Almost before the HTML was dry on last week's column, Bill Gates stopped being CEO of Microsoft and people began asking me to tell them what this really means. I used to be flattered by this attention until I realized it is based solely on my advanced age and wasted life. People care what I think about this stuff because my professional life encompasses almost every minute of what we used to call the PC revolution. I never worked at Microsoft, but my first visit to the place was when it had fewer than 25 employees and Steve Ballmer's office was one end of Bill Gates' sofa. I did work at Apple, starting when the outfit was only months old. Since then, you can name an event, a product introduction, or somebody being thrown in a swimming pool at Comdex, and I was there. It's mainly as a human time capsule that I am opened up from time to time and asked to make it all make sense.

Bill Gates giving up his CEO job at Microsoft means exactly nothing.

Remember that Bill wasn't always Microsoft's CEO. That job originally went to Paul Allen. It was Allen, not Gates, who made that fateful flight to Albuquerque to sell Microsoft BASIC to MITs. It was Allen, not Gates, who pulled Bill away from that dorm room poker game to read the issue of Popular Electronics introducing the Altair. It was Allen, not Gates, who was considered by Jack Sams (the business guy from IBM) to be the business guy at Microsoft.

After Paul Allen left Microsoft to fight his Hodgkins' Disease, he wasn't replaced by Gates, at least not for long. They quickly brought in a new CEO from Tektronix, a guy who didn't even last a year. Then Gates took another short CEO fling only to replace himself with Jon Shirley, who came from Tandy.

Jon Shirley, who still sits on the Microsoft board and whose home guards the Northern flank of Fortress Gates on Lake Washington, is the person who turned Microsoft into a real company. Shirley gave Microsoft a business infrastructure it had always lacked — an infrastructure that remains intact and for the most part unchanged to this day. Microsoft is a very well-managed company and that has not very much to do with Bill Gates.

Bill's main job was to be the visionary, which has never meant being the guy who invented the future. Like Metternich, his job was to realize where the future was already heading, then elbow Microsoft into a position resembling the lead. Those who study Austro-Hungarian history around 1848 could learn a lot about Microsoft.

Bill's secondary job was to scare the nerds into better performance. "I could do that in a weekend," he lied so many times that it eventually became a joke even to the programmers, who secretly worried it might be true.Neither of these jobs will change a bit in Bill's new role as chief software architect. It's what he was doing all along.

What Gates gives up along with his CEO job is some of the management overhead and a lot of the ceremonial duties of being the head honcho. As a family man with kids to play with, he can't be wistful for those things. But these are not the reasons why Gates decided now to step aside.Bill Gates quit his CEO job because of the Department of Justice. His arrogant and evasive testimony in the anti-trust trial already associated Gates with everything negative about Microsoft in the eyes of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. I sometimes think this was deliberate. Demonize Gates, then demote him, and maybe the DOJ will settle that much easier. This could be Gates and Ballmer playing bad cop/good cop. And it might even work.

Certainly, in typical Microsoft fashion, the price was right — nothing.So now the boss is Ballmer, who for the last several years has been heir apparent. Most people underestimate Steve Ballmer and they shouldn't. In the early days of Microsoft, it was common to think that Ballmer got his job just because he was Bill's friend from Harvard or because Ballmer had an MBA from Stanford or because he had worked for a time in product management at Proctor and Gamble. What everyone except Bill Gates forgets is that Ballmer placed higher than Gates in a national achievement test for high school mathematicians. Just because Ballmer chooses to play the cheerleader doesn't mean he can't make touchdowns, too.

It's Ballmer's persona, his expansive blowhard style, that hurt him with the nerds of Redmond. They laughed behind his back. For the longest time, this held Ballmer back because Gates was sure that only he could extract from Microsoft's techies what was needed to stay ahead.

Then something changed, in the two men, in their organization, and in the world outside Microsoft. Each man mellowed in his own way and that left a Gates a little less competitive at the same moment Ballmer became more of a grownup. Microsoft grew to the point where Bill could instill fear on video or by proxy, and it wasn't all that clear that any particular big brain was critical to Microsoft's success. They used to say exactly this about IBM, that no one person was critical to the success of Big Blue. But that was before Lou Gerstner proved it wrong. Is Microsoft different than IBM or just enjoying that pinnacle moment of John Opel, circa 1983? And Finally, the government got Microsoft's number and began to score big in anti-trust court. Even Bill knew it was time for his role to change if Microsoft's role was to not change.

And so we have it. Nothing is different.

Not all that much has changed, either, from the look of this week's other big bit of business, the coming-out of Transmeta, the supersecret startup that employs Linus Torvalds. Transmeta's super-low-power, kinda-sorta-X86-compatible Crusoe processor is interesting technology, but it is telling that the story rolled on and off the headlines at News.com in less than three hours. We've seen instruction mapping, tiny hardware, and asynchronous logic before. A little outfit called Ardi in Albuquerque used instruction mapping five years ago to create what it called a "synthetic CPU" to build a software 68030 Macintosh inside a PC clone. From the Transputer to today's StrongARM, tiny RISC engine processors have been coming from the UK. And asynchronous logic, which allows Crusoe to ratchet down its clock speed and fuel consumption to exactly match application needs, has been demonstrated for years in experimental processors coming from Alain Martin's lab at CalTech.

Of course Transmeta has taken these technologies, put them all together in a modern and elegant package, then pasted Linux on top. But they didn't announce a single customer at the launch. I wish them well, but this is not a good sign.