[laumars]

Gates has done good work since leaving MS but I wouldn't say he mellowed out towards the end of his time at Microsoft. He was still very much proactively trying to control 3rd parties. Whether it was IRC via Microsoft Chat (which was actually a pretty cool idea but it didn't belong on public IRC servers), MSN, IE Vs Netscape wars, then IE Vs HTML wars (eg ActiveX, Silver light, etc). The whole Java wars (which did eventually give us .NET so some good eventually came of it, but it took years before .NET matured). MS Office Vs open standards (eventually we got a compromise with OOXML but it still feels like the battle was lost given every other office suite used the non-propriatory ODF).

And this is all without going into how he tried to destroy Linux, control UNIX, successfully destroyed competing DOS platforms (eg DR DOS), blocked OEMs / shops from selling PCs with competing OSs (or was it machines without Windows preinstalled? I forget now), ruined EeePCs and their form factors (by selling With dies at a loss), etc.

I think the only reason Gates didn't try his luck with data collection was because it simply wasn't a thing back then.

That said, I do still respect the guy even though I disliked his products and how he monopolised the market. Which is more than I can say about Balmer.