Apple, where cofounder Steve Jobs returned to power in 1998, is up 600 percent since the beginning of 2002. Amazon.com, where Jeff Bezos has reigned as CEO more or less uninterruptedly since the online retailer's founding, tripled its worth. Google, where cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin form a troika with hired-hand CEO Eric Schmidt, has also tripled in value since its inital public offering in 2004. These gains remain despite the stock market's punishing fall.

What about Yahoo, eBay, and Microsoft, where founders handed over the company to professional managers? They are all back where they started almost seven years ago. Under former CEO Terry Semel, Yahoo had a brief golden age in 2004, where it outperformed all the other big Internet companies; it ended just as Google began its relentless rise. Meg Whitman overstayed her welcome at eBay, presiding over its stagnation before handing over the CEO job to John Donahoe — like Whitman, also a management consultant by training. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has proven that he's no Bill Gates; the stock has flatlined under his leadership.

Under Yang, the stock has gone down, down, down, interrupted only by the hope that Microsoft might buy the company and in so doing, give its employees the leadership and sense of purpose they so desperately crave. Does that disprove the value of founders? No. Rather, it suggests that by abandoning his company when it was merely a toddler to be reared by strangers, that he was never much of a father figure to begin with.

"We talked and talked and talked and talked and paid no attention to anybody else. I started asking him a whole bunch of questions about his business, not expecting to understand any of it. He's a great teacher, and we couldn't stop talking," Buffett told the newspaper. "We were sort of ignoring all these important people, and Bill's father finally said, gently, that he'd prefer that we join in a little more." Then the conversation turned to sex and computers.

As the night wore on — Gates's helicopter had to fly before it got dark, and he let it go — Gates and Buffett grew more and more fascinated with each other. Buffett asked Gates about IBM and Gates told him to buy stock in Microsoft and Intel. Then, per the rules of the buddy-comedy genre, Gates objectified a woman. (The idea being, of course, to share a sexual course of thought without crossing any societal norms.) Says Buffett: "Bill started trying to convince me to get a computer."

I said I don't know what it's going to do for me. I don't care how my stock portfolio is doing every five minutes. And I can do my income taxes in my head. Gates said he would pick out the best-looking gal at Microsoft and send her to teach me how to use the computer. He would make it totally painless and pleasant. I told him, 'You've made me an offer I almost can't refuse, but I will refuse it.

Young Steve Jobs, Apple cofounder:

Jobs, older and thinner:

Young Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO:

Old Bill Gates, philanthropist:

Young Eric Schmidt, before he was Google's CEO:

Old Eric Schmidt:

Young Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO:

Old Larry Ellison:

Young Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen:

Not quite as young Ning cofounder Marc Andreessen:

Only one man has escaped the effects of time. That is, of course, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:

Gates sold $350 million worth of shares in August and $2.54 billion worth in 2007, but even at that rate the 52-year old will sell his last Microsoft share right shortly after he's eligible for Social Security, the New York Post reports. Microsoft began a $30 billion stock buyback program in 2004, eventually increasing that round of repurchases to $40 billion.

I may well be too far down the rabbit hole to have any idea if the spots are having the desired warm-and-fuzzy effect on the populace. If anything, they serve to remind us of the opposite: That Gates and Microsoft are so out of touch, the company has to pay an advertising agency $300 million (and Seinfeld $10 million) to lend even the thinnest veneer of approachability. "Cool," presumably, would have cost extra.

Playing on an early meme about home computers, Alan Alda shows how an Atari will make your kid a better typist than you. Oh, and it plays games too.

Apple flaunts its Y2K-proof products with a sad monologue from 2001's HAL 9000.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion teaches you how to get the color you want from your I-can't-decide girlfriend. Sexist? Not as much as the talk about Sarah Palin at Whole Foods this morning.

A clever Web page ad for Apple that ties two ad spots on the page together. John Hodgman's PC guy undermines the ads a bit by making me feel sympathetic for him.

Seinfeld's pointless but funny Superman ad for American Express's product warranty feature was probably what convinced Microsoft he could do the same for Windows. If the writers of the Microsoft/Seinfeld ad had created a similarly out-of-character character for Bill Gates, it might've worked.

Penn repeated the same advice to Clinton, telling her not to worry about being perceived as "warm" or "nice." Gates's image didn't shift until he actually changed from being a hard-driving capitalist to saving the world.

We think Penn's next client should be Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Hiring the likes of Penn is perhaps the only job Facebook's new flack, the D.C.-connected but tech-clueless Elliot Schrage is qualified for — so get cracking, Elliot!) After Zuckerberg's disastrous interview with Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas this March, I was told Lacy's manner — which struck some audience members as overly familiar — was an attempt to make Zuckerberg, who's robotically stiff on stage, seem more human. In person, Zuckerberg's quite engaging; he needs stage training, not an extra dose of "humanity." Penn seems brash enough to tell him as much. Mark, meet Mark — I think you two need each other right now.

Because this is the same skilled-worker immigration program that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates praised at the 50th anniversary hearing of Congress's science and technology committee:

We created an office up in Vancouver, Canada, because that government, like virtually every government other than the United States, recognizes that competing for talent and encouraging talent, particularly talent educated in a country, getting them to stay, that that's very, very important.

Gates did not continue, "At this rate, Microsoft will be unable to find the kind of innovative murderers we need to stay competitive in the global beheading and cannibalism economy," before praising representatives for their own skill at gutting bills and bleeding funding from programs. (Photo by AP/Graeme Roy)

The Economist tidily sums up billg's career this week, now that Microsoft's Rain Man (see video) has walked away from the company after 33 years. I've whittled the piece down to its talking points.

When Bill Gates helped to found Microsoft there was a company rule that no employees should work for a boss who wrote worse computer code than they did. Just five years later, Mr Gates hired a business manager, Steve Ballmer, who had cut his teeth at Procter & Gamble, which sells soap.

In becoming the world’s richest man, Mr Gates’s unswerving self-belief has repeatedly been punctuated by that sort of pragmatism. To let it all go is to acknowledge that his best work at Microsoft is behind him. It is to accept that the innovator’s curse is to be transitory.

Mr Gates’s vision has come to seem so obvious that it is hard to imagine the world any other way. Yet, early on, he grasped two things that were far from obvious at the time:

• Computing could be a high-volume, low-margin business. Until Microsoft came along, the big money was in maintaining a select family of very grand mainframes. Profit would come from selling a lot of them cheaply, not servicing a few at a great price.
• Making hardware and writing software could be stronger as separate businesses. When mighty IBM unwittingly granted Microsoft the right to sell its PC operating system to other hardware firms, it did not see that it was creating legions of rivals for itself. Gates did.

Mr Gates’s invention was as a businessman. His genius was to understand what he needed and work out how to obtain it, however long it took. In an industry in which visionaries are often sniffy about anyone else’s ideas, the readiness to go elsewhere proved a devastating advantage.

Gates had the good fortune to be perfectly suited for his time—but he is less well-equipped for the collaborative and fragmented era of Internet computing. Some great industrialists, like Henry Ford, stick around even as the world moves on and their powers fail. Mr Gates, pragmatic to the end, is leaving at the top.

My mother started working for Microsoft in the mid-eighties, when the company had only around 3,000 employees. While Gates had yet to become the world's richest man (a title he lost this year to Gates Foundation benefactor Warren Buffett), but he was already quite rich, quite young and not afraid to show it. For instance, there was his reported Porsche 959 — a car so expensive, it wasn't street legal because Porsche refused to crash test them. He parked it in a garage attached to his four-story underground home on waterfront property in Seattle's wealthiest suburb.

That home was across the lake from my family's, an absolutely gorgeous craftsman bungalow with views of Lake Washington which my parents purchased and painstakingly restored with money from stock options. "It split again" was repeated often enough right before a fine meal at that fabulous seafood restaurant on Elliot Bay. Even before Starbucks took the four-dollar coffee worldwide, Seattlites were indulging in their newfound wealth. A blue-collar city turned boomtown, with Microsoft stock minting millionaires faster than the Yukon Gold Rush.

Then a music explosion (fueled by both cheap housing and cheap heroin) touched off, and the coolest place in the world to be was Seattle. The coolest job for a young punk kid was as a barista. And the coolest classes at school had computers. Okay, we fought amongst each other over the Apple Macintoshes, but still. Microsoft was driving a wave of wealth and interest in Seattle the city had never really experienced, and I got to watch it as a wide-eyed kid with a knack for standardized tests.

It was when I went to art school in New York (where every computer was an Apple and connected to the Internet) that the allure began to diminish. Outside the bubble, I was just another weird kid who happened to be able to save your homework when a computer crashed — and let me tell you, that special skill got me very little nookie. Sure, Microsoft stock wealth was paying for a private education, but I was getting indoctrinated online by geeks who talked little about Gates when not cursing his name because of how hard it was to connect Windows to the early Web.

By the time of the browser wars and anti-trust suits, Bill Gates and Microsoft had officially become "The Man." The Microsoft monopoly was certainly something discussed in the family, with my mother making a token attempt to uphold the company line at home but my parents wary and skeptical of the organization's ethics. Eventually, my mother went off to create a startup and my dad started working for the first in a string of technology companies that had sprung up around Downtown Seattle.

When the bomb hit in 2001, it took much of my family's investments — largely Microsoft stock — with it. I was well out of school, but many lean years trying to pay Bay Area rents on HTML coder wages that plummeted by two-thirds seemingly overnight still lay ahead. I even had to resort to going back to using Windows PCs for a while, each blue screen of death fresh reason to drag Gates' name through the gutter.

Now he walks away with his monopoly billions, leaving the share price of Microsoft in the hands of Steve Ballmer, who comes off like a dumb ox when compared to Gates cold but graceful intellectual mien. He'll spend them on the poor, in Africa, he assures the world. We'll see. If he succeeds, maybe he'll restore my childish faith in him as a positive role model. As it stands, he's a shrewd and powerful but archetypically greedy bussinessman out to have a little expiatory fun. A heroic character, yes, but then as they taught me in the university Microsoft paid my way through, villians are the heroes of their own stories.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download. In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

I can see Gates now, calling for an orisha and leading an anxious goat to a spot in his office covered in plastic sheeting for the candomblé ritual required to install a crappy video editing program.

Google is a very strong competitor, and so people will enjoy watching whether they can be challenged. The world will be better off if they are challenged effectively, and I think there's only one company left in terms of the depth and breadth and staying power that you need (to) really give them a big challenge.

Google-baiting aside, did Gates bringing up WordPerfect make anyone else feel really, really old?(Photo by AP/Stephen Brashear)

My question is whether or not the car will be passing through the enclaves of wealth on the east side of Lake Washington like Mercer Island and Medina, where Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has his four-story underground bunker. Still, the homes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Clearwire founder Craig McCaw are all within Seattle city limits, so happy Street View hunting! (Photos by Jed Rosenzweig)

Things became so bitter that, on one occasion, Mr. Gates stormed out of a meeting in a huff after a shouting match in which Mr. Ballmer jumped to the defense of several colleagues, according to an individual present at the time. After the exchange, Mr. Ballmer seemed "remorseful," the person said.

After which, we imagine, in a private exchange on the quiet walking trails which meander through the bucolic woods which surround the Microsoft campus, Gates tearfully exclaimed to Ballmer, "I wish I knew how to quit you."

The news, long expected, that Facebook would open-source its platform is not reviving the buzz. And the comparisons people are making now are not as complimentary.

A revamp of how Facebook handles third-party applications is "Orwellian," one observer says, which I suppose makes Zuckerberg Big Little Brother. "We've heard from many users that adding applications is cumbersome," writes Facebook developer Pete Bratach. And yet application-tracker Adonomics reports that Facebook users have installed more than 912 billion applications. The real effect of Facebook's redesign is to make it less likely that Facebook users will install applications their friends use. This may reduce complaints about annoying applications, but it will also slow the spread of applications on Facebook from user to user — an overwhelming part of the Facebook Platform's appeal.

It's sensible for Facebook to do something about its reputation for being all about zombies and pirates. What doesn't make sense is dissembling about the reason it needs to. Facebook's problem isn't that applications aren't popular enough; it's that they've become too popular, and grown out of control. The changes to how applications get added, as well as changes to the design of profile pages which downplay applications, will put more of Facebook's screen real estate back in its control. Why not just say that?

Because Facebook needs to maintain the loyalty of developers, if only for appearance's sake. I've never been convinced that widgets add that much to Facebook in a business sense. But they gave Facebook Valley buzz, which it cleverly, and profitably, capitalized on. Microsoft would never have invested in a mere social network — but start talking about Facebook as a computing platform, and the likes of Bill Gates get interested fast.

Which is why, when Facebook executives get up on stage talking to a Wall Street crowd, as Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg did last week at the D6 conference, they're swift to talk up the work of developers. But on the site itself? They'd just as soon the developers disappear.

(Photo by Brandee Barker)

We know of at least two internal IT projects (one worth $1.3 million and other $2.7 million) that have been canceled halfway through deployment. Contacts tell us every project is now getting reevaluated, and depending on the relevance to the core business, projects are either accelerated, delayed or canceled.

Jeff Bezos talked about Amazon.com's Kindle e-book; Activision's Bobby Kotick showed off a videogame; Sony's Howard Stringer unveiled a television. Barry Diller charmed everyone with his brilliance long enough that they forgot he really hasn't accomplished what he set out to on the Net. Michael Dell, Jerry Yang, and Jeff Bewkes simply seemed clueless to the realities of their business predicaments. Mark Zuckerberg proved terminally incapable of sharing. Only the last speaker of Wednesday night, Rupert Murdoch, showed any real spark.

Murdoch's one new idea of late — buying a newspaper, the very newspaper that produced the very conference series at which he appeared — was so old media, as one says dismissively in San Francisco coffeeshops. So last century. So over. One couldn't conceive of a bigger raised middle finger to the Valley's innovators. Yet Murdoch argued that he bought the Wall Street Journal because he was attached to news, not newspapers, and talked of delivering customized wireless alerts — just the sort of thing a mogul says at these conferences to seem passably clever, but he pulled it off.

What he is not attached to is journalism as it is practiced today. Today's reporters have brains overflowing with rules and rubrics, archaic practices that isolate them from the notion of writing interesting stories. Write for readers, not the Pulitzer Prize committee, Murdoch said.

How simple! How brilliant. How rather unlike Bill Gates. Perhaps it's not just the Microsoft founder's brain that needs a good working-through. Perhaps it's the entire media-technology complex that needs reformatting. Murdoch's iconoclasm is a good start. But only that. Do you want to defragment your industry? Click "yes" to continue.

(Photo by Asa Mathat/AllThingsD.com)

(Photo by Asa Mathat/AllThingsD.com)

But after Yahoo cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo showed it would take a messy proxy fight to push a merger through at Microsoft's price, Gates lost patience and quashed the whole enterprise, reminding Ballmer that Microsoft really just wanted Yahoo's search business. Now Yang and company — under pressure from activist shareholders — crave a full merger and believe it to be a "a strategic imperative for Microsoft," according to one source who also observes: "I think sometimes that their execs must be smoking something."

Never mind the contributions of such scientists as Alan Turing to computing and cryptography, two rather key elements in the development of the Internet. Still, if that's a stipulation of the foundation for funding, it only makes clear how Bill Gates and company are using the nonprofit to invest in Microsoft's strategies by other means — and putting ex-Microsoft executives out to pasture there, rather than hiring experienced philanthropists. (Photo by Marcin Wichary)

• Public bathrooms: Waiting in line for the glory hole? Just sign a fake name on the wall at the local cruising bathroom and it can direct you to the stall where George Michael is servicing all comers. Bonus points if it provides information on sexually transmitted diseases while you wait.
• Drug dens: Blowing rails off a mirrored coffee table is so 1980. Have the computer track the size of your dose and instantly send a text to your dealer or recommend the number of Xanax to take after a wild night blowing through your latest round of venture capital.
• Padded cells: Committed to a mental health facility, but don't want to give up your daily rounds of editing Wikipedia? Now you won't have to. Plus your activity can be monitored to gauge just how manic or depressed you are at the moment, with your forced meds meted out to match.
• Homeless shelters: What better way to cross the digital divide than to provide cloud computing to the increasing number of Americans living under the open sky? Cities could get rid of all those expensive social workers and replace them with Clippy.
• Voting booths: If you think Diebold is helping candidates steal elections now, just wait until you'll be allowed to vote by photo instead of having to read the names of candidates. It'll be kind of like ordering from the menu at Denny's: the democratic process as Grand Slam breakfast.