It is almost unthinkable that any one human could pick up where Bill Gates leaves off when he ends his full-time tenure Friday as Microsoft's leader. But as Gates bones up on epidemiology at his charitable foundation, his software company must still wake up Monday to face hard problems even he could not solve. Among them: beating Google Inc. on the Web while fending off its attacks on desktop computing.At a May gathering of chief executive officers, Gates outlined how he hoped to translate the work once done within the singular confines of his brain into the sort of group projects that could be managed with the company's own collaboration software.“We’ve created a thing we called quests, where we divided our types of customers down, and we got the best thinkers on these things, both the very practical people who are with the customers, the engineers who write the code, and the researchers who may be more unbound in terms of their timeframe and imagination, and put them together,” Gates said. If the quests are as deeply tied to Gates’ own ideas about the future as indicated by the few examples Ballmer mentioned, Microsoft may be in trouble.After all, even with Gates himself at the helm, Microsoft has yet to solve critical competitive headaches. “Some of the technical folks may even be better suited than Gates to lead the company into the next generation of computing,” said Michael Silver, an analyst for Gartner who has covered Microsoft for a decade. “Some would say that maybe he had too much power . Some would say Microsoft hasn’t failed enough, hasn't gone out on enough limbs and been as innovative as they could have been.” As a result, perpetuating Gates’ thinking may leave the company ill-equipped to handle big changes in the software industry, said George Colony, founder and CEO of Forrester Research. “They will stay in the shadow of Bill Gates, or not make any fundamental changes. Or they will take a deep breath and say, ‘We’ll do it the way we want to do it’,” Colony said. “You may want to break from the past, not try and replicate the past.”
