El Globo Does Enterprise Reporting

Food-safety violations at greasy spoons in city buildings? I'm shocked! Here is your spinach pie, inspector.

Meanwhile, no word out of Morrissey Boulevard whether any of our local officials might have received a Friends of Angelo special over the past few years. This is the sort of reporting I expect from the 10pm news, sandwiched in between the lotto numbers and a piece about a dog that can ride a skateboard.

Bittersweet Surrender

Bill Gates will retire from Microsoft this coming Friday, marking the likely end to a uniquely American career that scaled the heights known only by a very few--Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford--and yet which ends on a distinctly somber note.

Gates, after all, is not yet an old man. Warren Buffett hasn't retired yet, and is old enough to be Gates' father. Of course he's not retiring--he's moving to run his vast charitable foundation, made twice as vast by Buffett's contribution--but that too is telling. This popped up as a line in one of Whit Stillman's movies when one of the poor little rich kids remarks on how all of their parents, who had inherited sizable fortunes, spent their time on the boards of museums and running charities, because they were deathly afraid of failing, and when your job is giving away money, it's hard to fail.

Gates lived the dream, from dropping out of Harvard all the way to creating and redefining the pivotal industry of his time, in the process becoming the richest man in the world. But as he heads off to pursue future endeavors, it is possible for the first time to imagine the technology world without Microsoft. The Web's basic shape was set while Microsoft still denied its significance, and has defied Redmond's every attempt at strong-arming. While still strong in the enterprise, business computing has reached a saturation point of sorts in the things that MS is good at. Even on the desktop, Microsoft is for the first time looking truly vulnerable in the face of a highly-organized competitor and their own failed execution of Vista.

And yet one only needs to look at Yahoo, which was fortunately (for MS) dumb enough to spurn their advances, to see how much of a failure Microsoft isn't--not yet. While no longer the indispensable behemoth it once was, Microsoft still has a broad portfolio of individually-lucrative properties. The best thing that could happen now--for shareholders, customers, and employees alike--would be for Microsoft to break itself up into at least four individual entities:

• Platforms: Operating systems and development tools. Microsoft still makes amazing development tools, and a smaller, leaner OS group might be able to move more decisively to build a viable successor to Vista and competitor to OS/X and Linux.
• Business Applications: the Office suite, Exchange, and SQL Server are all still market-leading tools. The greatest threat they face right now is being chained by the ankle to a rapidly-sinking OS division.
• Entertainment: The original XBox was Microsoft's boldest move ever into an established market, and they have ultimately proven the doubters wrong. Of course, they were going up against Sony, which has an even worse proprietary mindset. Gaming is one of very few areas with potential for sustained multi-billion dollar growth and needs to be set free to maximize that potential.
• Online Media: MSN, Hotmail, Live Search, all the online properties except XBox Live--gather them all up into one mangy, flea-bitten pack, and sell it to Yahoo. Or maybe News Corp, or Time Warner, anybody--just get rid of it. Consumer media is not something Microsoft knows how to do, and the longer they keep trying, the more shareholder value they are going to waste.

Barring this scale of change, the future for Microsoft will rapidly become grim. Gates' departure sets the stage to make this type of transition credible, and perhaps even infuse employees and customers alike with a sense of real excitement again.