TalkingaboutWindows.com offers IT professionals genuine insight on Windows 7 from the Microsoft engineers who helped build the product.

Listen as they talk about why product decisions and feature trade-offs were made. Also, get real-world commentary from IT professionals as they share their Windows deployment and adoption experiences. Participate in this forum to express your opinions, discuss Windows and share adoption stories.

Join the conversation with Microsoft and other IT professionals just like you as the next generation of Windows arrives. 

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Talking About Windows | Sumeeth Evans Source: talkingaboutwindows.com

Sumeeth Evans discusses how a modern OS will help overcome many of the obstacles of maintaining an IT infrastructure and explains his plans to solve mobile worker challenges with the adoption of Windows 7 and DirectAccess.

Link: http://mobilitytoday.com/news/009201/mobilitytoday_giveaway_2009

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The early years
Gates, born on October 28, 1955, had a passion for computers right from his school days. He made money from software even while at school!

Bill Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen studied together in high school. In Lakeside Prep School, they had the first tryst with computers. Both of them had a great interest for computers and programming. They would spend hours in front of the computer.

The turning point in their lives was when they came across an article about the Altair 8000, a small computer. Gates and Allen approached the manufacturer, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) to launch a programming language for the computer even when they did not have the program ready.

However, in a span of eight weeks before the demonstration, Gates and Allen developed the interpreter. The interpreter worked at the demonstration and MITS agreed to distribute Altair BASIC. It was a great achievement for young Gates.

Passion for computers

In pursuit of his entrepreneurial dream, Gates moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where MITS was located. Gates and Allen realized there was huge potential in software languages. They saw a great opportunity in it.

To give shape to their dream, they founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975 in Albuquerque. Gates was only 20 years old then. The name ‘Microsoft’ was derived from the words ‘microcomputer’ and ‘software.’ The name was first used by Gates in a letter to Allen on November 29, 1974. It became a registered trademark in 1975. A few years down the line, Microsoft started gaining prominence with operating systems.

The first taste of success
Gates first tasted success with the MS-DOS operating system. In 1980, Microsoft joined hands with IBM. Under this pact, Microsoft’s operating system was bundled with IBM computers. This worked out well for Microsoft. Five years later, IBM wanted Microsoft to write a new operating system for their computers called the OS/2. Microsoft created the OS/2. However, Microsoft managed to get the rights, to market MS DOS separately besides the IBM deal. The Microsoft version emerged successful. The OS raked in fortunes for the company.

Image: Microsoft headquarters in Redmond. | Photograph: Photo Ron Wurzer/Getty Images

Why Microsoft is a hit

The company restructured on June 25, 1981, to become an incorporated business in Washington with a change of its name to ‘Microsoft, Inc’. Bill Gates became president of the company and chairman of the board, and Paul Allen became executive vice president. On February 16, 1986, Microsoft relocated to Redmond, Washington.

A month later, on March 13, the company went public with an IPO, raising $61 million at $21.00 per share. By the end of the trading day, the price had risen to $28.00. Soon Microsoft began introducing its office products. Microsoft Works, an office program which combined features in a word processor, spreadsheet, database and other office applications, was the first to be released.

It then went on to launch more remarkable products. However, the world’s most used software programs did not have a smooth and speedy launch. It was challenging to develop advanced software, Microsoft faced several glitches and legal issues initially.

"The success of Microsoft is really due to our relationship with developers. From those early days of getting people to write applications in BASIC, to getting people to write applications for MS-DOS, to get people to write graphical applications for Windows, that’s where we had our success. With things like Windows, it didn’t happen overnight. There were many years of getbting the system better, taking advantage of performance, improving the tools before that became a mainstream thing," Gates told software developers at Microsoft’s TechEd conference about his transition on June 3.

The wonder of Windows
Microsoft introduced its successful office product, Microsoft Office on August 8, 1989. Microsoft Office had applications like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel etc. On May 22, 1990 Microsoft launched Windows 3.0.

Later it was followed successive versions — Windows 95, 98 and 2000. More than 1 million copies of Microsoft Windows 95 were sold within 4 days of its launch.With several versions of Microsoft Windows, the company captured over 90 per cent market share.

Innovations continued to rule at Microsoft. In 2001, Microsoft launched Office XP, followed by Windows XP. In 2002, Microsoft and partners launch Tablet PC. Microsoft launches Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System to consumers worldwide.

Today, the company manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. The most popular products are Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software.

Innovation the buzzword

From just two co-founders who struggled to put things in place in a challenging environment, the Microsoft family has grown stronger by 78,000 employees spread across in 105 countries. Today, Microsoft has revenues of $51.12 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2007.

From July, Gates will hand over the entire responsibility of running the software giant with one of the world’s most aggressive CEOs, Steve Ballmer. Ballmer believes that innovation is the secret of Microsoft’s success story.

"Why is Microsoft a big company? Microsoft is not successful because we are big. We did something that people really like. People wanted it and they bought it," Ballmer says with confidence.

And how big is Microsoft? Well, quite big, actually. It makes profits of about $60 million every 24 hours!

But what will Microsoft be like after Bill Gates? Keep watching this space over the next few days as we bring to you a series of articles and opinions on Gates and Microsoft.

Credits:
Image1 : Pictures of Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates (L) and Paul Allen, from the early 1970′s, were on display at the Microsoft Visitor Centre in Redmond, Washington. | Photograph: Ron Wurzer/Getty Images
Image2: Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen (L) watch the Western Conference Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Portland Trail Blazers in Portland on 26 May 2000 | Photograph: George Frey/AFP/Getty Images
Image3: A customer checks software packages of US software giant Microsoft at a Tokyo computer shop. | Photograph: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images
Image4: A customer looks at a display of desktop computers running the new Microsoft Windows Vista operating system . | Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Image5: Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates Pose in Seattle after Gates announced Ballmer as the company’s New Chief Executive Officer on January 13, 2000. | Photograph: Getty Images

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Part I: Hits and Misses

Michael Miller: From a technology standpoint, what would you say is your biggest success? Was it making the PC popular or the graphical user interface?

Bill Gates: The most important thing is the creation of the software industry and the importance of having this platform that anybody can write to. That goes back to Microsoft Basic on the Altair, the Commodore PET, TRS-80, Atari 800, Apple II—building up a library of programs that people use to get something done.

There was no software industry before the PC came along. The whole magic was that computers became so cheap, and you need a lot of software, so people can sell software in volume and price it quite reasonably. That magic of high volume, low price just wasn’t possible in an era with a very modest number of very expensive computers. Most companies that did software did it as a sideline before we came along.

Basically we take that idea of a whole software industry, and we ourselves do some of the big things. We evolved the platform of the software industry from Basic to DOS; from DOS to Windows; from Windows to .Net Internet; to modeling, cloud computing, natural user interface…

The platform is changing because of the hardware improvements and the kind of scenarios that are possible. It’s just so different. We are about building a software platform and a software company.

M: Over the years, you have also talked about a number of technologies that you thought were going to be successful but haven’t reached mainstream appeal as much as I think you thought they would: SPOT, tablet PCs, speech recognition, stuff like that. What do you think it is: a software or hardware problem, or just society? Why did some things become incredibly popular and some things stay more or less as niches?

B: Look what was written down from when Paul and I started Microsoft. Half the things we dreamed of as scenarios for software to solve are still in front of us.

Natural interface including speech, and the kind of inking that comes out on the tablet. My prognosis, you can call it stubbornness, is simply that it is not ready for the mainstream yet. We have to keep improving the software and hardware. But I have no doubt that the current way we interact—which is overwhelmingly a keyboard and mouse way—in the next decade will be changed deeply. Not that it will go away, but it will be supplemented by speech, vision, ink-type things. And this is the kind of issue where Microsoft gets to put billions of dollars behind those beliefs.

The tablet: it’s taken off in some niches. There are millions sold a year, but not tens of millions. My belief is that we will get to hundreds of millions. So we are a factor of 100 away from what I wanted to happen and I believe will happen, where every student instead of having paper textbooks has this great device connected to the Internet that allows them to edit, create, record voice, browse, in this very deep way. —next: A Long, Sometimes Slow Journey ></ZIFFARTICLE itxtvisited="1">

Part II: A Long, Sometimes Slow Journey

M: So why did it take so much longer than a lot of people thought it would?

B: Well, everything [took] longer. Why did graphics interface take so long? Why did connecting computers in a network take so long—seven or eight years? Then you get to the hockey stick point.

Take graphics interface: Steve Ballmer and I would fly around the country and do these seminars about graphics interfaces, people would say "No, it’s too slow, it’s too hard to write the software," and it was very weird that we were pushing it. Then in a period of about year, it became so obvious that nobody discussed it anymore. So it is one of those weird things where you battle for so long and then there is no period where people say, "Gosh, you were right." All that happened was that immediately they say "Why are you still talking about that, of course that was right. Now we want to discuss your next thing."

The early 128K Macintosh almost failed. The only reason that thing survived at all was because some craftsmen at Apple and Microsoft were able to squeeze a few programs into the thing and kept it going enough. Then the 512K Mac came along and finally they got that thing to reach its critical mass. In the meantime, 95 percent of the companies that showed up to write software for the Macintosh went bankrupt, just as happens with all these things.

So the things that did happen: the move to PC computing as the mainstream office device; the move to graphics user interface; the move to PC-based servers taking over the data center. I remember there was a Fortune magazine article saying that some workstations had a higher growth rate than PCs did, of course off of some tiny little volume. What happened is we in our high-volume/low-price way created PC-based systems that did everything those workstations did. Not only did we take over the specialized functions, but we became the standard device for many of the jobs in the economy.

All these amazing things happened for the information economy, based on this software platform. And those things took time. There is nothing that was overnight.

The ones that are still in progress but are partly there are Tablet PCs, Internet TV, natural user interface. Those are three of the things you can say that they have failed to date. If you take my optimistic projection of how quick those would take off, we are well behind.

But the nice thing about Microsoft and the situation that we are in is that we can afford to be early. We can have our work sitting there ready to just keep being improved and improved.

Take Internet TV: until someone like AT&T comes along and says "OK, we want to do a video platform that is better than cable, that is personalized, targeted," it will only be another two or three years before it will be a common sense that when you watch a new show you can skip over the things that aren’t interesting and see more about the stuff you care about. When that finally happens, will anybody say "Oh, what a brilliant idea"? No, they will say "Of course! Why was it any other way?" Because it is insane that it’s any other way. Broadcast was this weird hack that was created to deal with very finite ability to get bits into households. And now the rules, at least for urban households in rich countries, are in the process of changing.

Things take a long, long time, but a lot of those things actually will happen. Many of them in terms of shopping patterns and behaviors, you almost take a generation in terms of how people are used to doing things before you get the full impact. No matter how good the technology gets. Mobile phone interface and natural interface will accelerate it, but all these things have the technical issues of the hardware and software, the price, and the behavioral thing around them. —next: Riding the Internet Revolution ></ZIFFARTICLE itxtvisited="1">

Part III: Riding the Internet Revolution

M: When you go back and look at the whole Internet revolution, what did Microsoft do right and wrong?

B: The key thing we did right is we got more than 100 million PCs out there ready to be connected.

Then it was set that at some point the cost of the connectivity would get to the right point and some protocol would be picked. The fact that it was the ARPA protocols that came out of the university environment, could you have known that? I used those protocols a lot before I started Microsoft. In one place, one niche became where those protocols exploded, and they were particularly good protocols, but any of them would have worked. So getting all the machines out there and creating a volume environment meant the connectivity was guaranteed to happen.

Knowing what period it would hit the hockey stick, we didn’t know. For many years, "the year of the network" was declared by many people, and we were supportive. It was when we were going up and college interviewing that we saw within a particular environment—universities like Cornell—that a threshold was crossed in terms of expecting to put course outlines online, ordering pizzas online.

Now if you take the population as a whole, you have different groups with different adoption patterns.

M: As this was happening, you guys spent a lot of time developing sites, Internet tools. What did you do right and what did you do wrong with that?

B: So many things have to be learned as you go along. We bought some things that you have to look back now… As I say, in that party room, we were the sober guys over in the corner who had half a punch. You had valuations of $2 billion for software companies that had 10 guys. There was an ad-rotation company that had a valuation of $500 million, and I had guys working on ad rotation, who were saying "Can’t we have a fourth head?" If you had a certain kind of story, infinite capital went to you. That was very strange because we had been the people with the capital to back cool software, internally within Microsoft.

This whole concept that if you can get a piece of software so popular that it creates an ecosystem around it—that was our insight back in 1975. As that became recognized, people took it too far and didn’t think there could be many people going for that all at the same time.

We were caught in some of that craziness in the late ’90s. We bought a few things. I still believe in the Sidewalk vision: the sites for a city where you could see all of the events and merchants and plan things. It’s really going to happen more on the mobile phone. That concept was good. We created this company that we spun out for over $1 billion that became Expedia. It became about booking airlines, not about software. We created Expedia, Slate, Sidewalk, MSN. We bought Hotmail, we bought Link Exchange. I bet I can’t remember all of those crazy things we bought.

The thing we did well was helping businesses think about Internet and what they should do. That we did really well. Some of the more consumer-ish things and what would or would not catch on, we didn’t have the magic answer.

The search thing is the one that jumps out where you ask "Why didn’t Microsoft do a better job in search earlier?" Well, hey, we can’t do everything—we don’t expect to do everything. We do a lot and we have a longer time horizon than anyone else.

Say there is an ocean out there and some big wave starts up, there is going to be somebody who is right where that wave is and they are going to be surfing before you know it. [The Google founders] are bright guys and were there when it started. They weren’t even the first, but they executed very well and they took the Adwords stuff and they created a good market with it. Boy, did they execute well. They’ve stayed ahead and did a good execution on that.

One thing that never comes out is that the software business is bigger selling to businesses than it is to consumers. Microsoft is really in touch with what are the practicalities, how do you make workers more productive, what are the pains in an IT department, what does corporate site development involve. We have built up over the decades the real ability to have great ongoing dialog with businesses about how they do their software and what they do. We have a very strong position.

When you think about why information workers will be far more productive 10 years from now than they are today, I would say the ideas in Microsoft Research Labs. There is more there about interactive whiteboard and the Surface-type desk and the way communications will work and how modeling will let you express things. There are more of the key ideas about why workers are going to be more productive there than anywhere else. In fact, it’s hard to think about what is the other place you’d name, because most people don’t have that broad view of software in common for that information worker. The economic value in that is very high.

This is a strength that Microsoft intentionally developed and it took a long time. We were first about bottoms-up guys who ignored IT, then we had to have the balance. Now we have that tension to meet that constructive needs from both top and bottom more often, even from the beginning of the product. What we did with SharePoint, what we did with the .NET development platform—that took a long time.

This is the whole time that the Windows platform really scaled up in terms of performance and security. Take Windows Server; it is unbelievable what has happened. Today the things that are still on mainframe have nothing to do with performance. It has to do with the code we wrote. We don’t want to rewrite it. In terms of absolute price/performance, nobody does anything on mainframe, but there is still a lot because the code is still up there. The Windows-based server and the Unix-based servers using the same hardware, they totally have taken over everything except the code museum stuff. —next: The Power and Problems of the Cloud ></ZIFFARTICLE itxtvisited="1">

Part IV: The Power and Problems of the Cloud

M: Everybody now is talking about software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing, and those sorts of things. How does the move towards those kinds of models impact desktop computing, which is clearly Microsoft’s legacy, the thing Microsoft is best known for?

B: There’s always been this question of "Where is computing being done, right next to you or far away?" And the more bandwidth and lower latency you have, the more flexibility you have about how you split that computer task. Time sharing had terminals where almost nothing was happening locally. Whether it was a character-based display, a 3270 or X protocol, everything but presentation was happening centrally. Then the PC swung it, before the Internet shows up, to where you’re doing everything on that local device and only the file store and in some cases, the database store, are done remotely, but you have most of the business logic as well as presentation, editing, and interactions done on that device. The beauty of that is you can work offline, you get great responsiveness, you don’t have to worry about the latency. Those of us who grew up with time sharing understand going back to timesharing, even with great capacity, is not that great.

Now you have more of a balance. HTML is back to the terminal model. When you browse a Web site, although HTML is way more complicated than most presentation protocols, it is a presentation protocol. Now you mix that in when you put active controls in or local script. All that AJAX stuff lets you now do some code execution. So it’s ironic that the good websites are the ones that aren’t using HTML, they are using local execution.

Now we are in a world where you can get the best of both worlds, when you call a subroutine, that subroutine can exist on another computer across the Internet. We now have tools for developers so they can call a service right across the Internet and they think they are calling a local subroutine.

Everything in computer science is to just write less code. What is the technique for writing less code, and its called subroutines. Everything that has ever been done—object-oriented programs, software as a service—it’s about taking this idea of subroutines and being able to use them broadly. When you want to draw a map, you say "That’s hard, a lot of data; I just want to call a subroutine." Well now you can call Virtual Earth or Google Earth</ZIFFARTICLE itxtvisited="1"> and get back the presentation in this great form. You don’t have to think about the data, the format. So we are taking subroutines to this next level and making that simple. Actually debugging the stuff, performance, making it work offline—there is still work being done on this.

In the extreme case, we can take somebody’s data center and run it for them on the cloud. All the issues about administrative, capacity, who owns the data, what happens when things go wrong, when people are getting error messages, that’s cloud computing and there is a lot of deep invention and work. I would say we are investing more in letting businesses use cloud computers than anyone is, and we have some brilliant projects that Ray Ozzie will be talking about more over the next year.

None of this means you don’t want local intelligence that is very responsive to you. You don’t want everything to just be a terminal-type approach.

People get confused. There is storage in the cloud, which is clear that your file should be up there and geo-distributed and backed up, and there is computation in the cloud. Those are both great, appropriate things, but the one that is without any tradeoff is to have the logical storage master up in the cloud. The one that you have to be careful of is what about computation, because computation is not free. And you have big problems with latency, offline, and scheduling that resource, which is a finite resource. But we are actually taking some pilot customers and moving huge parts of their data centers into our cloud where we manage it for them. Over the next couple of years, a portion of the data centers will start to move. Some people say data centers will move to the cloud very quickly, but I tend to think it will vary a lot

So you have two things moving to the cloud to be clear. You have stuff that could be done on the client, like storage where the master moves up and you just do caching. Then you also have server-based computing that could move into the cloud. Well that’s just a different data center, but it may be one that has the scale and pooling. With some of the early efforts, like the Amazon S3 stuff, it still forces you to write the program that understands there are different computers and how things work on that.

The thing we’re doing that Ray Ozzie will talk about later this year at the PDC is how you make it easy to write those programs that are high-scale running in cloud data centers in a way that you really understand what is going on. —next: Windows Work Yet to Be Done ></ZIFFARTICLE itxtvisited="1">

Part V: Windows Work Yet to Be Done

M: When you look at operating systems, like Windows, what has gone right and wrong? What do you see that you need to add over the next decade or so?

B: Well, there is a famous quest of mine called integrated storage, where you have not just a file system but more of a very flexible object-type database: things like your contacts, calendars, favorites, your photos, your music—how you rate those things are stored in a much more structured environment. And so they can be navigated easily and move between applications very easily. And that hasn’t happened. It will happen as part of the move to cloud storage. We will get this extra storage structure. Say you want to move data between multiple phones, multiple PCs, TV, car. You don’t just want to move files, you want to move things that have more structure. So there’s integrated storage or unified storage that hasn’t happened yet, and that’s too bad. You see a little bit of it where Apple and Microsoft are doing string indexes in the background, but it’s only a partial step. It doesn’t give you the full structure.

Now operating systems have a huge role to play in natural user interface. Now we have taken Windows and put it into our Surface device, but how do you add the programming model, how do you interact with those types of things? There’s a lot that still has to be done there.

There’s a lot of work to be done in security. Right now the tradeoff is between the user having to see a lot of things that they don’t really understand versus choosing how promiscuous things want to be and what they want to run. We haven’t made the breakthrough that makes it easy for people to understand what type of risk they are taking for which actions, so they are just getting a lot of stuff that they don’t know how to answer. Even with all these great mechanisms, they can do things that are quite dangerous. It is not an easy problem to solve, but there is a lot to be done with that.

You know the whole thing with the operating system existing across devices, where I updated the operating system on this machine, I update it on this machine…. If you have a houseful of machines or multiple machines, you should just say, "Hey, I want this Adobe application on all them, I want this file on all of them." That way you can just look at your machines and do things holistically. We are in the process of solving that, but that’s really a mess today.

With some of these things that aren’t done, the cloud stuff gives you a slightly better way of doing them. We can store your music rights, all of your preferences, software rights, we can store them in the cloud. Then when you buy a new device, if you’ve got connectivity you can pre-configure the thing. When you get a phone, it’s a lot of trouble today. Why should it be? You should say "Hey, I am Michael Miller. Make this thing like that other phone I have." Even if it’s from a different manufacturer or has different software—for things like contacts and schedules, there is a mapping. You shouldn’t start like some newborn.

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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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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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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. 

News Source

Microsoft released a slew of product updates over the past few weeks, but the one IT administrators seem to care the most about is Windows Vista SP1, with many already having rolled out the release candidate for the service pack or planning to do so in the near future.

In addition to the release candidate of the Vista service pack, the software maker has rolled out other updates, including Office 2007 SP1, SharePoint 2007 SP1, Exchange 2007 SP1 and the release candidate for Windows XP SP3.

However, for some IT managers at smaller companies, dealing with all these upgrades at the same time can be overwhelming.

“Evaluating all the service packs at the same time is quite a job for a small business and can overload the IT department, so we attack them in order of importance,” Jurgen Altziebler, interactive experience director for CoreBrand New York, told eWEEK. “Office SP1 is a no-brainer, while SharePoint will need time as our portals are highly customized.”

However, CoreBrand, which helps companies understand, build, express and measure their corporate brand, is looking forward to the promised LAN/network performance improvements as well as the other enhancements that Vista SP1 is expected to bring.

The company plans to roll out the release candidate for the service pack early in the new year, “depending how my test laptop holds up over the holidays,” Altziebler said.

However, other customers, such as Gary Wilhelm, business and financial systems manager at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, have already downloaded the release candidate for SP1 and are running it on test machines to make sure that its internal applications are able to run, and to see if the service pack resolved some of the issues it identified.

“We have also loaded the service pack on a few laptops to test our Avential VPN, Citrix and single sign-on solution. I was also looking forward to the release of SP1 for SharePoint 2007, since we are an early adaptor of SharePoint 2007, Office 2007 and Vista. Rather than apply the individual hot fixes Microsoft released, we made a decision to wait for SP1,” Wilhelm said.

Collegiate Housing Services, in Indianapolis, which provides housing programs to colleges, universities and post-secondary learning institutions in 27 cities throughout the United States, has not only deployed the Vista SP1 release candidate in its test lab, but also on its production IT machines to see how it behaves in the company’s environment.

CHS has about 78 machines currently running Vista, and is keen to roll out the service pack, which it sees as critical as it incorporates a lot of stability and performance improvements, better battery life and sleep/hibernate stability improvements. Overall network performance improvements are also crucial, Sumeeth Evans, director of information technology at CHS, told eWEEK.

“There is a perception in the industry that Microsoft products are not usable until the first or second service pack is released,” Evans said. “But this time around, the company delivered regular updates before the service pack release cycle to fix and update the bugs and features in both Vista and Office 2007. It also appears that, in terms of our testing so far, that these service packs are of very good quality.”

But while CHS has also already deployed Office 2007 SP1 in its lab and on production IT machines and others, Evans has not yet started testing Windows XP SP3 RC1, Office 2007 SP1, SharePoint 2007 SP1 or Exchange SP1.

December is the company’s fiscal year end and the IT department is extremely busy trying to complete projects before the end of the year and handle department requests and projects. “The best time of the year for dealing with service packs for my group is February or March,” he said.

CoreBrand, which designs and develops SharePoint 2007 portals for its clients, is currently evaluating SharePoint 2007 SP1 on its development servers and plans a rollout in the first quarter of 2008, at which time it will encourage its clients to do the same, Altziebler said.

While this is also a very busy time of year for the company, he welcomed the service packs and the promise they bring of improving the products it uses on a daily basis.

However, Altziebler is not convinced that will happen, saying he is keeping his “fingers crossed they don’t introduce new headaches.”

Despite all the service packs Microsoft has rolled out of late, Altziebler said one more is needed: for Internet Explorer 7. “The [Microsoft] IE 7 team has been very quiet since the latest release. IT needs to know the road map for Internet Explorer, especially now where everything is about building smart, Web-based enterprise applications,” he said.