For a period in the Ballmer era it was said that Gates had entirely disconnected to focus 100% on the charity work. There is some surprise that Gates seems to be more involved in the Nadella era given how strict Gates was said to be hands-off during Ballmer's tenure, though certainly it is still no surprise that the charity work is still Gates' focus.
Purely speculation on my part, but that makes a lot of sense. During the Ballmer era, he would have wanted to send a clear and unambiguous signal that he was no longer calling the shots, so he would have made a greater effort to step away. Also important was that, while Ballmer wasn’t technically a cofounder, he had been around since the early days. With Ballmer gone and Gates having demonstrated that his foundation is by far his #1 focus, there’s less reason for him to give Microsoft some distance and more reason for him to occasionally show up and, among other things, serve as a living connection to their early history.
That doesn't really make a lot of since though. Why all of a sudden for the younger one? He spend most of those years in command for Microsoft, before focusing on charity work from 2008 and up. (His children would have been roughly 12, 9, and 6 at that time.) So, that may be a part of it but probably not a major part.
Ah, I was under the impression that he had stepped down in 2008. But that was probably from any activity at Microsoft and 2000 was when he relinquished the CEO title. Thank you for clarifying that. It does sound like that may be more closely related than I thought.
Seriously, though, go check out the Yammer UI and you'll quickly see that it is a blatant clone of Facebook. Then again, this goes for most of the competitors in that space, whether it's Salesforce Chatter, IBM's Connect, or whatever else.
source: messed around with all these things to build automated compliance and archiving products.
If nothing else, I'm rooting for Lyft so that Uber is not the only one out there. I'm scared of what would happen to service / prices if Uber had no real competition. For that reason, I only use Lyft.
Local monopolies are usually the rule rather than the exception, with global monopolies rarely (if ever) occurring.
This makes me wonder if Lyft can leverage the backlash against Uber and achieve success in areas hostile to Uber but not hostile to ridesharing/Car-as-a-Service services.
It is essentially a land-grab but on a global scale, with the measure of success being on-going local dominance on a per city basis. Personally I find it fascinating, the goings-ons of municipalities are usually quite opaque to outsiders and the insight is new.
Local monopolies are the norm in industries where massive capital investment is required (electricity, cable). Uber is not this type of business. Uber is more like a marketplace (like Amazon or Ebay)... while network effects are strong there is no reason to think that local monopolies are inevitable.
Also, if you catch an Uber in SF or Seattle, the driver is likely to be running Lyft and Uber. Sure, Uber can try to give drivers disincentives to use multiple apps. But good luck doing that AND staying out of anti-trust investigations AND convincing everybody that their drivers are still contractors not employees.
Google decided to rename Android Market to Google Play and along the way decided to rename the siblings apps as well :
Google Play Movies
Google Play Games
Google Play Books
- wife has no job (due to move to Seattle), just had kids, need to pay for housing: unless you can get another job immediately (which is hard if you're too busy to interview), quitting will be a disaster
- boiling frog: it wasn't awful on day 1, so at some point he'd have to acknowledge that things have changed
- negative reinforcement and the cult: dysfunctional organisations are often good at making you think it's your fault. Hence the therapy.
Sure, he can move to another job that has the same kind of stupid demands. However, finding a job that doesn't have those kinds of demands isn't so easy. Now, let's add in the stress of uprooting your family as well as a new job where you have to prove yourself (so you're probably going to be spending the same number of hours, anyway, for a while) and it's not so obvious a choice.
The real solution is for labor laws to start biting and saying that salaried workers are to be compensated after 40 hours and have it enforced. Once you have to pay a salaried worker overtime and a shift differential, they'll hire another worker.
