Last July, The New York Times ran a story about changes in leadership at Microsoft, where Bill Gates is one year away from shifting full time to his charitable foundation.

Gates stood with two deputies who have assumed larger duties: Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy, and Ray Ozzie, the top software architect. Oddly missing from the photo and downplayed in the story was Steve Ballmer, the longtime insider who already carries the title of chief executive.

A Microsoft spokesman said Ballmer was elsewhere because the story was focused on transitions of technical issues, not of the overall company. And yet, despite the confident looks on faces at Microsoft and claims that leadership evolution has gone seamlessly, uncertainties remain about the change from Gates as überboss into something less. Exactly to what is a little blurry. Gates will remain chairman and stay deeply involved in a few strategic issues, indefinitely.

It may take a philosopher on the level of Ichiro Suzuki to parse the distinctions. Gates will be out, but not gone. Largely there, but not. At any rate, his long goodbye is a reminder that CEO transitions can be fraught with questions, difficulties and even drama. That shouldn't be surprising when careers, money and often family are at stake.

After 32 years at Microsoft, Gates is entitled to a change in scenery. Some CEOs get in trouble by insisting they will never leave (Sandy Weil at Citicorp comes to mind.) Others start to feel a draft by acknowledging a succession plan but mishandling the process (Michael Eisenberg at Disney). Others test-drive the CEO job, change their mind and give the keys to someone else (Bill Ford Jr., turning the job over to Alan Mullaly, formerly of Boeing). Still other CEOs spoil family dinners by favoring outsiders as possible successors (Sumner Redstone at Viacom).

In Washington state, several families have stayed in charge. At the private Seattle Times Co., for example, CEO Frank Blethen has led an effort to prepare for a fifth generation of leadership. Various cousins in that group have worked in different departments, including Blethen's son, Ryan, presently assistant editorial page editor.

Blethen once said that he spent a significant portion of his time teaching family members the history and values of the company. Keeping the company in family hands is laudable perhaps, but rarely successful in the long term. For various reasons, family ownership or control usually ends by the third generation. Gates, for example, has said he has no intention of turning Microsoft over to his children. (More bad news for them: He plans to give away nearly all of his money.) Bill Boeing sold most of his stock after leaving the airplane company. The families of Dexter Horton and Joshua Green saw their banks absorbed into bigger enterprises.

Some beat the odds. At 107-year-old Weyerhaeuser, the family's involvement is older than some of their trees. George Weyerhaeuser served as CEO for 25 years before stepping down in 1991. (A non family member, Steve Rogel, is now CEO.) The Piggott's have kept control of truck maker Paccar, where Mark Pigott is CEO and an uncle is a board member. The Weyerhaeusers and Pigotts can only look with envy at the record of the Rothschilds, whose European banking interests trace back to the 1760s.

Family control may sit well with the family, but not always with shareholders, as the Pigotts and others have discovered. In 2000, the pension fund TIAA-CREF complained that the Paccar board was too close to management (that is, the family). The company rebuffed criticism and the Pigotts stayed in charge. In 2003, shareholders of the Murdoch-controlled British Sky Broadcasting Group insisted on a competitive process rather than simply giving the CEO job to Murdoch's son James, then 30. (The son got it anyway.) Father knows best? Tell that to Dorothy C. Bullitt, who was ousted in 1992 from Seattle-based Harbor Properties by her father, Stimson Bullitt, just as he was eased out of King Broadcasting by his mother, Dorothy S. Bullitt.