If you think colleges and universities are immune from the pressures of the marketplace, that they invest wisely—that they invest in the furtherance of wisdom itself—a word to the wise: Talk to a recent college applicant. Ask a student at one of the nation’s elite colleges what an acceptance package looks like. Ask him to let you see—ask her to let you review—the materials from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and Penn.
For Microsoft, the answer rests with closing the gates on the era of Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer, too; billionaires who popularized hardware with derivative software; who treated taste as a distasteful waste of time and money; who never seemed to care what their archrival, Steve Jobs, said about Microsoft’s lack of culture and absence of original ideas.
