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

Microsoft over the years has had a reputation for being a really, really tough competitor. Has Microsoft been accurately portrayed?
It depends on what you mean. Taking word processing, were we a tough competitor? Yes, we did a great product, and it kept winning review after review after review and actually at some point it gained some market share. And today many of those other word processors are a footnote in history, in Microsoft Word. So is that tough? It has nothing to do with somebody who has been meaner, or negotiations: we put a better team of people together writing word processors.

Is there a low point you can delineate?
Not really.

Not the antitrust episode?
No, because there's always so many things going on. There's no point at which the antitrust thing was the dominant thing. There certainly was a point where we had this honeymoon period that really successful technology companies get, where they think you know everything. The banks want you to tell them about the future of banking, airline companies want you to tell them about that, the business stories about the way they serve lunch at Microsoft. It's silly that somehow we have some magic thing. But it happens to be somebody else right now. It's kind of crazy in a way--are these random choices so sacrosanct and important? You get into this period in the late '90s when people thought startups could do everything. They didn't care about research and the long-term effort required to do speech recognition, visual recognition. It got a little frustrating-- all this capital was being thrown at those people, and they weren't really doing multiproduct, long-term things, they were just kind of doing this one thing, but that was messing up the way that our work was looked at. You're competing for talent with those people, and you have these capricious stories about some guy who made millions who happened to cash out, and his roommate is working on some great thing at Microsoft Research, which has way more impact. Of course, our employees made a lot of money, too, but over a longer period of time.

Yes, but the antitrust thing seemed to affect you personally.
I didn't like that. If I had one thing to change, maybe I'd take my little paintbrush and paint that one thing out of the picture. But we were doing our best work at that time. If you look at our sales and profits, you look at our impact on blind people, you look at our impact on students, you look at our empowerment of the world's digital economy, those are the most amazing years.

You look now on those years favorably?
There's no year that I didn't, net, love my job. We made crazy acquisitions in that period, because everybody was kind of going nuts. Even with the lawsuit, you could say there are some lessons learned out of it.

What will you do when you're at the [Gates Foundation] full time?
I'll have about four times as much time to do strategy reviews--what we're doing in education, the various diseases, agriculture, microfinance, Also, my external voice will shift to be mostly about the foundation. So my travel will be more to Africa and India. I'll be meeting with companies, drug companies about the medicines and the things they can do, as part of this creative capitalism thing. I'll be meeting with other philanthropists. I'm going to learn a lot more of the science, I'll learn a lot more about health things. The education area is one where I haven't done nearly as many visits as I'd like to, and there are some real great thinkers about how teachers can learn from each other, and use tools in different ways, how curriculum can be better. Melinda is actually quite a bit ahead of me on that.