Bill Gates always seems to know when it’s time to go

Computer World   Mar 16, 2020

Bill Gates resigned from Microsoft’s board of directors last week, pretty much ending his official ties to the company he co-founded. He says he’s still available as a technology adviser to CEO Satya Nadella and other Microsoft leaders, but otherwise he’s devoting himself completely to his other pursuits, like philanthropy.

Gates and the company he started very nearly 45 years ago with Paul Allen transformed the computing landscape. Throughout the period of Microsoft’s early growth and maturation, Gates was at the helm as CEO, demonstrating business leadership and competitiveness that, even more than technology, were keys to the company’s success.

The competitiveness eventually led to Microsoft’s antitrust issues. The technology world was changing (I’ll go through some of that history in a bit), and the leader who had made Microsoft a tech giant was perhaps no longer tuned in to the changes as he once had been. That happens a lot with founders. What rarely happens is that the founder sees the writing on the wall and takes a step back. But Gates did. He resigned as CEO, staying on as chairman of the board.

Not everything Gates did was brilliant. By the time the internet had become a force in the tech world, Gates and Microsoft had made a series of missteps that almost made the company irrelevant. And in resigning as CEO, Gates left Steve Ballmer in charge. Ballmer clearly had earned the right to lead Microsoft as CEO, but he wasn’t right for the job, and Gates eventually had to remove him. The men had always been close, and it couldn’t have been easy to do it, but he did.

Founder power

This is the third step back from Microsoft that Gates has taken. He dropped his day-to-day duties as CEO in 2006, and gave up ultimate oversight as chairman of the board in 2014. Now he has relinquished his seat on the board.

This is actually a remarkable record. Founders have extraordinary power at a company, and they often don’t know when to step down, sometimes doing the company so much harm in their later years that the firm doesn’t recover. Even if they step away from day-to-day activity, they often step in and exert their influence at critical times, undermining the sitting CEO and setting the company up for failure. As chairman, Gates seemed to have refrained from that sort of thing, until the day came when Ballmer had to go.