'There's No Year That I Didn't Love My Job'

As Bill Gates wrapped up his tenure as a full-timer at Microsoft, as part of his plan to focus his energies on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he sat down with NEWSWEEK's Steven Levy to talk about his legacy, the good days and difficult ones at Micrcosoft, and his future at the foundation. Excerpts.

NEWSWEEK: Are you leaving Microsoft at a time of extraordinary challenge?
Bill Gates: Every year that we've existed, we've had the excitement that this is a fast-changing business. I would say we're probably stronger relative to that than we've ever been because of not only our product strength and our great people, like Steve [Ballmer] and Ray [Ozzie], but the strength of Microsoft Research. We are quite unique in the relationships we have with the universities and the quality of our researchers.

But doesn't part of you want to stick around for the battle against Google?
If you say, "Gosh, I won't leave when there's an interesting competitor," then you'd have to die on the job. I have the unique situation of the opportunity to really engage with the foundation as it's scaling up, which is something I also love. So, yes, I'm giving something up. This is a fun job, and with the neat things going on, there's nothing in my making this change that's saying that software has become less interesting.

Do you feel that Vista didn't come out the way you hoped it would?
In every product we ship, the team knows of features that I asked them to put in that they didn't get in. So you never ship a perfect software product. Thank goodness you don't, because then what would you do? There are brilliant things that were done in Windows Vista, and there are some things where we say, "Hey, are we putting out too many prompts, were the device drivers really ready?" Are there some areas of performance where Windows 7 has just got to be dramatically better in? You bet. We are good at giving ourselves a hard time. And sometimes the outside world even helps us do that.

Did you participate in the discussions of Microsoft's attempt to buy Yahoo in the same way you would have, had you not had this transition coming?
Yes, absolutely. Steve is the CEO, but he involves me very heavily. Something huge like that, I would always be involved in, maybe not as much on a day-to-day basis as I have been on this one.

Does the fact that Microsoft offered almost $50 billion for Yahoo show that the company hasn't made the most of the Internet opportunity you identified in 1995, the year Yahoo was founded?
Let's see, how have things gone since 1995? Have our sales increased? Have our profits increased? What was our main goal for the Internet in 1995? It was to make sure that Microsoft software was used to do Web sites, which became the most important type of application possible. Today the majority of all Web sites are written using Visual Studio, running on Windows Server. We made the Windows platform the most popular for writing Internet applications. We made our browser the most popular. We created a little company called Expedia, and learned from that and spun it off for over a billion dollars. So we've done great things since 1995. Did we do everything? Do we wish that we'd also done everything that, say, Google has done? Sure. But I'll take our track record since 1995 versus anyone.