of email, lots of meetings [and] lots of product reviews. So, in a sense, it's hard for me to project what it's going to be like for me or Microsoft when I'm not here.

As long as I'm here, I'm still sending a lot of email and in a lot of meetings, and so the real change, in terms of people having an opportunity to step up and do things, to some degree, [will come] after 1 July, when my involvement is only a very specific involvement on particular projects, as opposed to the overall strategy thing.

Everybody likes to pick the current competitive battles that we're in and kind of think: "OK, those are the big things". For me, I'd pick the tablet or interactive TV — things that are, according to me — but I've been over-optimistic before — on the verge of big, big impact. So, I've been sending a lot of mail to the tablet and interactive TV team — sort of sending now the mail I would [otherwise] have sent three months from now — just giving them encouragement. Because, you know, [as regards] all the big successes, whether it's Office integration or Windows, it takes a long time for those things to get established.

We thought it would be a good idea for me to go to the Windows 7 group and go see the work, and I was thrilled. Steven Sinofsky [senior vice president in the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group] took me around and showed me what they're doing.

So, you're going to product group by product group?
Well, in terms of big meetings, that's pretty much done. Like the Windows group had a meeting and the Surface group had a meeting, but this is more just sitting down with the top executives: [for example] Stephen Elop, Craig Mundie, Kevin Turner.

The timing is actually pretty good. We just did our business reviews. We do the business planning, which is for the next fiscal year, which starts 1 July. So, we have the plans in place, and I sat through that last set of reviews, but it's a perfect example of something that, as just a board member working on projects, I won't sit in those business-plan reviews in the future. I mean, Steve [Ballmer] may ask me to sit in on one that touches directly on something I'm doing, but the default is that I'm not there at all.

Can you think of a time when the company was coming from behind? I mean, we've all heard about the early days of developing the first version of DOS, but are there other times where it was kind of a mad scramble?
Well, we weren't that well known publicly until sometime in the 1980s. One of my favourite articles was where they wrote that there were four software companies, and none of them wa