The new issue of Newsweek will hit the stands with a familiar face on the cover: Bill Gates.

Gates, who is stepping down from his full-time roll at Microsoft this week to focus on his $37 billion charitable foundation, is the subject of an article that profiles Microsoft’s successes and failures during his tenure, as well as the difficult transition the company and its founder will likely face.

While the Newsweek story mentions Microsoft’s challenges in antitrust probes, Windows Vista versus Windows XP, and the Internet search arena, the story also offers intimate perspectives from the people who know him the best.

“He’s not just Bill Gates, he’s the Bill Gates,” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO and Gates’ right-hand man for decades:

“He founded the company, he’s accumulated this wealth, he’s got this foundation, he’s got this fame. That’s irreplaceable. Also, Bill grew up with every one of the technologies in this company. He’s got more capacity to remember things than anybody I’ve ever known. It’s unlikely we’ll have anybody again who has that breadth.”

Gates was also responsible for stoking the fires of urgency at the software giant, said Ray Ozzie, who took over Gates’ roll as chief software architect.

“A lot of the company’s strength is that Bill created a culture of crisis–if there weren’t a Google, we’d have to make one. This is a period of unprecedented strength for the company. If there had to be a time when Bill transitioned out, we couldn’t have set it up better than it is right now.”

Paul Allen, who co-founded the company with Gates, pulled from the perspective of his own departure from the company in 1983:

“You don’t always realize how dramatic that transition is going to be when people aren’t depending on your decisions day by day.”

So how about Bill? Is he going to miss being in the trenches, slugging it out with Apple, Google, and Mozilla? It doesn’t sound like it from the perspective he related to the magazine:

“This whole thing about which operating system somebody uses is a pretty silly thing versus issues involving starvation or death.”

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