This is, in fact, one of the most important lessons for Microsoft to learn: great media is often created in a collaborative environment, but it cannot be done by committee — a painful fact Gates learned firsthand after seeing his book, The Road Ahead, almost universally panned for having been put through the corporate "blander" and not sounding Gates's own authoritative, querulous voice.

A former public relations woman should know that personalities are commodities. A woman on the news is still a rare enough event that she is inevitably cast in an erotic role - like a school marm in a boys' school. The press puts that eroticism through the blander - the star-maker machine, and the result is every article you've ever read about Valerie Elia, Jan Tennnant or Adrienne Clarkson.