"There he is. Bill Gates is coming", a Chinese girl calls out to her friends as other pumped-up Chinese students jostle her and push their way to the security line. Seeing this, Bill Gates, who is coming to China to scout out business opportunities , smiles and waves in their direction, his face gleaming. " Bill Gates, Bill Gates," more and more Chinese students start screaming in unison, behaving like a nutter when someone is listening to psychedelic music. "That's remarkable for Microsoft and Bill Gates," David Kirkpatrick, who used to work for Fortune, wrote in an article published by Fortune in 2007, adding that he's just another well-regarded tech rock star for tech-savvy students in China. That is to say, they'd love to do anything to be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. " At the very least, I want to be a role model just like Bill Gates. He is my king, " a Chinese student told a journalist when asked about his own life goals

We don't know if this student has achieved this goal or not; he may be still struggling to find his bearings. Yet one thing we know is Microsoft will be a different company without Bill Gates, who just announced that he was stepping down from its board, becoming a technical advisor to current CEO Satya Nadella, who was born in India.

In a sense, Bill Gates, who founded Microsft with his friend Paul Allen, has already handed over the reins to Satya Nadella, who is said to be working hard to turn Microsoft into a best-in-class cloud computing company with the launch of Azure and game streaming service. Speaking to Bloomberg Businessweek, Satya Nadella said cloud computing would be the cash cow or money-gusher for tech stalwarts that offer cloud computing services, say Micrsosft, Amazon, and Google.

Satya Nadella has a point. Unlike the cash-incinerating WeWork, which still hasn't been able to find a way to break even(not to mention to turn a profit), Microsoft has already found a new way to generate profits by harnessing the benefits of cloud computing and cloud gaming. Piggybacking on their incomparable computing capabilities offered by their massive global data-centers, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are in a good position to provide such lucrative services to companies eager to tap into cloud computing and use it to curb operating costs; it would be difficult and costly for most companies to set up their own date-centers. Moreover, unlike WeWork's founder Adam Neumann, who was sacked by WeWork's board after he failed to give credence to the view that his business model was effective, Satya Nadella, who appears to be a cerebral sort, knows what he is doing. And Microsftsoft, flush with cash, has no trouble snapping up tech upstarts that have state-of-the-art technologies and brainy techies , thereby giving Microsoft a chance to make the pie bigger.

On the other hand, there are no grounds to think that Bill Gates will "decouple" from Microsoft's day-to-day operations if Satya Nadella strays from the right path as the founder of Microsoft. After all, Microsoft is part of his life.