new leaders prepare for the post-Gates era - Seattle Times(BuildingWebsiteNews)

The company is gradually making preparations for next year when Mundie, Ozzie and Ballmer will be in charge after Gates steps aside from day-to-day involvement with the company. With the twilight of Gates' career at the company approaching and new technical and strategic leaders Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie preparing to fill his role, Microsoft executives decided to make this prognosticating more formal. For the past year, and really the better part of the past decade, Gates has been downloading the institutional knowledge of Microsoft and the software industry stored in his head to the leaders who will handle his responsibilities at the company he co-founded 32 years ago. As such, it's important for the rest of the company to see that Gates fully endorses the new leadership, Silverberg said, particularly Ozzie, whose job carries with it the weight of inspiring Microsoft's legions of software engineers — something Gates has done as an almost mythical figure in the history of the company and the industry. While Ozzie and Mundie can divvy up and fill Gates' functions at Microsoft, they readily admit that no one can replace Bill Gates himself. read more

[Tags]gates, microsoft, company, ozzie, mundie, ballmer, buildingwebsitenews[/Tags]