“Three of the top 20 investors in Microsoft Corp are lobbying the board to press for Bill Gates to step down as chairman of the software company he co-founded 38 years ago, according to people familiar with matter,” Nadia Damouni and Bill Rigby report for Reuters. “While Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has been under pressure for years to improve the company’s performance and share price, this appears to be the first time that major shareholders are taking aim at Gates, who remains one of the most respected and influential figures in technology.”
“There is no indication that Microsoft’s board would heed the wishes of the three investors, who collectively hold more than 5 percent of the company’s stock, according to the sources. They requested the identity of the investors be kept anonymous because the discussions are private,” Damouni and Rigby report. “Gates owns about 4.5 percent of the $277 billion company and is its largest individual shareholder.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Boom! Behold the devastation Steve Jobs hath wrought!
What I can’t figure out is why he’s even trying? He knows he can’t win. – Bill Gates on Steve Jobs’ return to Apple to become the company’s CEO, June 1998
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “epd” for the heads up.]
I started to have a bit of respect for Gates regarding his humanitarian efforts then I realised what his foundation does in comparison to what it could do with the ridiculous amount of money he has and all respect was lost
Heck: the biggest humanitarian contribution he could ever make would be canceling Windows.
The Gates Foundation gets governments (i.e. YOUR taxes) to pay money to drug companies then brags about how much THEY pay out.
Its about as generous as McDonalds placing collection boxes in their restaurants where YOU pay for their hostels, then name the hostels after themselves.
I like the work they both do, but I would prefer to see Bill Gates’ net worth go down accordingly, not ours.
It would be admirable if we never heard about it (left vs right hands) and no one claimed it off their taxes.
Yeah I know thats is what I mean, all respect lost. The same pretty much applies to all “charity” organisations. CEOs taking home well over $1M/y when the only source of revenue are donations from people thinking they are helping someone in need is something well beyond fkd up
He’s trying to make up for all the he has brought with windows by creating the gates foundation
Tim Cook must be laughing manically in proxy for SJ and for his own delight. TC catches a lot of grief (undeserved IMO) and yet Apple continues to steam-roll the tech bad guys.
Makes sense. He obviously does not have a vision of computing (never did) and Microsoft is hobbled with him as chairmen.
If their competitors are lucky he’ll be the chairman until the day he dies.
If Bill Gates as 4.5% stock, and the 3 of the top 20 stock holders, minus Bill Gates has 5%, it’s pretty easy to tell who these guys are. They have to be stopped!!!. they will ruin everything. 🙂
“Gates… remains one of the most respected and influential figures in technology.”
Blood hell! Not around here, that’s for sure!
Did you see the photo on the linked article. Sooo tempting to delete just one specific finger off Bill’s gesturing hand. 😉
I just read the comments section of the original article, I wasn’t the only one thinking of using Photoshop on that finger!
It is like a prostitute donating money for children’s good sex education in schools!
posted this the other day under the Msft ctrl alt delete story:
(applies even more here)
——-
we blame Ballmer for a lot (and he deserves it!)
BUT
Bill Gates is still the Chairman of the Board,
I can safely bet every major decision like Surface and Win 8 (use one OS for desktop and mobile to protect the Windows Desktop Cash Cow) had Gates Approval, in fact he might have demanded those moves..
… which turned out to be fiascos,
I doubt that Ballmer had the clout to create Win 8 by himself or didn’t clear it with Gates. (as Chairman).
I believe that a lot of the msft disasters can also be partly placed on Gates door (like misreading mobile, iPhone, tablets etc). Note even in quite recent interviews he kept insisting on the primacy of the keyboard for tablets and that tablets should be equipped for ‘work’ which requires desktop Office etc.
Ballmer has been vilified as an idiot yet Gates his partner (and as Chairman and in personal relationship sort of his Superior) gets off scot free. Once again I don’t think when they met privately Ballmer wouldn’t have had intense discussions about the future directions of Msft Windows, mobile etc or that he had the balls to go alone against Gates advice.
BUT the general press STILL presents Gates as some sort of tech genius Seer like a smarter Steve Jobs. This was hold over from 20 years ago (when to my laughter) Gates was invited to numerous high brow tech conferences to expound on tech in the future and the like , he was even invited to write huge thick books on his tech ‘visions’. The press gives no of the blame of msft missteps (to put it politely) on Gates door.
Don’t get me wrong, Gates is a smart dude but his brilliance is as a businessman – leveraging deals, negotiating, attacking markets – not tech innovation. Even the original MS DOS (Q Dos owned by Seattle Computer) was a product he bought and improved and Windows of course was a Mac rip off.
he was never a ‘visionary ‘ tech guy like the general press likes to paint him. Every msft product was an attack on a successful (money making) product made by another company , Windows/mac, Zune/iPod Xbox/Playstation, Bing/Google, Kinect/Wii — he never took risks to PUSH the BOUNDARIES (just “this guy is making money on this, we can too ” )
to recap I think that the criticisms for recent Msft failures have tarred Ballmer but Gates who should surely get some of the blame escapes reputation intact. As a Steve Jobs fan , a person who I think is the true apex tech visionary of my generation, I believe it’s time to take Gates off the same platform as Jobs.
Gates is no tech genius visionary
Read more at http://macdailynews.com/2013/09/27/bill-gates-admits-ctrlaltdel-command-a-mistake/#8xgIlov0gAcGqYDC.99
Indeed, Davewrite, I think Gates is overrated on technology ability.
Peter Drucker, the management guru wrote back about 1950 or so “When innovating, go with the market response, not with your preconceived ideas.” One of Gates’ failings was to confuse the “buyer” of his product with his “user” or customer as Drucker would call him.
Satisfying a corporate buyer or IT segment is not the same as satisfying the end user.
Gates’ lawyer father is the one who taught Bill how to negotiate & leverage favorable deals that were the basis for the enormous position that DOS and later Windows achieved.
First rule of assassination, kill the assassin. Easy to figure who let Ballmer go. Now it’s kharma time.
Sad, very sad, but very predictable.
After 10 years of sole searching, he could then come back to save the company. 😉
You have to have a soul to be able to search it. With Gates and his thieving past, that’s questionable.
Sole searching? Shopping for shoes?
Wall Street investors are the bottom feeders of everything.
Gates, who remains one of the most respected and influential figures in technology
Respected? NO, not in my world. Reviled? YES.
Influential? Sadly so, until the day The Dark Age Of Computing ends. And it sounds like that day is swiftly approaching. I could not be happier! 😀
“… they point to Gates’ role on the special committee searching for Ballmer’s successor.”
I find it hard to believe that Ballmer’s successor hasn’t already been found and signed up for the job, but will need to fulfil existing obligations first. Publicly, Microsoft’s line is that they will take 12 months, but I reckon that it’s already been sorted and the new CEO will be in place before the year is over.
As for Gates being shown the door too – it’s another exclusive story from Reuters, so it’s unlikely to have any substance. Reuters exclusive = fiction.
I am sure SJ did appreciate Bill Gates rescuing Apple from going broke though! Oh is that a chorus of boooo’ing i here ringing in the ears of the iFan’s?
Misinformation. Apple had 1.5 billion in the bank but was losing money each quarter and that couldn’t go on. There was a deal between Jobs and Balmer in which MS was let off some very big and long-running patent disputes and MS agreed to support Apple with a small (150m) but meaningful (to the stock market) investment, plus most importantly 5 years of Office for Mac. Jobs agreed to using IE exclusively for 5 years too. So it was win-win and a turning point, but no way did Gates “rescue” Apple.
Was one of the most clever moves Steve ever thought of. Then it was Buh-bye Billy!
It was beyond clever, it was brilliant.
Steve knew Apple could not continue to pay the legal fees to fight the patent war, and he desperately needed to reset Apple. Saying the war was over, that Apple was no longer trying to beat Microsoft meant everything.
It allowed everyone in Apple along with customers and investors to allow Apple to take a different path, and, you know, think differently. It reset Apple and allowed Apple to focus on the consumer market and leave enterprise to Microsoft, who smuggly thought they owned it. Steve knew all they owned was the PC market, that there were other iterations of technology where Apple could dominate.
You are completely correct Chaz. At the time I was horrified to see Bill’s face larger than life come up on that screen, wanted to just throw up. But in hindsight I must admit it was one of the most brilliant Chess moves in business history.
Thanks for regurgitating the same misinformation every uninformed idiot out there with a rationalization bias to support mistakenly believes. Apple had 1.5 BILLION in the bank. All Microsoft did is ensure Office would continue to be supported on the Mac for 5 years and invested $150 million in non-viting stock for which they reaped a profit on later.
If they hadn’t sold the stock though it would have been worth billions and billions today. Another poor Gates/Ballmer move. And there are so many….
Besides MSDOS ( we know how that was created ), Windows ( we know how that was created ), and Office ( hmmm maybe actual innovation ) err what exactly did he hands on created that fundamentally changed how we work and play? Not the PC because Apple was actually there right in the trenches hardware and OS.
The “innovation” in Office was bundling and forced marketing, not the technology. MS copied, then destroyed, Lotus and WordPerfect. (They’re both still around, but are only bit players. And, yeah, Lotus did the same to VisiCalc before.)
And it was Bill Gates’ lawyer father who helped Bill set up those bundled contract deals that were so crucial to the success of Microsoft.
In other words…he…did…NOTHING! 🙂
They would be idiots to boot Bill. Love him or hate him, that’s his baby. He wants what’s beat for it more than anyone. If he wants to leave on his own, fine. But booting him would be buffoonery of the highest order.
It’s not going to be easy to oust Billyboy..he has almost 5% himself, Capt Ballmy has 4% and Paul Allen still about 2%, that’s a sizable chunk already, not to mention all the smaller shareholders that are either buddies or semi-buddies that he has learned to know over the decades.
Not going to happen unless Ballmy + a few other old vets feel they have been backstabbed and/or betrayed.
Apple needs to advertise hell out the Mac right about now.
Apple should stick with the buzz, lines and headlines generated by their latest products and iOS 7 and stay away from TV ads as their last few attempts have clearly proven.
How Jobsonian. Though I don’t think he’ll be back in 12 years with the title of iCEO. How long before we see a big presentation screen at a Microsoft event with Tim Cook’s head on the screen promising to keep developing iTunes for Windows for at least five more years. Amazing, I love it!
Wow this head chopping is getting seriously serious.
This has little to do with Steve Jobs, and a lot to do with Steve Ballmer. Anyone who would associate with such a clown as him, let alone gift him control of your company, should not be, on or chairman of, any board.
MS certainly has some of the resources needed to compete – like the $77B they have stored up. With the right people, who knows what they could come up with. But they should break new ground, not just copy appl. Whether they have the guts to do that, who knows. Maybe not?
I fail to see how this article has to do with Apple Inc.
He should probably step down and let Microsoft run Microsoft. He is busy doing good with his foundation. It’s really impressive really. For any one that doubts me, find the 60 minutes piece on Gates foundation.
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