The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

5. Rock, Scissors, Whiteboard

Bill Gates is sketching out a bizarre picture. The Microsoft (MSFT) founder muses about technology in the April 7 issue of Fortune. In a piece labeled "How I Work," Gates contends that what he calls the "digital workstyle" is finally about to bloom.

"Paper is no longer a big part of my day," the software billionaire reveals. "I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC."

It's that kind of fresh thinking that's behind every tech success story, no doubt. But Gates doesn't stop there. "If the entire week is very busy, it's the weekend when I'll send the long, thoughtful pieces of email," Gates enthuses. "When people come in Monday morning, they'll see that I've been quite busy -- they'll have a lot of email."

Good to know, though it seems everyone isn't equally enthralled. Hedge fund manager Jeff Matthews writes on his blog that Gates' comments come across "as the self-impressed noodlings of a man in control of a very large, very rich and very powerful organization who appears to have lived almost frozen in time."

Perhaps most chilling is Gates' take on his favorite nondigital accessory.

"The one low-tech piece of equipment still in my office is my whiteboard," Gates writes. "I always have nice color pens, and it's great for brainstorming when I'm with other people, and even sometimes by myself."

Thanks, but we don't care to see what Bill Gates draws by himself with all the nice color pens.

Dumb-o-Meter score: 80. "Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my productivity is desktop search," Gates declares.

>To order reprints of this article, click here: Reprints