Microsoft, a company that keeps failing in technology, but managed to thrive on 2 cash cows (office and windows) had to part with its founder.
Thousands of books have been written on how to grow a company, including BillG's 1996 book "The Road Ahead". In which BillG repeated warned MS would one day become like IBM, a mature company that looks to the dust of a new company that may not have been founded yet (Larry Page enrolled into Stanford's graduate program in 1995).
Indeed, many of the things BillG predicted in "The Road Ahead" became true in the past decade (e.g. storage explosion, wallet PC, video on demand, DRM, and even Spam). For that matter, BillG is quite visionary. What MS failed is to capitalize on his vision. For the longest, MS didn't have an adequate solution to Spam. FAT32 & NTFS are still plagued by fragmentation (Linux's extfs doesn't have fragmentation problem). Windows CE, Windows Mobile, SmartPhone all failed to compete with RIM's blackberry.
The lesson here is, even with a lot of cash and a visionary leader, a company will still fail, because it can't chase all the disruptive changes with full steam. MS's strategy of concentrating on its cash cows is a double-blade sword. It helps its survival financially, but hurts its ability to enter new market.
MS also made the wrong investment on Speech and OCR technology. Granted, those were really cool technologies, but the application is too limited. Many of the MSR executives have speech background, just like their counterpart in Bell lab or Xerox PARC. That shows how popular Speech technology was during those eras.
I imagine 10 years from now, the next next wave of tech executives will have "search" background, because "search" technology is so popular in this decade.
Who will dominate the next platform after Google. I bet it's a company that has not been founded yet.
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finally, he retired
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