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Lest we forget the turgid history of some other horrifically bad promotional videos from Microsoft that will forever be burned into our brains. Here are some of my top picks:

8. Steve Ballmer Sells Windows 1.0
Do plaid suits make you think of Crockett and Tubbs? Didn’t think so, but apparently now-CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer thought it would be an accurate attempt at making Windows Write look more useful than Word, which at the time was not yet working very well with Windows. In his pre-"monkey boy" days Ballmer could still get things cooking though. Who else would get this excited about Reversi?

7. Windows 98: It’s a Series of Tubes
What makes this one great is that this is probably what Alaskan Sen. Ted Stevens saw before making his famous "series of tubes" speech. An e-mail is sent out and makes a perilous journey through the neon tunnels of the Internets. When actually delivered, the e-mail comes into the woman’s laptop as a glowing sphere of light, as well as to everyone else including a young boy who is clearly far too young to be working as an employee of Global.com. Between that, the completely unnecessary espionage subplot, and the cameo by stillborn WebTV, this one is a keeper.

6. Microsoft Flight Simulator X (a.k.a. Virtual Air Traffic Controller)
See what they did here? You can buy a $50 software title and not even have to play it. You can just sit at home and help other people have fun by pretending to be an air traffic controller. Even better, couples can play together, the young and old can play together–it was like the Nintendo Wii, but before its time. Then end it all with an obligatory multicultural odd-couple moment and you’ve got one of the greatest promotional videos ever made.

5. If MS Vista Launches, and Nobody is There to See it…
Can’t get anyone to buy your fancy new operating system? Try making a slick video of your company blowing a ton of money on promotions worldwide. Then combine footage with explosive techno music.

4. Windows ME: It’s Hammer Time
Look it’s the same version of Windows Media player you’ve got in Windows 2000. But wait, we’ve got new keyboard protection in case your child attacks your computer with plastic hammers–forcing you to roll back your version of the OS to a more stable one. Oh yeah, there’s also a new version of Internet Explorer that you don’t need to upgrade your operating system to use. How ready are you to pay us $200?

3. MS-DOS 5 Upgrade (Give Me My 5 Minutes Back)
These working slubs were expecting a boring training session but look who turned up! It’s some guy that’s a cross between Bill Nye the science guy and crazy tax guy Matthew Lesko. He’s got The Dreams with him, too! With such awesomely bad lyrics as "Free more memory can’tcha see, spring those K’s that got to be free" how can you not want to upgrade?

2. Windows 386 Made Impossible
What could be in that large bag you ask? Why of course it’s a Mission Impossible-style self-destructing tape. What’s the impossible task? Using the latest version of Windows. How cute. That’s not the weirdest part though–when "Linda" goes New Wave and begins rapping about making her charts hot it’s an HR violation in the making. Don’t forget to check out Part 2 here, or else you’ll never know how the story ends.

1. The Windows 95 Ad that Offends Everyone
Parodies, bad costumes, even worse puns and the phrase "whip it on me" make this one of the worst offenders. Besides the fact that Windows 95 literally explodes out of a copy of MS DOS that’s cut in half with a chainsaw, it’s quickly followed up by screencasts put to saxophone music and an over-the-top actor who’s constantly putting out David Caruso-caliber one-liners. The worst part? It’s kind of enjoyable to watch.

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You rarely hear about a new OS causing people to panic. But IT consultant Scott Pam says that’s exactly what his small-business clients are doing when they install Windows Vista on new PCs and run smack into compatibility or usability roadblocks.

Pam’s clients are not alone: Since InfoWorld launched its petition drive on Jan. 14 to ask Microsoft to continue selling new XP licenses indefinitely alongside its Vista licenses, more than 75,000 people have signed on. And hundreds of people have commented — many with ferocious, sometimes unprintable passion. “Right now I have a laptop with crap Vista and I’m going to downgrade to XP because Vista sucks,” reads one such comment.

Where does all the vitriol come from?

[ Get the big picture on Windows XP’s impending demise, from user reactions to licensing implications — and sign InfoWorld’s “Save XP” petition ]

IT managers and analysts suggest a range of reasons, some based on irrational fears and others based on rational reactions to disruptive changes.

Emotional effects
“When we first deployed Vista, people told us it sucks, that it’s not as good as XP,” recalled Sumeeth Evans, IT director at Collegiate Housing Services, an 80-person college facilities management firm. A month later, he surveyed the staff to see if their views had changed, and they had: “They said it was very good, that they were getting used to it. We asked what was different, and they said they originally didn’t like Vista because it was a change. That’s human nature.”

Microsoft’s overzealous schedule in replacing XP with Vista has exacerbated resistance to change, said Michael Silver, a research vice president at Gartner. The company had originally planned to discontinue XP sales on Dec. 31, 2007, just 11 months after Vista was made available to consumers and 14 months after it was made available to enterprises. The date for new license sales to end is now June 30.

In practice, XP’s consumer availability ended for many users even sooner — just six months after Vista’s release — since storefront retailers Best Buy and Circuit City and most computer manufacturers’ Web sites stopped selling XP-equipped computers in July 2007. Typically, Microsoft has given customers two years to make such a transition, Silver noted.

Burton Group executive strategist Ken Anderson suggested that the strong emotional identification with XP represented a fundamental shift in how people, including IT staff, now think of operating systems. They have become a familiar extension of what we do and how we work, thus not something want to change often. “When technology becomes part of you, you don’t want people to mess with it,” he said.

Anderson likened the reaction to XP’s impending demise to what happened in the 1980s when Coca-Cola replaced its classic Coke formula with New Coke, causing massive protests by customers who had no reason to change what they drank. The protests forced the company to bring back what we now call Coke Classic. “XP has come to the point of being Coke Classic,” he said, with Vista playing the role of New Coke.

The further the better
The Englewood (N.J.) Hospital Medical Center switched to Vista shortly after its enterprise release, since it had been in Microsoft’s early adopter program. Most users — mainly nurses and other medical staff — didn’t really notice the upgrade and had few complaints, noted Gary Wilhelm, the business and systems financial manager (a combination of CTO and CFO) at the 2,500-employee facility. That’s because they don’t really use the OS, but instead work directly in familiar applications that load when they sign in using their ID.

Capacitor manufacturer Kemet saw a similar ho-hum reaction from most of its staff, says Jeff Padgett, the global infrastructure manager. And for the same reason: Users have little direct interaction with the OS. But the staff did push back on Office 2007, whose ribbon interface is a departure from the previous versions. They rebelled to the degree that Padgett has delayed Office 2007 deployment and may not install it at all.

Back at the Englewood hospital, Wilhelm did hear anti-Vista grumbling from people in the administration department, who work more closely with the OS itself for file management and so on. And at Kemet, another group of hands-on users complained about the switch to Vista, noted Padgett: “The people who suffered the most were engineers and IT people.”

The phenomenon of hands-on users being the most resistant explains why so many small-business users and consultants have reacted so strongly against Vista, noted Gartner’s Silver.

Conversely, those enamored of the latest technology tend to be Vista enthusiasts, said David Fritzke, IT director at the YMCA Milwaukee, which has been adding Vista to its workforce as it buys new computers. “Some users bought Vista for home and then wanted it more quickly at work than we had initially planned to deploy it,” he said. Fritzke also found that younger users adapted to Vista more easily.

In search of ROI
Users’ personal reactions, positive or negative, ultimately impact the bottom line and help drive the business decision of whether to roll out Vista across an organization.

It’s all about basic cost-benefit analysis, says Gartner’s Silver. In most businesses, Vista offers few compelling advantages for users while introducing challenges. The cost of change is too high for the perceived benefit. For example, users often complain about Vista’s constant nagging about possible system threats, about applications that no longer run, or about files that appear to be “lost” because they’ve been moved to new places by the OS, Silver said.

“It’s really hard to convince someone to go to a product that’s not quite as stable or as capable as what they’re already using,” Silver noted — and so they get frustrated and angry. While IT managers and analysts appreciate some under-the-hood changes in Vista, these improvements don’t have an immediate, obvious benefit for users. “Vista’s benefits are not about the users,” concurred Collegiate Housing Services’ Evans.

Upgrades from Microsoft’s past have also colored expectations, Silver said. Users tend to remember the straightforward transition from Windows 2000 to XP, even though technically it was a “minor” upgrade, he said. (Silver also noted that until XP Service Pack 2, XP had its own share of compatibility and security flaws that annoyed users, something that most forgot with SP2’s release.)

And while the path from Windows 95 and 98 to Windows XP was rockier, the benefits were clear enough at each stage for most customers to make the upgrade investment gladly, Silver said.

Some users have decided to skip Vista altogether and instead wait for Windows 7, whose release date has been reported as anywhere between 2009 and 2011 “Why shoot yourself in the foot twice? Windows 7 will be out next year; I’ll wait till then,” said one InfoWorld reader. If Windows 7 arrives sooner rather than later — or if a miraculous Vista service pack addresses all the major objections in one swoop — then the uproar over upgrading to Vista will quickly fade into the hazy past of other Windows upgrade snafus.

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Did I mention I was Scobelized…? More on that later.
What to do if you’re laid off in 2008 recession

It’s sad to hear about layoffs at companies like Yahoo. Right now it seems like a bad time to be laid off. I’m here to offer some hope.

I laid myself off in February 2002. Remember that time? It was far worse than what we’ve seen so far in the economic turmoil of 2008. It seemed like EVERYONE was laid off. There was even a Website, fuckedcompany.com, that tracked layoff after layoff. No good news, like the funding of Automattic, was coming out. 9/11 just happened and it seemed to be particularly dire.

But even in that tough time I found a job working at NEC. Here’s some tips I learned from that time.

1. Don’t get lazy. It might seem dire, but if you work it you WILL find a job. Some of my friends went on vacation, started drinking, or generally just hung out with their families. Those people took a LOT longer to find a job than the friends of mine who approached their time off with these tips.
2. Make sure you spend at least 30% of every day trying to find a job. That means working on your resume. Getting your cover letter finished. Sending out resumes. Searching the web for work. Networking. Etc. At first your time spent on these tasks should be a lot higher, but after weeks of watching the job sites for jobs and having your resume checked over by 10 of your friends you will naturally have more time to spend on other things.
3. Start a blog on the field you want to work in. Want to be a PHP programmer? Start a PHP blog and make sure you put world class stuff there. Link to EVERYONE who has a PHP blog. But that’s only the beginning.
4. Do things that will get you to be recognized as a world leader in the field you want to be in. Are you a programmer? Build something and put it up! Share your knowledge on your blog (give tips you’ve learned). Are you a program manager? Those jobs will be tougher to find, but you should demonstrate that you are a great manager of people as well as that you’re expert on the kinds of things you want to do. Demo! Demo! Demo!
5. Learn from Loic Le Meur. How did he get thousands of videos uploaded on Seesmic everyday? He networked. He visited tons of journalists, bloggers, executives. He is a consumate networker (you should watch him work the halls here at the World Economic Forum).
6. Do a video everyday on YouTube that demonstrates something you know. Loic does a video everyday. If you’re laid off you have absolutely no excuses. Get a cheap Web cam and get over to YouTube or Seesmic.
7. Show your friends your resume and cover letter. Don’t have any friends? Now is the time to make some. Call up some interesting people and ask for an informational interview. This is particularly key if you work at a big company and are getting laid off. I watched people at Microsoft get laid off and the ones who had tons of internal informational interviews got new jobs fast. The key is to meet people everyday and get in front of them. Not to beg for a job, but to do research on the industry you want to work in. You’d be amazed how showing some interest in your industry will get noticed itself.
8. Do the basics. I got my NEC job by sending a resume into a job that I found on Craig’s List. Yes, my blog helped me AFTER I got the interview, but I got the interview just by having a great cover letter and an interesting resume.
9. Don’t feel bad about taking government assistance. You’ll need it to pay your bills. I took it and it helped me get over that tough period.
10. Go to any job networking session you learn about. All of them were valuable to me, even though they didn’t necessarily bring me a job. Part of it is just feeling like you’re doing everything you can to get back on your feet. It’s an attitude thing. If you have an attitude that you’re going to work at this that will come across and will bring opportunities to you.
11. Go where the money is. If you are laid off and you haven’t sent your resume to Matt Mullenweg this morning, why not? People with new funding are the ones who are hiring. You want to work for them, so do what you can to at minimum get an informational interview. Why don’t you interview Matt for your blog? You never know, he just might give you an interview and that might lead to a discussion about how you could fit into his company. Even if it doesn’t, at least you get an interesting interview with someone in the industry who is seeing success. Other employers want to be like Matt, so if you have some insights to his success you might be surprised by how that gets you job interviews.
12. Take a little bit of time to work on family and health. You probably haven’t been paying enough attention to these two things. This is the time to start some healthy habits. Give up smoking, if you’re doing that. Drink less (the temptation will be to drink more, don’t give in). Get more exercise. Yes, I should take my own advice (I went for a long walk this morning in Davos and had fish last night).
13. Volunteer. Let’s say you are going to be out of work for six months. What could you do with six months of your time? Make sure you come away with it with a great project under your belt. Why not volunteer your time with a charity that could use your skills? Not only will you feel good about yourself, you’ll come away with job experience so you won’t have a hole in your resume (building an IT system for the Red Cross looks damn impressive — saying you were “on the beach” for six months does not). Plus you’ll make great friends with people who are trying to improve the world (they are typically the kinds of friends you should have anyway).
14. Make sure you take advantage of any help your former employer is offering. Sometimes they have retraining or other programs that might help you land an even better job.
15. See if you can keep coming into the office. This isn’t open to everyone, but at Userland I kept coming into work everyday after the paychecks stopped. That made me feel better, plus it gave me the ability to use phones, stay away from negative situations (do you really want to be around family all day, everyday, who might remind you that you need to find a job?) as well as give you a place to work hard on finding your new job.
16. Go to every business event you can attend. Can’t afford to get in? Me neither and I have a job! Hang out in the hallways. You never know who you might meet. At minimum you’ll get interesting interviews for your blog. Have your resumes ready.
17. Always have your suit ready. Some interviews happen fast “can you be here this afternoon?” The one who is ready will get the interview.

On your resume and cover letter. I found a TON of tips online for how to improve yours. Those tips work. Listen to them. My cover letter is what got me my interview (the guy who ran the group told me that later). My cover letter’s approach came off of tips I found online. Do Google searches for things like “how to write a great cover letter.”

Do you have any tips? Help out people by posting your own blogs and linking to them in my comment area here. Good luck and keep your head up. Lots of people have gotten fired. I’ve talked with quite a few CEOs here at the World Economic Forum and you’d be surprised at how many of them have had bad times in their careers.

I’ll be asking business leaders this week for their tips and will come back to this topic later in the week.

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There was a lot of press last week about Bill Gates’ session “A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century ” at the World Economic Forum 2008 in Davos, Switzerland but few if any of which had linked to the YouTube video of the whole session. It’s just one of the many great sessions at Davos this year, on top of the very inspiring “The Davos Question” videos. If you have a spare 30 minutes, check out what Bill has to say about the role of economics in the 21st Century.

At around the 2-minute mark, Bill once again makes fun of himself leaving the full-time position at Microsoft. “As you all may know, in July I’ll make a big career change. I’m not worried; I believe I’m still marketable. I’m a self-starter, I’m proficient in Microsoft Office. I guess that’s it.”

If Bill’s speaking pace makes you unsettled, you can read the transcript yourself here.

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Bill Gates and his wife Melinda head the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which aims to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty worldwide.

If innovation is what the Middle East is looking for, then today it will have a chance to hear from a man who defines it. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest and most influential software company, will speak to audiences in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Gates isn’t just the chairman of Microsoft, which he co-founded in 1975 with his friend Paul Allen. He has directed the company from its humble start in New Mexico into the Redmond-based giant that it is today. Gates help created several of Microsoft’s earliest creations and reportedly worked on products until the early 1990s.

Today Microsoft dominates the operating system market, and its collections of applications from Word to Excel have become industry standards. The company last year reported revenue of over $51 billion.

There have been problems along the way, too. Microsoft has been successfully sued for monopolistic practices both in the US and Europe, and the man at the helm has often been associated with the company’s marketing tactics. The company was fined over 497 million euros by the European Union in 2004. The fine was upheld in a 2007 ruling.

Since 2000, Gates, along with his wife Melinda, has focused heavily on philanthropy. Today they head the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which aims to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty world-wide.

The foundation has an endowment of $37.6 billion. Gates himself is worth an estimated over $56 billion, and was ranked as the world’s richest person from 1995 until 2007.

Last year, Gates announced that he would remove himself from the daily business of Microsoft in June of this year. He said he will focus mainly on philanthropy, although he will remain as the company’s chairman.

The following Q&A was conducted with local media via e-mail prior to Gates’ arrival in Dubai.

How much more can technology advance in the next decade - will it be at the same pace as the past 10 years?

People often ask me if we’re nearing the end of the digital revolution - if technology progress is at a point of diminishing returns and the personal computer has reached the apex of its development.

I believe the opposite is true. In many ways, the incredible advances of the past few decades have really just laid the foundation for much more profound change. In the years to come, hardware will continue to improve, often in dramatic and surprising ways.
Software will continue to advance as we develop new approaches to take advantage of multi-core processors, thread-level parallelism, expanded data storage and more pervasive broadband access. Together, hardware and software will be the catalyst for advances during the next 10 years that will far exceed the changes of the last 30 years.

Technology is increasingly changing the way people live - the way we share experiences and communicate with the people we care about; the way we preserve memories of past events; the way we access entertainment; the way we learn; and how we utilise healthcare. Simply put, technology is transforming the way we interact with each other and understand the world we live in.

More and more emphasis is being placed on developing emerging markets. What role will Microsoft play in the development of these regions?
When Paul Allen and I founded Microsoft more than 30 years ago, our dream was to put a computer on every desk and in every home. Today, about one billion people have a PC. That’s a large number, but it’s just a fraction of the world’s 6.6 billion people.
As we make technology more affordable and simpler to use, we will be able to extend the social and economic opportunities that come with better access to education, information, healthcare and global marketplaces.
As more and more of the world’s people participate in the knowledge economy, the result will be new innovations that make everyone’s lives richer, more connected, more productive and more fulfilling.

Because information technology and education are so critical to creating economic opportunities, Microsoft is deeply committed to improving technology access and fostering innovative teaching and learning methods.
In developing countries and in less prosperous communities where we do business, we believe in helping governments, schools and non-profit organisations equip students with the practical skills they need to thrive in today’s knowledge economy.
Through our citizenship programmes such as Unlimited Potential and Partners in Learning, Microsoft has provided software, training and curriculum to more than seven million teachers and 75 million students in over 100 countries.

Lately Microsoft has faced competition from companies like Apple, Google and Cisco, among others. How do you see the future of the market, and where do you think the line is for reaching sustainable and positive competition?
Software and high-tech has always been extremely competitive, which is what makes this industry so dynamic, fun and interesting. We’ve always faced tough competitors. In the early days it was Ashton-Tate and WordPerfect, later on it was Netscape and Novell, then IBM, Sun, Oracle, and now Google, Apple, and Cisco. In another five years the names will be different but the competition will be just as intense.

Our competitors do a lot of smart things, and that means that we have to constantly think about how to innovate beyond them. All of this innovation leads to incredible value being created for our customers - for businesses, governments, schools and consumers.

How do you see Arab countries playing a role in the development of technology?

The Gulf region plays a critical role in the global economy and it has great potential to contribute to the development of software and technology. To thrive in today’s global knowledge economy, developed and developing countries alike need to focus on building the productive capacities of their workforce. One way to boost productivity is through investments in information and communications technology.

Even greater competitive advantage can come from strengthening workforce skills through investments in education. In an increasingly globalised economy, knowledge and skills are the key differentiators of nations as well as individuals.

In the US, we’ve been fortunate to benefit from access to a deep pool of scientists and engineers trained in US universities. Our economic leadership has always been driven by the ability of American companies to turn breakthrough innovations - the internet, fibre optics, genomics, and much more - into thriving businesses that create high-paying jobs for millions of people.

The success of high-tech regions such as Silicon Valley has been driven by their connection and proximity to great research universities. Now we see this being replicated in places like China and India.
I commend the many Gulf leaders who have had the foresight to invest in the education of their citizens. Focus on the needs, interests and dreams of young people because they hold the keys to the economic and social future of every nation.

What advice would you give to the millions of people who want to be the next Bill Gates?

One of the most important changes of the last 30 years is that digital technology has transformed almost everyone into an information worker. That’s true for everyone from the retail store worker who uses a handheld scanner to track inventory to the CEO who uses business intelligence software to analyse critical market trends.
So, if you look at how progress is made and where competitive advantage is created, there’s no doubt that the ability to use software tools effectively is critical to succeeding in today’s global knowledge economy.

Beyond that, however, I don’t think you can overemphasise the importance of having a good background in math and science. If you look at the most interesting things that have emerged in the last decade - whether it’s cool things like portable music devices and video game, or more practical things like smart phones and medical technology - they all come from the realm of science and engineering.

Communication skills and the ability to work well with different types of people are very important too. A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.
This isn’t true at all. Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.

I also place a high value on having a passion for ongoing learning. When I was pretty young, I picked up the habit of reading lots of books. It’s great to read widely about a broad range of subjects. Of course today, it’s far easier to go online and find information about any topic that interests you. Having that kind of curiosity about the world helps anyone succeed, no matter what kind of work they decide to pursue.

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… about living with Bill, working with Warren Buffett, and giving away their billions.

Years before Melinda French met and married Bill Gates, she had a love affair - with an Apple computer. She was growing up in Dallas in a hard-working middle-class family. Ray French, Melinda’s dad, stretched their budget to pay for all four children to go to college. An engineer, he started a family business on the side, operating rental properties. "That meant scrubbing floors and cleaning ovens and mowing the lawns," Melinda recalls. The whole family pitched in every weekend. When Ray brought home an Apple III computer one day when she was 16, she was captivated. "We would help him run the business and keep the books," she says. "We saw money coming in and money going out."

Of all the tricks that life can play, it’s hard to imagine any stranger than what befell Melinda French. Today she is living in a gargantuan high-tech mansion on the shores of Lake Washington, married to the richest man in America - and giving billions of dollars away. When she married Bill Gates 14 years ago, she bought into a complex bargain. On the one hand, she became half of what has turned out to be the world’s premier philanthropic partnership. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has assets of $37.6 billion, making it the world’s largest. In that total is $3.4 billion that Warren Buffett has already given, and still to come are nine million Berkshire Hathaway B shares, currently worth $41 billion, that he has pledged to contribute in coming years. Assuming that Berkshire shares continue to rise and that the Gateses continue to bestow their own wealth on their foundation, Melinda and Bill will very likely give away more than $100 billion in their lifetimes. Already the foundation has disbursed $14.4 billion - more than the Rockefeller Foundation has distributed since its creation in 1913 (even adjusted for inflation).

Along the way, Melinda has sacrificed privacy, security, simplicity, and normalcy. In the late 1990s, during the Microsoft antitrust trial, her husband was widely regarded as the biggest bully in business. And isn’t anyone married to Bill Gates susceptible to losing her identity - to being perceived as the ultimate accessory?

Forgive her if she overcompensates. One day this past fall she spent many hours at her children’s school (the Gateses have two daughters, ages 5 and 11, and a son, and then hosted a dozen dinner guests, including four African health ministers who were in Seattle for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Malaria Forum. By 10 P.M., after everyone had left, she was feeling frazzled and panicky about her speech the next morning. "Just go to bed!" Bill told her. "You know so much about malaria." Melinda dreads the spotlight, but the following morning she faced more than 300 scientists, doctors, and health officials. She unveiled an audacious plan to eradicate malaria - a disease that kills more than one million people annually and has eluded a cure for centuries - and then answered questions with Bill. Afterward the crowd buzzed about this woman whom even they, recipients of the Gateses’ billions, hardly know.

Today, at 43, Melinda Gates is ready to reveal her full self - to go public, so to speak. "I had always thought that when my youngest child started full-day school I’d step up," she says, sitting down with Fortune for her first-ever profile. Although she admits she would prefer to stay out of public view forever, her older daughter got her thinking. "I really want her to have a voice, whatever she chooses to do," she says. "I need to role-model that for her." She is spending more time on foundation work, up to 30 hours a week. "As I thought about strong women of history, I realized that they stepped out in some way."

She is stepping up also because her husband is doing the same. Beginning in July, Bill, who is nine years older than Melinda, plans to spend more than 40 hours a week on philanthropy, leaving 15 or so for his duties as chairman of Microsoft. Friends of the couple say that he wouldn’t be shifting gears if it weren’t for Melinda. Moreover, they say, she has helped Bill become more open, patient, and compassionate. "Bullshit!" he bellows. Nicer, perhaps? "No way!" he shouts, grinning because he knows it’s true. One thing he admits readily: Thanks to Melinda, he is easing comfortably into his new role. About the philanthropic work he says, "I don’t think it would be fun to do on my own, and I don’t think I’d do as much of it."

This is not exactly a marriage of equals. Melinda is better educated than Bill, having graduated from Duke University with a BA (a double major in computer science and economics) and an MBA. Harvard’s most celebrated dropout, Bill was awarded an honorary degree last June. Melinda also outperforms him athletically. She runs once a week with a few friends - seven miles in an hour, a brisk pace - and tries to exercise five days a week. She has completed the Seattle marathon and climbed, with ropes and crampons, to the peak of 14,410-foot Mount Rainier. As for Bill, Melinda says, "He’s finally started to run in the last year." To give him credit, he is an aggressive tennis player and a decent golfer - sometimes playing with Melinda. Beyond that, though, running on the treadmill while watching DVDs three nights a week is all Bill can do to keep up with his fit wife.

Melinda also understands people better than he does, Bill admits. In fact, he uses her as a sounding board, sometimes for personnel matters at Microsoft. In 2000, when Steve Ballmer, with whom Bill has worked for 28 years, replaced him as CEO, Melinda helped ease the awkward transition. "Melinda and I would brainstorm about it," Bill says. "You always benefit from your key confidante telling you, ‘You think so-and-so stepped on your toes? Well, maybe he didn’t mean to. Maybe you’re wrong.’" Says the couple’s close friend Warren Buffett, who has known them since 1991: "Bill really needs her."

When it comes to investing their philanthropic assets, Melinda wields even greater influence. Early on she and Bill agreed to focus on a few areas of giving, choosing where to place their money by asking two questions: Which problems affect the most people? And which have been neglected in the past? While many philanthropists take the same tack, the Gateses, who love puzzles, apply particular rigor. "We literally go down the chart of the greatest inequities and give where we can effect the greatest change," Melinda says. So while they don’t give to the American Cancer Society, they have pumped billions into the world’s deadliest diseases - most importantly AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis - and failing public high schools in the U.S. And while Bill is drawn, naturally, to vaccine research and scientific solutions that may be decades away, Melinda is interested in alleviating suffering right now. "You can’t save kids just with vaccines," she says. "I’d go into rural villages in India and think, ‘Okay, we saved this child. But the cows are defecating in the stream coming into the village. There are other things we need to be doing.’"

Those other things include funding insecticide-treated bed nets to ward off malaria-carrying mosquitoes, providing microbicides to prevent the transmission of AIDS, and offering microloans and insurance to help the poorest of the poor start businesses and farms. The Gateses’ latest mission, which developed out of a trip Melinda took to Kenya two years ago, is to recreate for Africa a green revolution similar to the program that increased crop yields in Latin America and Asia beginning in the 1940s. In 2006 the Gates Foundation formed a $150 million alliance with the Rockefeller Foundation. "Melinda is a total-systems thinker," says Rockefeller president Judith Rodin. "She and Bill dive into issues. They care deeply, deeply, deeply about making a difference, but they don’t get starry-eyed. They demand impact."

The impact comes from the combination of Melinda’s holistic vision and Bill’s brainpower. Bono, the rock star-humanitarian who is both a friend of the Gateses and a grantee (through his One antipoverty campaign), calls their relationship "symbiotic." Noting Bill’s fierceness, Bono says, "Sometimes I call him Kill Bill. Lots of people like him - and I include myself - are enraged, and we sweep ourselves into a fury at the wanton loss of lives. What we need is a much slower pulse to help us be rational. Melinda is that pulse." Buffett also believes that Melinda makes Bill a better decision-maker. "He’s smart as hell, obviously," Buffett says. "But in terms of seeing the whole picture, she’s smarter." Would Buffett have given the Gates Foundation his fortune if Melinda were not in the picture? "That’s a great question," he replies. "And the answer is, I’m not sure."

A goal a day

If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped. - Melinda Gates, valedictory speech, Ursuline Academy, 1982

Unlike William H. Gates III, whose parents, Bill and Mary, were civic leaders in Seattle, Melinda French grew up not knowing privilege or wealth. Her father worked on the space program at LTV. Her mother was a stay-at-home mom who didn’t go to college and regretted it. Says Melinda, who has one sister 14 months older and two younger brothers: "My parents told us, ‘No matter what college you get into, we will pay for it.’"

That Apple III was actually the family’s second computer; when Melinda was 14, her father brought home an Apple II, the first consumer computer on the market. "I finagled it to be in my bedroom so I could play games on it," she says. She learned BASIC, the programming language, and taught it to other kids during summer vacations.

Life was a test, and Melinda believed she had to ace it. Susan Bauer, her math and computer science teacher at Ursuline Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Dallas, recalls, "Every day she had a goal." Melinda laughs, a bit embarrassed at the mention: "The goals were run a mile, learn a new word, that sort of thing." During her freshman year she looked up recent graduates’ college choices. She discovered that only Ursuline’s top two students had gotten into elite schools. "I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal," she explains. She hoped to go to Notre Dame.

Didn’t we all know this girl in high school? The star student, captain of the drill team, candy striper in the hospital, tutor at the public school on the other side of the tracks? Melinda was all that. At Ursuline, where the motto is Serviam (Latin for "I will serve"), volunteerism was a requirement. Her ambition, insists Bauer, "was never abrasive. Never. She was always lovely and charming, and she would win people over by being persuasive."

She made valedictorian and got into Notre Dame. But Notre Dame did not get her. When she and her dad visited, she recalls, officials at the university told them that "computers are a fad" and that they were shrinking the computer science department. "I was crushed," Melinda says. Duke, which was expanding in computer science, got her instead. She earned her BA and MBA in five years. Then a helpful recruiter from IBM, where Melinda had worked as a summer intern, directed her to Microsoft. "I told the recruiter that I had one more interview - at this young company, Microsoft," she recalls. "She said to me, ‘If you get a job offer from them, take it, because the chance for advancement there is terrific.’"

Dating the boss

Arriving in Seattle in 1987 as a marketing manager for a predecessor of Word, Melinda, 22, was naive about what Microsoft held for her. "There were a lot of idiosyncratic people. They were all so smart, and they were changing the world," she says, unfazed that she was the youngest recruit and the only woman among ten MBAs. The culture, though, did faze her. "It was a very acerbic company," she recalls. That culture trickled down from the top, where Gates and Ballmer badgered and harangued managers. Melinda thought about leaving Microsoft.

But four months after she started, during her first trip to New York City, for the PC Expo trade show, she went to a group dinner and sat next to the CEO. "He certainly was funnier than I expected him to be," she recalls. What attracted Bill to Melinda? "I guess her looks," he says.

Later that fall, on a Saturday afternoon ("Everybody worked on Saturday," she says), Melinda and Bill ran into each other in a Microsoft parking lot. "We talked awhile, and then he said, ‘Will you go out with me two weeks from Friday night?’ I said, ‘Two weeks from Friday? That’s not nearly spontaneous enough for me. I don’t know. Call me up closer to the day.’" Bill called Melinda later that day, rattling off his lineup of meetings and commitments. "I promised I would meet him later that night," she says.

The scrawny brainiac had just become a billionaire from Microsoft’s 1986 IPO. Yet even that kind of money can’t buy you love. Asked if Melinda played hard to get, Bill replies, "She was hard to get!" Both Melinda and her mother decided that dating the CEO was not a good idea. But, says Bill, "we found ourselves deeply emotionally connected." Melinda was adamant that their relationship would not affect her work. "I wanted no public exposure. And I drew this line in the sand that I would never, ever, ever go to him on anything related to work." She explains, "It reached the point that Bill would say to me, ‘You never tell me what you’re doing.’"

The CEO’s attention notwithstanding, Melinda French was a hotshot. In nine years at Microsoft she rose to general manager of information products (Expedia, Encarta, Cinemania) and oversaw 300 employees. Her record wasn’t perfect. Remember Microsoft Bob, the version of Word for people afraid of computers? That was Melinda’s baby. ("Too cute," she says.) But even on troubled projects, Melinda was seen as a strong team builder. Says Patty Stonesifer, Melinda’s former boss at Microsoft and now CEO of the Gates Foundation: "No question, if she had stayed, she would have been on the executive team at Microsoft."

Melinda worried about marrying Bill. "Bill had money," she says. "To me, it was like, Okay, Bill has money. Big deal." She saw what success was doing to him - robbing him of his privacy and a normal life. Both Melinda and Bill, in fact, questioned whether his conquer-the-world capitalist nature could co-exist with a family. "I thought, ‘What would it be like to be married to someone who works that hard?’"

A friend from Omaha juiced the relationship. On Easter Sunday in 1993, Bill and Melinda were visiting his parents at their vacation home in Palm Springs when he announced that it was time to head back to Seattle. They returned to their private jet. The pilot announced the route. Bill drew the shades. To distract Melinda he pulled out a jigsaw puzzle. ("Bill’s very good at complicated jigsaw puzzles, but she’s unbelievable," Buffett says.) When the plane touched down and the doors opened, "There’s Warren with a bugle," Melinda recalls. (This isn’t Seattle, Melinda. It’s Omaha!) As Buffett drove them to Borsheim’s, a jewelry emporium owned by Berkshire Hathaway, he kept ribbing: "Bill, there’s a metric of love here. I spent 6% of my net worth on Susie’s ring. I don’t know how much you love Melinda, but 6% is the yardstick in Omaha." Bill, worth $7.3 billion by this time, inquired about sales per square foot while Melinda checked out the goods. "I said an emerald. Bill said a diamond is more appropriate," she recalls. She chose a diamond scandalously shy of Buffett’s price target.

Around that time Bill and Melinda started talking about giving his money away. They both figured they would wait until Bill was in his 60s, despite flak he was getting about his miserliness. "He had been advised by lawyers and accountants that he should have a foundation," recalls his father, "but he refused. He said he didn’t need another entity." Melinda’s wedding shower in December 1993 shifted the thinking. Bill’s mother, Mary Gates, who was fighting breast cancer at the time, read a letter she had written to Melinda. "From those to whom much is given, much is expected" was its essence. Mary Gates passed away the following June. Her message spurred the creation of the first Gates charity, the William H. Gates III Foundation. Bill’s dad ran it out of cardboard boxes in his basement.

Initially, Melinda recalls, the idea was to put laptops in classrooms - which was derided by many as a self-serving gesture by a software tycoon. But at the time, she was volunteering in a couple of schools in Seattle, and she realized that "there’s a much bigger problem" than a technology divide. She and Bill decided to take on education reform broadly, focusing on secondary schools. "The piece that looked so intractable and no one was touching was high schools," she says.

Soon after their wedding came the calling to global health. Melinda read a front-page New York Times story about children in developing countries dying of diseases that most Americans have never heard of - rotavirus, which kills more than 500,000 children every year - and others like malaria and tuberculosis that barely exist in the U.S. "I thought, ‘This can’t be happening,’" Melinda says, and she attached a note to Bill. ("This is how we work," she says. "We constantly put stuff on each other’s desks.") Reading the article, Bill learned about the World Bank’s 1993 Development Report, which calculated the cost of these diseases. He got the 344-page document and read it several times. "That is not something I will do," notes Melinda. "I learn in a different way. I learn experientially."

Buffett’s gift

"Yes, we’re a couple that has fun discussing fertilizer while we walk on the beach," says Bill proudly. We are sitting in the chairman’s office at Microsoft, and Bill, in an armchair, is rocking forward and back - an old habit that Melinda has not broken. "Melinda is more scientific and reads more than 99% of the people you’ll ever meet," he says. When the couple reviews grants (of the 6,000 or so requests that the foundation receives annually, they personally evaluate only those asking for $40 million or more), they typically meet in a study or hash out their views during long walks. They discuss grant requests without notes in front of them because, as Melinda says, "You’d better have it in your head. That’s a good discipline."

Former President Bill Clinton, who paid tribute to Melinda at a Save the Children dinner in New York City in September, said that two years ago, when he went to Africa with the Gateses, he and Bill "thought we were so smart. We showed how much we knew about all these issues, you know, and we asked all the right questions. Melinda just sat there patiently. And then when we shut up, she bored in and said, ‘What are you doing in education? What are you doing on prevention? How many people are using condoms?’" The two Bills wilted. "Melinda showed that in the end, women are stronger than men when it counts," Clinton said.

As Melinda has handed him AIDS babies with dirty pants, her husband has developed a noticeable compassion. But hers seems natural. Her close friend Charlotte Guyman, a retired Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft executive who is now on Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway board, recalls a trip to Calcutta in 2004. One day, when Melinda had foundation meetings to attend, Guyman and a few in their group spent a half-day at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying. There, they were captivated by one young woman suffering from AIDS and tuberculosis who was "just bones," Guyman says. No one could break the woman’s zombie-like stare. The next day Melinda visited. "Melinda walks in, pauses, and goes right over to this young woman," Guyman recalls. "She pulls up a chair, puts the woman’s hand in her hands. The woman won’t look at her. Then Melinda says, ‘You have AIDS. It’s not your fault.’ She says it again: ‘It’s not your fault.’ Tears stream down the woman’s face, and she looks at Melinda." Guyman can’t forget the connection. "Melinda sat with her. It seemed like forever."

Seeing such suffering up close has led the Gateses to direct more money to what they call intervention: those bed nets, condoms, microbicides (clear, odorless gels that women apply vaginally) that help ward off illness and death until the magic bullet, vaccines, arrives. As AIDS among women has exploded in the developing world, Melinda, who goes to church regularly, feels no guilt about funding programs that more conservative Roman Catholics question. "Condoms save lives," she says.

As mighty as the Gates Foundation is, Melinda insists that it needs partners. Relatively speaking, she says, "our pocket of money is quite small. The NIH budget is $29 billion. The state of California spends $60 billion in one year. If we spent that, our entire foundation would be out of business." So the Gates Foundation has allied with other charities - Rockefeller, Michael and Susan Dell, Hewlett - and with companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and Procter & Gamble on various projects. The most successful joint venture is the GAVI Alliance, formerly called the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which the Gateses helped start with donations of $1.5 billion. With 17 donor governments and the European Union in the fold, GAVI has distributed vaccines (including tetanus, hepatitis B, and yellow fever) to 138 million children in 70 of the world’s poorest countries. Thanks largely to this alliance, immunization rates are at all-time highs in the developing world, and more than two million premature deaths have been prevented.

Closer to home, where just 70% of American ninth-graders graduate on time from high school, reforming education has been a slog. Melinda admits that she and Bill were initially naive. "I thought that if we got enough schools started, people would say, ‘Let me build schools just like that.’ Just the opposite is true. You could get 1,000 schools up and running, and the system would pull them down." In Denver and even in Seattle, the Gateses’ backyard, some of their education efforts have failed for want of community engagement or the right leadership. So now the Gateses are working with 1,800 high schools and aligning with superintendents, mayors, and governors wherever they can. "It’s always been one step forward and one step back," Melinda says.

New York City, though, shows what Gates money can do. At 43 new small high schools funded by the Gates Foundation, graduation rates are 73%, compared with 35% for the schools they replaced. The Gateses’ partner here happens to be Joel Klein, who led the government’s antitrust case against Microsoft a decade ago and now runs New York City’s public schools. Klein appreciates the irony of their alliance, calling the progress "a tribute to Bill." For his part, Bill claims that it was no big deal to give his money to his former nemesis. And Melinda won’t say a word about the tension that stemmed from that period. "That’s part of our relationship that I need to keep private," she says. But clearly she helped her husband get his head around the notion of working with Klein. "This is one of the great things about Bill," she says. "Bill looks forward." Buffett observes, "When Bill gave $50 million to New York City schools with Joel Klein in charge, I thought, ‘This guy can rise to the occasion.’"

Now, with another key partnership - the one with Buffett - the Gateses have more to spend and do than ever. Buffett had planned to hold onto his money until his death, but he changed his mind after his wife, Susie, died in 2004. In the spring of 2006, after lots of hinting, he broke the news to Bill. When Bill went home and told Melinda, they went on a long walk, and both cried. Melinda recalls, "We said to each other, ‘Oh, my gosh, do you know how responsible we’re going to feel giving someone else’s money away?’"

Buffett, who requires that the Gateses spend his annual contributions in full the following year, has given them just one piece of advice: "Stay focused." He considers the Gateses "the perfect solution," he says, because they are experts in philanthropy and also because he sees himself in Bill and his late wife in Melinda. "Bill is an awkward guy. He’s lopsided, but less lopsided since he’s with Melinda," he says. "Susie made me less lopsided too." Perhaps proving the point, Bill is quite touching when he explains his delight in disbursing Buffett’s billions. "Warren knows how lucky I am to have Melinda. It makes him look back at his time with Susie and wonder what it would have been like to be doing the giving with Susie."

Bill and Melinda are only now figuring out their new division of duties - crucial in a 500-person outfit that will probably double in size in two years. Bill, no organization geek (that would be Ballmer), intends to spend more time with scientists and academics, explore technology in education, and egg on the pharmaceutical companies that are not working on vaccines for the developing world. "Nobody gives them a hard time," he complains. "That job is natural for me to do." Melinda, meanwhile, intends to focus on personnel and culture. Some critics of the foundation contend that only managers who are close to the Gateses have the clout to get things done. Melinda says she wants to push decision-making further down the organization. Asked whether criticism about the Gates Foundation’s bureaucracy is valid, she replies, "You bet, some of it is." Still, she says, "years ago we got compliments about how fast we reviewed grants. Those grants were swift, but they were not all as effective as they could have been. I’d rather be a bit more methodical and effective." She also believes that the foundation must respond better to charges that its assets are invested in companies, including BP and Exxon Mobil, whose business interests can conflict with its altruistic goals. In May, Melinda and Bill directed endowment managers to divest stocks of companies invested in Sudan.

Housing crisis

Melinda and Bill married on Jan. 1, 1994, in a small ceremony on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, with Willie Nelson, one of her favorite singers, performing - a surprise arranged by Bill. Afterward, Melinda says, she had "a mini sort of personal crisis." This crisis was over the house Bill was building on Lake Washington outside Seattle. It was a bachelor’s dream and a bride’s nightmare: 40,000 square feet with several garages, a trampoline room, an indoor pool, a theater with a popcorn machine, and enough software and high-tech displays to make a newlywed feel as though she were living inside a videogame. "If I do move in," she recalls telling Bill, "it’s going to be like I want it to be - our house where we have our family life." After six months of discussions about shuttering the project, Melinda hired a new architect to redesign the place. They worked together to create intimate spaces, an office for her, and staff quarters out of sight and on the periphery.

The couple moved in before construction was finished, which might have been a mistake. "Having a hundred workmen there gave her the message, ‘This is what your life is going to be like,’" Bill says. He used to tell Melinda: "Every day I want to hear one thing you like about this house." She recalls: "I’d say, ‘Okay, I like the laundry chute.’ Or ‘Okay, here’s what I like and ten things I don’t like.’"

The house is, of course, a metaphor for Melinda’s desire for normalcy. Her foremost concern is that the kids lead lives as normal as possible. She insisted on booting all hired help on weekends except for the security people and a sitter who arrives late in the day in case she and Bill want to exercise or go to dinner or a movie. Wednesday night is family swimming night. Friday night is family movie night. Bono, who has stayed with the Gateses several times, says, "That home has a stillness to it. It’s got a sort of Zen-like quality. Melinda has created that." When they congregate in the light-filled kitchen overlooking the lake, Bono says, "they’re fun to hang out with. And they’re funny. She plays the straight man to his dark humor."

Melinda appreciates Bono’s description. But does she like the house? "Now I like it," she says, smiling. "I still wouldn’t build it. But I like it."

The Gates children are reaching the age where they want to understand their parents’ passions. In 2006, Melinda and Bill took the two oldest children to South Africa, showing them slums and an orphanage in Cape Town. But the value of their work is often difficult to translate. A few years ago when they showed a documentary about polio, the kids asked about a crippled boy featured in the film: "Did you help that kid? Do you know the name of that kid? Well, why not?" On and on. "We don’t know that boy," Melinda told the children, "but we’re trying to help lots of kids like him." Bill’s explanation: "I’m in wholesale. I’m not in retail!"

As Bill says about their children, "They know the money is overwhelming." And of course the kids have asked whether their parents will provide for them as generously as they do for those poor people who receive their billions. "We say, ‘You’ll be fine. You’ll still be very well-off,’" Bill says. While he and Melinda plan to give away 95% of their wealth in their lifetimes, they have not yet decided how much of what’s left will go to the children. Melinda says they will follow Warren Buffett’s philosophy: "A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing."

***

"My fatal flaw?" Melinda says, laughing, during our third and final interview. She sometimes wishes for a simpler life, she admits. "It depends when you catch me. Most days, no. But if you’d asked me yesterday if I would like a much simpler life, I would have told you yes." Yesterday was that night before the Malaria Forum, when she went to bed feeling unprepared. This morning, as she sat onstage and scrutinized the audience of renowned doctors and health experts, she says, "I was telling myself, ‘I know that person … I know his work … I know her work.’" She was giving herself a pep talk. "I told myself, ‘But I do know enough.’" She completed her goal for the day: calling for the eradication of one of the worst diseases the world has ever known. Tomorrow, another goal. Maybe it will be even bigger. 

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