Microsoft is shedding 5,000 jobs from its 95,000-person workforce, the company's first-ever mass layoff. It's about time. And let's put the blame where it belongs: Bill Gates.

What, hasn't he retired? Yes, but Microsoft's overgrown state is very much his fault.

The official reason is trite and predictable: "Economic uncertainty," Chris Liddell, Microsoft's chief financial officer, told analysts. And exactly wrong. The problem with Microsoft is its financial performance is all too predictable. It has grown so large, its products so woven into the modern way of business, that its sales wax and wane with the economy; Microsoft no longer controls its own destiny, as its army of libertarian-minded geeks would prefer.

Would it matter to its financial performance if Microsoft had 80,000 employees? 50,000? Or even 20,000 — the number gathered at Seattle's Safeco Field just eight years ago?

Microsoft's headcount today is a product of Gates's ego, not business reality. Having planted a computer on every desktop, he set his company's sights on people's living rooms (the Xbox game console), their Internet connections (MSN), and even their pockets (Windows Mobile cellphones). Yet Windows and Office remain the company's financial engines. Imagine if the company had just focused on those franchises. Shareholders would be far richer. And employees would be far happier. The only one who might be less than pleased is the company's bizarre billionaire founder, who's discontented by the idea of anyone selling technology he didn't invent. Now that he's left to pursue philanthropy, perhaps the company can get back to writing software.