I’ve been covering Microsoft for enough years to have seen and heard Bill Gates on numerous occasions. But I’ve not done so for enough years to have seen the best of him. I gather from other journalist friends that until maybe the early nineties, Gates was excellent value for the IT press, showing his technical side and chatting in-depth about some of the details of his products. Note this comment from Joel Spolsky:

Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.

Sadly I was a little too late to see this side of Gates. Microsoft grew too big; Microsoft execs grew too distant. In the keynotes I’ve heard, he talks about the company vision and the state of computing and leaves the technical details to others to explain. He occasionally takes questions, to which he typically gives long, circuitous answers, a favourite technique used by senior execs with, I suspect, the goal of reducing the number of questions that can be asked and answered in the time available. Nonetheless I respect him for steering the company through its path from the early days of DOS through to having its products installed on nearly every desktop and in nearly every home.

What prompts this post? billg is retiring in July and confirmed this at CES:

It’s the middle of this year, in July, that I’ll move from being a full-time employee at Microsoft to working full-time at the foundation.

This isn’t news; it’s in line with a previous announcement in June 2006; even the date, July 2008, was announced then.