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Comment by badloginagain | Hacker News Reader

> Yahoo is 20 years old and not precisely in its prime, and Sun Microsystems existed only for 28 years. > such as Oracle (39 years and counting), Apple (40), Microsoft (41) or, in the extreme, IBM (105).

Of which, how many original CEO's are still at the helm?

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To be fair, Bill Gates or Larry Ellison would just need to say the words and they'd get the CEO position back in a millisecond. As would Zombie Steve Jobs.

Microsoft would not replace Satya Nadella with Bill Gates at this point. One of the counter points is very clear: they forced Bill to relinquish his chairman role. The board now would never allow Bill to return as CEO unless the company was in extreme crisis and they needed a temporary leader; they successfully just pried Bill's hands off of a big point of control over Microsoft.

There's also no evidence Bill is a stronger candidate to manage the current conglomerate version of Microsoft than Satya (who appears to be doing a fine job so far). Based on the work Bill did the last several years he was actively involved, he has lost a step or three. Further, Bill's age at this point - 60 - is a serious problem, Satya can run Microsoft for 12 years before catching up to that. Jobs by comparison returned to Apple at a mere 42 years old.

You're having the wrong argument. Bill doesn't WANT the job anymore, he's doing more important things with his life now.

He owns 18% of the company.

If I was Bill Gates I wouldn't want to go back...he's so rich He can fund any idea he wants. If he goes back to Microsoft he would be under scrutiny of investors. I would say f Microsoft, f investors and do things my way for my ideas.

He won't. It's well documented that he was very miserable during his last few years at MS.

What? Where is this documented?

Well, Jobs would have been until at least his mid-late sixties if it wasn't for the unfortunate disease.

And in other lines of work, including finance, it's not rare to continue to be a CEO well into your 60s or 70s...

Arguably, Oracle, Apple, and Microsoft all offer good reasons for why you want to ensure that founders maintain control. It certainly seems that tech companies perform best when under founder control.

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