I’d say no. His skills, while prodigious, are not those required of the president of a great republic. His election would also, IMHO, concentrate too much power - both economic and political - in the hands of one man, which would be dangerous.
A somewhat related thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=328605&highlight="bill+gates"+president
I have seen no evidence that Bill Gates actually knows how to write code. He’s very good at the business negotiation and “vision” thing (which largely consists of dominating markets with proprietary ad hoc standards), but I wouldn’t trust Gates to find the right flags to pass to a compiler.
Now, Steve Wozniak – there’s a geek who’s “made it.” 
NO, NO, NO!!! a THOUSAND times NO!!!
there is no way in hell i’d vote for that evil little troll, i spit on the ground he walks on, he’s evil incarnate, i’d vote Bush in for a Third 4 year term before i’d give billy-boy the reins to the U.S., and i’m a republican (old school pubbie) who HATES dubya with a passion (i voted for Kerry in the last election, and i’m a republican for Og’s sake)
I’ve an idea. Cryogenic Technology can give me the Bill Gates that I want. Cryogenically freeze his head, you can discard the body. INstall the head on the hood of my car with an air horn in the throat.
And Billy-Boy gate$ stole all my punctuation and capitilazation in my previous post, so you KNOW he’s evil! 
And with whom he’s never been particularly close.
That’s pretty brief; it doesn’t exactly make you a Washington insider.
Not really, AFAICT. He’s been governor of Texas, of course. He’s been helped out by his daddy’s rich friends while losing money in the oil bidness. He’s had a productive political alliance with Karl Rove. But his Texas cronies, his daddy’s rich friends, and Rove were none of them creatures of Washington. Ditto for the vast majority of the Pioneers who financed his 2000 campaign.
He was never a Washington insider, never hung around for long with people who were. He was a money insider and he was close up with power, too. But he was never a Washington insider. Before 1999, this town [I’m typing this from inside the Beltway, thanks] hardly knew him.
Well, he probably wouldn’t be able to do much these days programming wise…but then, I have my doubts that The Woz would be much good either these days down in the trenches.
But I get the impression you think someone handed Billy boy Microsoft pre-built and ready to go. Here is a Wiki article on good old Gate’s early life:
So…you learned something new today, ehe rjung? 
I’d say he had at least as much to do with the early formation of Microsoft was Jobs and the Woz’ster did in forming Apple. He wasn’t ALWAYS a big business tycoon ya know…
-XT
Still doesn’t mean he’d make a good president of course…in fact, he probably would be pretty miserable at it to be honest. But I have no idea what his politics are, so still no idea if I’d vote for the man. I certainly wouldn’t vote for him BECAUSE of Microsoft…but then again, I wouldn’t knee jerk vote against him for the same reason either.
Luckily we’ll never know…I seriously doubt the man would WANT to be president of the US. Why the hell would he want to put up with all that shit?
-XT
Yeah – xtisme still tends to believe the first thing that reaffirms his beliefs. 
If I were really snarky, I’d point out that programming in BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL are hardly bragging points – hell, I learned BASIC programming in one evening at the tender age of eight. But I’ll simply offer this rebuttal instead:
There’s no doubt in my mind that Gates was instrumental in the early growth of Microsoft, but as a marketeer and business negotiator, not a programmer.
You learned them in the early 70’s? Well, bravo to you rjung…you must know then that at that time COBOL and FORTRAN WERE a big deal, ehe? At a guess though, you learned programming at the tender age of eight sometime after the 80’s…maybe in the 90’s. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have said such a stupid thing…
Perhaps he did, perhaps not. I recall he did work on some of the early software…you don’t build a business by simply marketting or negotiating. But even if not, so what? You said the man couldn’t program at all…something that on the first hit I got on google was pretty well blown out of the water.
I take it, however, that you didn’t learn anything from that piece of data. Imagine that…
-XT
You’re very impressive, rjung. In the late 70s, I taught a full semester college-level class called “Advanced BASIC,” and it was difficult to cram all of the material into the allotted time. A few years ago, I taught a highly-compressed 8-week college course in beginning BASIC (Visual BASIC), and once again I was hard-pressed to cover a fraction of what the language did in that time. Yet you, a mere 8-year-old, could absorb all of this material in only one evening, even though it took months for my college students.
Yes, you’re an amazing programmer. I bow before you.
Microsoft became rich selling operating systems and basic interpreters for small computers…They were NOT writtne in COBOL or BSAIC or FORTRAN…Probably most of it was assembly. And most of microsofts biggest products were not originally written by microsoft at all. Microsoft became powerfull by selling a OS that they got from someone else to IBM and by buying up other peoples products and marketing them better.
Gates was a brilliant and somewhat unethical businessman, but I doubt he wrote much or any of the code they sold.
I agree wholeheartedly with the first part of this sentence. As to the second, Gates did most of the coding on Microsoft’s first product: a BASIC interpreter. He has done a lot of code critique since then, and I certainly believe he knows how to code, but I don’t know how much actual coding he’s done in the last 20 years.
Speaking as a computer professional, if I’ve ever met a computer professional that admired or related to Gates, they didn’t admit it where I could hear. Generally he is considered an amoral businessman whose interests lie in dominating the market at the expense of quality coding; he represents the antithesis of any good programmer.
(All this applies even if he can nominally code; it’s actually worse because then he’s robbed of the excuse of ignorance. And yes, a person can teach themselves enough of QBasic to code with it in just a few hours; I certainly did, around age 12. There were probably bits that I missed, but it’s basically a simple language, like most of them.)
Are these professionals you met actual, real, versatile coders, or more like server maintenance and script kiddies? In the few Computer Information Systems classes I slummed in at college they seemed married to MS…but I would never call them programmers or software designers in any realistic sense of the term.
Don’t blame me if you had dim students. 
Easiest academic course I ever took – while the other kids were wrapping their heads around loops and arrays and conditional statements, I was writing multimedia demonstrations for Back-to-School night and arcade games.
But he must have! xtisme said so!
(Though IMO the matter of Bill Gates’ coding L337ness should be a topic for another thread)