"Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand."
If you need proof of Gates' technical genius, I recommend Joel Spolsky's "My First BillG Review"
> Then I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the time it was done...
In those days we used to have these things called BillG reviews. Basically every major important feature got reviewed by Bill Gates...
Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before...
He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?]
... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html