Goodbye, Bill. Hello, Steve - Page 3

Page 3 of 3

The Ballmer years

2006 -- Gates hands his role as chief software architect off to Ozzie. He also announces he'll leave full-time work at Microsoft in 2008 to spend more time on charitable work, and begins phasing out of the company's leadership.

2007 -- Windows Vista and Office 2007 ship. While Office has sold well, Vista's numbers have been less robust than analysts expected.

2007 -- Microsoft breaks $50 billion in revenues for fiscal 2007.

2007 -- Silverlight, Microsoft's cross-platform, cross-browser streaming media plug-in debuts, competing with technologies such as Adobe Flash and Apple QuickTime.

2007 -- Microsoft buys aQuantive for $6 billion to bolster its online advertising business.

2007 -- The European Union's second-highest court upholds the EC's ruling against Microsoft, causing the company to settle with the EC. The decision cost Microsoft nearly $1 billion in fines. An additional $1.35 billion fine for tardy delivery of interoperability information to competitors is on appeal. Further investigations continue.

2008 -- The U.S. federal judge overseeing the consent decree orders Microsoft's oversight to be extended until November 2009, primarily for being slow in providing interoperability information to competitors.

2008 -- Microsoft bids $44.6 billion for Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) to bolster its position in search and online advertising vis-à-vis Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). After being repeatedly rebuffed, Ballmer withdraws Microsoft's offer. The company will instead pursue the search strategy it already has in place.

[cob:Special_Report]2008 -- Microsoft ships Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. SQL Server 2008 is due in the third quarter.

2008 -- Ozzie announces his "Live Mesh" initiative, which aims to sync users' devices with all of their data and information via services provided "in the cloud." It is expected to become a key component of Microsoft's emerging "software-plus-services" strategy for revolutionizing the company's business.

The next era begins

2008 -- Annual PC sales are expected to reach 300 million units in 2008, and 1 billion will be in use by the end of June.

June 27 -- Gates leaves full-time work at Microsoft to dedicate himself to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gates has said that he will probably still work as much as one day a week for Microsoft, and he remains chairman and the largest shareholder. CEO Ballmer is the second-largest shareholder. As of July 1, 2008, he's on his own.