Bill Gates is stepping down as "Chief Software Architect", completing the phasing out of his role at Microsoft.

He's needed three people to do what he used to by himself. Arguably, he may have needed more people (or smarter ones...). I was never a big Microsoft or Bill Gates fan, identifying more closely with Steve Jobs, but Bill Gates did do one thing that was so important, so ground-breaking that one has to acknowledge him as one of the finest technology business people who have ever lived.

History is replete with successful companies who could not make the transition to the new technological paradigm. The companies who made sailing vessels at the beginning of the 19th century where gone by the end of it, in spite of vast capital and market control. More recently, the market leaders in eight inch disk drives didn't survive the transition to 5-1/4", and those market leaders didn't survive the next transition to 3-1/2".

Gates is one of those rare-very rare individuals to understand how things were going to change and embrace it before it overwhelmed him. I am speaking specifically about the web browser which initially he ignored, then woke up to and then acted to deal with the threat from Netscape. The company hasn't been as aware of their surroundings since.

Newsweek posted these cool photographs of the original Microsoft team, struggling to make and get paid for software for the early microcomputers, and those same individuals now--all of them older, only some of them richer. Most of them eager to change the world and some of them did, but the world keeps going and now its left to others to express their idealism and enthusiasm...or not.