Culture flows from the top. Bill doesn’t take responsibility in his email, so he’s teaching everyone downstream to pass the buck like he does.
His role was pretty much the biggest shareholder having direct access to some of the company's top executives.
Once they started passing the blame, almost immediately, I would expect the first thing to be a new email from Gates saying “Bob, you’re doing this, Frank, you’re doing that, no excuses, get it done.”
Nope. Nothing like that.