SEATTLE — It is almost unthinkable that any one human could pick up where Bill Gates leaves off when he ends his full-time tenure Friday as Microsoft’s leader.

When Microsoft Corp. announced in 2006 that Mr. Gates planned to go part-time as board chairman, so he could spend more time on his global health charity, it named two senior executives to guide the company’s overall technical direction.

Mr. Gates’ recent remarks, however, indicate Microsoft is looking to a much larger group of employees for big-picture guidance and long-term planning. But it’s not yet clear whether the company can replicate his thinking with more traditional corporate processes — or whether it should even be trying.

From Microsoft’s start in 1975, Mr. Gates has been the company’s genius programmer, its technology guru, its primary decision maker, and its ruthless and competitive leader. But, even with Gates himself at the helm, Microsoft has yet to solve critical competitive headaches. The Internet has changed the means of distributing desktop software applications and even challenged the idea that they’re necessary. Microsoft has scrambled to catch up in music players, and remains an also-ran with its Zune. The most recent Windows Vista operating system landed with a thud. And Microsoft has stumbled badly in Web search and advertising, culminating in Ballmer’s quixotic, $47.5 billion pursuit of Yahoo Inc.

“Some of the technical folks may even be better suited than Gates to lead the company into the next generation of computing,” an analyst for Gartner who has covered Microsoft for a decade, Michael Silver, said. “Some would say that maybe he had too much power … Some would say Microsoft hasn’t failed enough, hasn’t gone out on enough limbs and been as innovative as they could have been.”