"Recent remarks indicate the company won’t even try to find a replacement for Gates but will divide his functions among whole groups of employees."

Can you say fail?
Take any task, and give it to 10 people, and you have one screwed up operation. Yea, This is the beginning of the end of MS.

Apple is a massive company, with huge profits, and still they make some of the best hardware in the industry (they are a hardware company, people forget that).

Nintendo is the top company in console gaming, and they still make outstanding games. (if you like there style anyway).

Intel has been the leader in CPU design for decades, and still make the best CPU.

Where MS has an issue, is they are the leader in desktop software, and they use that position to release shitty products that we are forced to use. If MS was as huge as they are, and didn't make the worst OS known to man, I don't think people would hate them.

If Windows is so bad use Linux...

It's quite interesting to see a man of his age rap... but i still hope he doesn't do it again.

Bill Had a good run. It's good to see that all the money hasn't gone to his head.

I use OSX, but thanks for the advise. If Apple did not offer a better solution, I would be typing this on a Linux PC :).

pffffft......them's fightin words....

OT: So, is the chair throwing Steve Ballmer 100% in charge now?

 hahaha, i don't think i've seen his wife! lol

i see a lot of blind hate tossed around in here. funny thing is the things the haters accuse Microsoft of doing its acceptable elsewhere disgused as "good competition". Nowhere is this gross example of hypocrasy more evident than in the EU.

You are not forced at all to use their 'shitty' products. If someone uses their products and hates them, it is that person who is the idiot. Microsoft has stayed in business because they integrate best for businesses. Their solutions are so completely integrated with one another that it is much easier for companies to say.."go ahead, get me set up, and keep me working" than to try and force compatibilities on products not meant to work with each other. Other companies do not offer the support that Microsoft offers for corporations. Google business support is atrocious and so is Apple's. The company I work for uses Windows to do all of our development work and Linux for the servers. We use Java so the platform really does not matter. We use Sharepoint(which is awesome) for collaboration, Visio for diagrams(UML,flow charts, data charts, etc), Excel for reporting purposes, Office Messenger(which integrates with all other Office products), Outlook, etc. They are all so perfectly integrated with one another that it speeds up the development process. No other set of products comes close to offering the features that Microsoft's do.