I came across this on the blog of an old friend Sriram Krishnan. Sriram goes onto give some colorful instances of Dave Cutler, the Windows guru who is the recipient of the award. To put some of this in context, Dave Cutler is considered a brilliant engineer, among the best Microsoft has ever seen - which easily places him among the best anywhere in the world.

Being several steps removed from Microsoft and the community of grace that envelopes it, these days I tend to see things with less rosy shades. If it is indeed true that Dave Cutler is as brilliant an engineer as he is touted to be, if he could have the genius to make design decisions about the NT system in the early 90s that are still revealing their mettle, then why is he being given a "Bill Gates" award? Wouldn't it be more fitting to give Bill Gates a Dave Cutler award? After all Bill Gates, to the best of my knowledge, has never been credited with impecable design that has withstood the test of time, the way Dave Cutler is often described, though he has deisgned systems that have had a huge impact on the future of Microsoft.

In the Computer Science community, the highest award of recognition is the Turing award. The award carries the name of one of the most foundational thinkers of our times, Alan M Turing, and is, in part, a community's recognition of the towering intellect of a man who was among their very best.

The true qualities that Bill Gates deserves to be applauded for, amongst which is being a buiseness-savy geek at a time when such a notion didn't exist, is in a different domain altogether from the strengths of Cutler. Maybe the Bill Gates award is just a name for "Microsoft's Best" award, in which case maybe Gates himself should have got the first one. Otherwise it feels like handing Tagore a Nobel prize for Physics.