It's been an interesting few weeks in our little world of being Microsoft weenies. I was driving home from TechEd still chuckling over the fact that all of the signage for WinFX had to be defaced at the last minute to say ".NET 3.0". One of the constant jokes was that the WinFX swag, still branded with the WinFX name, was a collectors item before the conference had even begun. Listening to the news in the car, I heard the it-had-to-happen-someday bombshell... that Bill Gates had announced he would be "leaving" Microsoft -- a two year transition that would leave him as the Chairman of the Board. He was finally handing over the reigns and the driver's seat for Microsoft to follow his other dream of changing the world focusing his energy and wizardry on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Not surprisingly, the technical reins would go to Ray Ozzie, who had just (from what I heard from many) used the TechEd keynote to present his resume to the developer community. Did he already know about Gates supposedly secret plan? Was he worried that he needed to prove himself to the community of Microsoft developers who weren't familiar with his credentials?
Now, on top of all of this, we heard this week that Warren Buffet, the richest man in the world, who apparently was Bill Gates' muse with respect to philanthropy, encouraging Gates to share his wealth and his business acumen in a fight against poverty and disease around the world, is committing somewhere around $40 billion to the Gates Foundation. Additionally, Buffet will become a trustee. Surely, Gates previous announcement had something to do with this.
I have never thought about working for Microsoft, but I have, in fact, thought that the Gates Foundation is something I would love to be involved in. Every time I read an article about the work they are doing, not just the impact, but a picture of Gates' drive at meetings (which seems to astonish many in the charitable community), I get visions in my head of what it might be like to have that type of impact on the world.
When I spoke at TechEd South Africa last fall, I had this wonderful feeling that what I was teaching would help businesses and the economy and that somehow that would trickle down to help the people in South Africa that need assistance the most. Those that I don't have skills (or wealth) to help directly. Although the IT community there is already pretty sophisticated, I loved being able to participate in this relatively new economy.
Now as I watch Microsoft tripping over themselves as they try to push forward technologically and becoming more and more intrigued with the Gates Foundation - and at the same time, thinking about my own future and what I want to be doing in it, I wonder if it is actually Bill Gates that I want to be following and not Microsoft and has that always been the attraction after all?