From the Fortune profile on her earlier this year (the first ever):

Moreover, they say, she has helped Bill become more open, patient, and compassionate. “Bullshit!” he bellows. Nicer, perhaps? “No way!” he shouts, grinning because he knows it’s true. One thing he admits readily: Thanks to Melinda, he is easing comfortably into his new role. About the philanthropic work he says, “I don’t think it would be fun to do on my own, and I don’t think I’d do as much of it.”

An all-rounder, Melinda is the girl you remember from school who was top of her class, good at games, popular, and a volunteer. She rose through the ranks at Microsoft, ending up as general manager of information products, before marriage to Bill, and their three children. And now it’s all systems go for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the one-time backroom girl has had to step into the spotlight–not a position she relishes, but where she knows she needs to be in order for the charity fund to realise its full potential.

Would the couple’s foundation, expected to dish out around US$100 billion of goodness in its lifetime, have been created without her influence? Perhaps Bill would still be flogging software to the world and beyond, with Ballmer, his Sancho Panza, riding alongside him. Misunderstood, he might claim, just plain weird, we might whisper as his wealth took him further and further away from reality. Melinda had the foresight to see what an aggressive, capitalist lifestyle would do to their family life and steered him away from it. He, in his wisdom, did not fight it.

The way I see it, most rich, workaholic men tend to marry someone who fits into their lifestyle. Bill Gates, on the other hand, has married a woman who has made him fit into hers. When I read about how she handled him in the parking lot at Microsoft after he asked her out on a date, her ballsiness made me weep with laughter. (”That’s not nearly spontaneous enough for me. I don’t know. Call me up closer to the day.” He called her that night.)

Plans for a trampoline room and nonsense-strosity high-tech in his new-build Seattle home were coolly dismantled without even a squeak from her other half. Melinda is credited for making him more open, patient and compassionate. Last week I watched a BBC documentary about him as he prepared to step down from the day-to-day stuff of Microsoft. “As he has grown older, the ratio of shouting to non-shouting has decreased,” one of his employees said about him. “That’ll be the Melinda effect,” I thought.

She is credited for having brought in a whole host of powerful partners to the couple’s eponymous foundation–not for nothing is she known as a great team-builder. Rockefeller, Hewlett and the Dells are on board, as well as a couple of big pharma companies. Joel Klein, the man who took the government’s anti-trust fight to Microsoft a decade ago, is batting for them on the education front in New York. And then there’s the current world’s richest man, Warren Buffett, who has pledged all his billions to the cause. “I’m not sure,” he said, when asked if he would have done it without Melinda.

Personally, I hope that the Nobel committee does make Gates Nobel Laureate, because that will mean that he did manage to make a difference to the world. And all because she made a difference to him.

1. Windows is on the vast majority of the world’s computers, creating a virtually ubiquitous platform that anyone can develop for. That actually breeds innovation and development. Yes, Microsoft fosters innovation. While it’s much easier for griefers to be mean if everyone’s on the same platform, that ubiquity gives us a common ground to drive forward on.

Stan Seiler, senior docent at the Computer History Museum, credits Microsoft for creating the common UI concept–”a common look and feel across multiple applications,” something that “couldn’t be pioneered until somebody had a whole suite of applications,” which Microsoft was among the first to do. They dragged third-party developers into following it as well, and voila, now most stuff works and looks the same across an OS.

2. Microsoft is basically responsible for the two-button mouse. Will Smith from Maximum PC (but not quite Hancock) gives the Gates machine props for really bringing the mouse to business computing with “the one-two punch of Windows 3.0 and Office.” More than that, it created a simple standard for two-button mousing: left-click equals action, right-click equals choices. Love your scroll wheel? (I do.) Microsoft, baby. Apple’s mouse philosophy is just silly.

3. Microsoft popularised the concept that software has value and is worth paying for it. Seiler says “it might sound obvious… but it was an important change in the mindset of people.” No one had done it on the scale Microsoft did. Today this leads to some weirdness: There’s a different price for each version of Windows. But this theoretically based on how much value Microsoft think is packed into each version of Windows (you can debate this, of course). But unless you’re a freetard, you probably don’t think the idea itself of paying for software is insane.

4. Microsoft’s intimidation leads to innovation. The flipside of Microsoft’s scale and success is that everyone hates them. (Duh.) While this sometimes results in unproductive pissing and moaning, it often drives companies to try to outdo the behemoth, after which Microsoft strives to catch up before getting leapfrogged again. This process benefits everyone.

The most famous example is the Browser Wars. Netscape Navigator pushed Internet Exploder forward (not only feature-wise, but leading Microsoft to bundle it with the OS, a big step in and of itself) before IE killed it and achieved a virtual browser monopoly. Years later, Firefox rose from Navigator’s ashes to strike back at IE, which resulted in Browser War II and drove us to the point of internet awesomeness (and Web standardisation) we’re at today. (Not to mention, as Smith points out, mainstreaming TCP/IP in Windows 95 made it much easer and cheaper to get on the internet in the first place.)

So, while Microsoft is now a super-bureaucratic organisation that may well be in need of soul, innovation and originality, the truth is, its very unsexiness is why tech and computing are as exciting as they are today. Microsoft’s early years provided the foundation and tools, and today it provides technology’s version of The Man to outsmart and outdo, which will make tomorrow as good as it’s gonna be.

What else should we give credit to Msft under Bill’s watch?

One man in particular has had that choice over the years. He’s Bill Gates.

In the past several decades, Bill Gates has been seen in jeans, ties and suits, but at the end of the day, there’s been one look he’s come home to. It’s the sweater. With a buttoned shirt under it. For over 20 years, this has been the signature calling card of one of world’s most powerful men. (That, and those $7 haircuts.)

And you know what’s crazy? Men’s Vogue tells us that it’s fashionable.

Ned Martel is a Deputy Editor over at Men’s Vogue and he was kind enough to stare at many pictures of Bill Gates that I sent him. When I got him on the phone, we discussed the matter, starting with some shots from a 1985 Microsoft publicity shoot.

“Sweaters…” I hear Martel think out loud. “The thing that strikes me is that…you didn’t need to dress in the ’80s like you were well funded to get funding…it was the opposite–if you presented yourself as pinstriped, you might not be seen as the upstart worth getting behind.”

And such may be true even today. When is the last time you saw Kevin Rose sporting a triangle hankerchief that matched his tie? But where Martel described the look as “I’m too busy to think about wearing a suit,” it’s probably been generalised in modern terms to “I’m too cool to wear a suit.”

We flip to a newer shot, this time taken just last year. (It’s our lead photo of the piece, minus that Voguesque spoof cover art.) Sweater. Collar. Same thing, right?

“This is more expensive,” Martel points out immediately. “I think it’s like a purple cashmere v-neck. That’s probably a bit of a luxury he would not have even sported in his youth…Like he got married and got a life. It’s more dad-like.”

But something else changed, too.

“His glasses are more grown up,” Martel says. “The change that you see in his face because of that. It is a reflection that he’s thought about.”

The word “fatherly” comes to mind again.

“It’s a different way of announcing your place in the establishment of American billionaires. I think you see that subtly in the way he dresses because it began as a little bit rebellious and it’s matured into a way that’s said it had a payoff.”

So the wardrobe payoff after several billion dollars is wire-frames and cashmere. But is that fashionable? What is a sweater and collar, after all? It’s certainly is not a cutting edge trend, nor is it quite a timeless classic.

“Any guy with confidence and a sense of how he wants to present himself is a fashionable guy,” Martel explains. Finally, a justification for that plaid shirt my wife hates.

But before I let Martel off the line, there was one last point to be settled. Gates vs. Jobs. No OSs. No fancy keynotes. Just. Wardrobe vs. wardrobe.

(Ed note: Of course, this photo is, like, the one time Gates isn’t wearing that damn sweater.)

“Comparing their clothes is like comparing their accomplishments–they both helped together to define an era,” Martel explains. “And the fact that we even have an indelible sense of how they’ve looked of the years means it worked.” [Men's Vogue]

Cover art by Richard Blakeley.

Click on the image above to access the full high-resolution version. [Bill Gates' Retirement Party]

Other Gizmodo timelines

• Sony Trinitron Timeline Shows Why It Will Live Forever In Our Hearts

• LEGO Brick Timeline: 50 Years of Building Frenzy and Curiosities

• 100 Years of Tech in the Times Square New Year’s Ball

Joel Johnson at CES 2005:

I didn’t quite know what to think of it, but I wasn’t going to turn it down. I would ask the hard questions: Does Ballmer really eat children? Can I swim in your Money Bin? I didn’t quite muster the balls to ask those, though, and instead acted like I had real questions or something.

[CES 2005]

Blam at CES 2007:

I’d asked him about the mug shot [from his Albuquerque arrest] and at first he looked a bit apprehensive, but answered. Apparently, Bill loves fast cars. In 1978, he told us, he’d gotten 3 speeding tickets on his drive to move up to Seattle. Two from the same cop. It was a Porsche 911 from that era.

[CES 2007]

Wilson at CES 2008:

When it came to be my turn, I had the warnings and admonitions of Blam to guide me. And sure enough, he didn’t look me in the eye at first, and though he was accommodating with my nervous stuttering, I could tell he was judging the substance of my questions. Mercifully, he little by little began looking more directly at me, and he lit up with answers, even letting his guard down enough to comment frankly about Windows, and the difference between Apple and Microsoft.

Here’s the vid itself, plus various excerpts, shot and digitally mastered by our own Chris Mascari:

Excerpts:

Part 1 – On the difference between Microsoft and Apple

Part 2 – On his changing public image

Part 3 – What he worries about most

Part 4 – On Windows Vista maybe, just maybe, sucking