Well, maybe not the whole world, but a healthy portion of it that resides exactly within the dimensions that set apart my body from the rest of the universe’s matter.

No, I’m not yawning because I prefer Apple products over Microsoft products. I’m yawning because if someone stops doing something, and that something wasn’t doing anything, what does it matter if they go?

Microsoft has been sucking for almost a decade now. It’s lost its way. One look at its web sites can tell you that. A potpourri of designs, domain names, styles and colors. It shows a company with 0 direction, no Grand Plan. If the eyes are the window to the soul, web sites are a window to a business’ cohesion.

If a look at MS’s wild array of web sites don’t invoke in you a feeling of unbounded, glorious schizophrenia, read the long, sad story of Vista, née Longhorn.

If I was Gates, I would have stepped in and commanded my underlings to develop a unifying company theme, and would have followed that with a web site and PR image unification. Oh what, that’s expensive? C’mon, this is Microsoft we’re talking about. I would have gotten the most important 100 people in the company together and asked things like

1. “Can anyone answer this question in one sentence: what do we do?”
2. “Should we be making hardware?”
3. “Why can’t we crack the search world after 5 years of instense effort?”

Microsoft needs a big fat reinvention like Apple got in 1998, but Gates didn’t do it, and at the twilight of his watch the company’s only successes are 1. holding onto their business clients with MS’s (admittedly very good) business software, and 2. Xbox empire.

So when the world mourns Gates’ departure, I say “Why”?