Goodbye to Bill Gates on June 27... but it’s not goodbye forever!

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Sunday, 22 June 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! Bill Gates stops his “day to day” work at Microsoft on Friday June 27, to focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its work in health, vaccines, education and more. But he remains Microsoft’s Chairman – and its largest single shareholder – so he won’t be too far away if Steve Ballmer wants to have a chat! Although Bill Gates leaving his day job at Microsoft signals the end of an era, the rise and rise of the world’s most well known, and richest geek, won’t be stopping its skyward pointing trajectory any time soon. Bill Gates plans for his foundation to continue “Bringing innovations in health and learning to the global community”, and through a combination of the generosity of Bill and Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffet, the “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” certainly has the resources, brainpower and financial muscle to ensure Gates’ star shines for some time to come. Founding “Micro-Soft” with his friend and fellow billionaire Paul Allen in 1975, the story of Microsoft’s success is legendary. The short version starts with Gates snapping up the QDOS operating system for a song, renaming it MS-DOS, selling it to IBM and securing the rights to sell it to others, along with writing his own version of the “BASIC” programming language. These actions set Gates, Allen, Microsoft and a host of others on a path of success that still sees Microsoft as maker of the world’s most popular operating system, with a vision to put a computer on every desktop and bring computing to the masses. Yes, Microsoft has had many stumbles over the years, from the original MSN Network that was meant to compete with AOL and the Internet itself, software “misfires” such as DOS 4.0, Windows ME and Windows Vista. The purchase of the “WebTV” platform never took off as intended, with Microsoft spending years in developing interactive TV solutions that only seem to be now bearing fruit with the Xbox Live video download service and the ability to turn the Xbox 360 into an IPTV box. Microsoft’s mismanagement of Vista, an operating system that is still shunned by some who prefer Windows XP, the Mac or various Linux operating systems, has somewhat matured with the introduction of Service Pack 1 (SP1). A lot of the work for SP1 was done side by side with turning the Vista code into the much more appreciated Windows Server 2008, which has itself become the foundation of “Windows 7”, Vista’s successor, due in late 2009. Another big Microsoft move of the past few months has also been the attempted and aborted purchase of Yahoo!, although Gates is said to not have had much to do with it. Next on page 2: what happens to Microsoft now that Bill is going? << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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