Management style

Bill Gates in January 2008
From Microsoft's founding in 1975 until 2006, Gates had primary responsibility for the company's product strategy. He aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft achieved a dominant position he vigorously defended it. He gained a reputation for being distant to others; as early as 1981 an industry executive complained in public that "Gates is notorious for not being reachable by phone and for not returning phone calls."[44]

As an executive, Gates met regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. Firsthand accounts of these meetings describe him as verbally combative, berating managers for perceived holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's long-term interests at risk.[45][46]

He often interrupted presentations with such comments as, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"[47] and, "Why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?"[48] The target of his outburst then had to defend the proposal in detail until, hopefully, Gates was fully convinced.[47] When subordinates appeared to be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically, "I'll do it over the weekend."[49][50][51]

Gates's role at Microsoft for most of its history was primarily a management and executive role. However, he was an active software developer in the early years, particularly on the company's programming language products. He has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100,[52] but wrote code as late as 1989 that shipped in the company's products.[50] On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would transition out of his day-to-day role over the next two years to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He divided his responsibilities between two successors, placing Ray Ozzie in charge of day-to-day management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy.[53]