Bill Gates announced yesterday plans to step down from his day-to-day role at Microsoft. Gates is leaving Microsoft to devote more time to his charitable work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Steve Ballmer, Gates' classmate and business partner of 26 years will continue on as chief executive while chief technical officer Ray Ozzie will assume Gates' role as chief software architect. The transition of top leadership will begin immediately but take close to two years to fully realize. An analyst on the development: "The most important title Bill Gates he had was not chief software architect, it was he was Bill Gates, and that title is not transferable."

Douglas Rushkoff on Gates' retirement, and his decision to devote more time to his charities: "Now let's see if he gets the big picture idea: that he could actually do the most good by figuring out a way for Microsoft, itself, to be an ideal global citizen rather than a monopolistic corporation based on the ruthless, chartered behemoths of the early 1500's."

Steve Yelvington also acknowledges Gates' announcement, noting its new anti-piracy measures and saying: "What strikes me is the arrogance of a big company that dislikes and distrusts its customers. It's like the music publishers viewing everybody with an MP3 player as a thief... And it's like the arrogant attitude that, until recently, was pretty much standard in newsrooms... I've sensed a big change in attitude in the newspaper business in the last 24 months. The collapse of Knight-Ridder helped inject some humility where it was desperately needed. We're not the rock of Gibraltar. We're not irreplaceable. We have to earn our way every day because there are other choices."

Vin Crosbie gives a compelling analysis of media economist Robert G. Picard's keynote speech to the 7th Annual International Symposium on Online Journalism. Writes Crosbie: "As a printed publication's circulation and readership decline, so too do that publication's revenues. Its publisher cannot simply charge the fewer subscribers more. Nor can he charge his advertisers more for the remaining subscribers. Meanwhile, as circulation and revenues decline, so do the publisher's costs. However, his costs don't decline as quickly as his revenues do. Though the will publisher pays less for newsprint, printing, and distribution as circulation declines and he might also cut his newsroom staffing, he still must pay the basic costs of his newsroom and overhead. This means that as his circulation declines, his slowly declining costs sooner or later will exceed his quickly declining revenues — at which time it will no longer be economically feasible for him to continuing printing the publication..."

Crosbie notes that newspapers have gained revenues from websites, but it may not offset the loss from print editions: "Unless ways can be found to increase the per user revenues generated from newspaper websites, newspapers need to gain fantastic numbers of Web site users just to replace the declines in print edition revenues. A 50,000 circulation daily would need to gain a million to 50 million Web site users to postpone the time when it's no longer economically feasible to produce its printed edition!"

Interpreting how this will effect the decision-making of newspaper stockholders: "More than 1,250 of the 1,500 daily U.S. newspapers are owned by publicly-traded companies. Their stockholders, particularly the institutional ones, aren't going to wait until the the day when it becomes no longer economically feasible to produce printed editions. And not until it becomes no longer economically feasible to produce either the printed or Web editions. No, they'll want to sell their cash cow to a butcher or themselves chop it up into parts long before then (as Thomson Newspapers did years ago)."

Crosbie concludes: "It is true that most newspapers have lost touch with their readers, and that 'citizen journalism' can provide some fractional help. But I think shorter stories, more graphics, having each editor and reporters write a blog, and even 'citizen journalism' are purported solutions that merely attempt to either change the spots on the cow's hide or are occasionally useful but more often distracting 'cow pies.

"The radical changes the newspaper industry needs to implement arise from a more true understanding by that industry of why newspaper readership began declining well before the Internet was opened to the public; about why one billion people worldwide have gone onto the Internet after it was opened to the public (they didn't do it to read traditional media on computer screens), and about why all that plus the misnamed and illusionary 'fracturing' of media audiences requires semantic solutions."