Gary Wolf has a piece at Wired which had me shaking my head for some time.

Several folks have pointed me to it. It's an imagined memo, dated three years into the future, after Linus Torvalds has supposedly gone to work for Mr. Bill Gates.

The idea behind the imagined memo, something I've written about extensively recently over at ZDNet's Open Source, is based upon building a Linux desktop suite. Wolf's point, apparently, is that Microsoft moving to Windows isn't that far-fetched, that Steve Ballmer doesn't get it, and that Gates has the imagination to listen to the market rather than the yes-men in Redmond.

Well, yeah. But so what? Ain't gonna happen.

A Microsoft that was truly committed to new thinking would simply not be the Microsoft we know. (Oh, that's a different Mr. Bill from Mr. Bill Gates. Buy his video here.)

In fact Microsoft is still a one trick pony, and that pony is named Bill Gates. He understood, early in his 20s, that the key to dominating the PC was to get under it, to be the software at the bottom of its stack. He kept Microsoft focused on that goal, to the exclusion of all else, for over 15 years, until it captured the flag starting in the early 1990s, making Gates the world's richest man (by far) and making many, many other Microsoft people into millionaires (and billionaires) as well.

But what have they done for us since? They've embraced and extended their position, with only minimal success (given their resources). They have defended their turf at an immense cost, in money and in reputation.

All those thousands of "high bandwidth" hires, with their free coffee and their campus offices, have delivered nothing but mice. (Microsoft has admittedly become a force in the mouse business.) There's nothing with the margins of Windows and Office in Redmond, and nothing like them on the horizon.

Would Linus Torvalds change that? I doubt it.

The only thing that might change it would be retirement. Yes, Steve Ballmer should probably go.

But so should Mr. Bill. And he needs to find another entrepreneur he can put in his place, someone with a new vision, a new direction. Not Linux, but something truly new and fundamental.

It took IBM decades to find such a direction. After Tom Watson Jr. retired IBM had a succession of leaders who were no better than anything Microsoft has now, making them vulnerable to the first Kid With A Clue that knocked them on their butts. (In that case, the kid was Mr. Bill Gates.)

But after getting knocked on their butts IBM found a new vision, under an outside leader, and came back. They came back strong. They're still coming back.

That's Microsoft's real challenge, one that will play out over decades, a story to be told long after I'm retired. The trick of finding another act to rival Mr. Bill.

I doubt I'll be around to see it, because I'm even older than Mr. Bill, old enough to get the joke about Billgatus of Borg.