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IT is perhaps the ultimate luxury—retiring young
and making a commitment to give away up to $100 billion to alleviate
the plight of the poor.
Microsoft Corp. founder and
chairman Bill Gates, 52, will gradually retire from active
management to devote more time to philanthropy, specially education
and fighting diseases of the poor like malaria and AIDS around the
globe.
After July 2008, Gates remains
the company’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.
Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie immediately assumes the title of
chief software architect and working side by side with Gates on all
technical architecture and product oversight responsibilities, to
ensure a smooth transition.
Similarly, Chief Technical
Officer Craig Mundie gets the new title of chief research and
strategy officer and will work closely with Gates to assume his
responsibility for the company’s research and incubation efforts.
Once the world’s richest man,
Gates told newsmen he will reorient his priorities, from working
full time for Microsoft and part-time for the Gates Foundation into
working full time at the foundation and part-time at Microsoft as
chairman and senior technical adviser.
Starting in 1975, Gates, a
Harvard dropout, built Microsoft into the world’s largest and most
profitable software company.
Gates’ strength was not in
innovation but in copying or buying the innovation of others and
adding value to it. Microsoft’s very first software was based on
someone else’s code.
The owner of that code was too
arrogant to meet with the engineers of IBM who were going to launch
the personal computer. Gates’ DOS won over CPM.
Gates saw early on the shift from
mainframes to desktop computers and that, as The Economist puts it,
computers could be a high volume low margin business. He also
realized that the future of computing was not in making computers
small but in designing the software to run them.
Beginning with MS-DOS,
Microsoft’s first operating system, and continuing with products
such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows and Xbox, the company
has developed a broad range of software, services and solutions that
have transformed the way people work, communicate and play.
Microsoft has annual revenues of $60 billion and profits of $18
billion.
Microsoft Windows partnered with
Intel to power 90 percent of one billion computers today.
Microsoft, however, has been
beaten to the Internet search engine by Google (now the largest
search and advertising company), to the portable music business by
Apple, to cellular computing software and hardware by Nokia and to
tapping the power of television by, again, Apple.
The Cupertino-based computer
company was first to introduce the mouse as a pointing and computing
device and first to come out with the more elegant Windows as
opposed to the typewriter-based DOS.
Apple has also leapfrogged over
Microsoft in introducing the iPhone, which is now in its 3G version
that is likely to set the world on fire, creating an entirely new
ecosystem of mobile telephony and entertainment.
Microsoft’s operating system
that runs PCs is considered inferior to that of Apple Windows. Its
Office suite’s profitability is being threatened by Google’s
free software, prompting Gates to announce a $3 Office software in
China for students to steal the thunder from Google’s and
Linux’s open source software.
The Windows Vista that succeeded
XP is considered disappointing. It will be replaced by Windows 7
next year.
Microsoft also failed to buy
Yahoo! despite a $47.5 billion offer, thus, denied a platform with
which to gain traction in the hugely lucrative Internet search and
advertising business.
Still, no one can deny Gates’
relentless genius and drive as a monopolist. He launched the
personal computer revolution. His dream was “a computer on every
desk and in every home.”
Gates says: “With great wealth
comes great responsibility, a responsibility to give back to
society, a responsibility to see that those resources are put to
work in the best possible way to help those most in need.”
Gates says 99 percent of his
wealth would be returned to society through a foundation. The Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation has $29.1 billion in assets and $100
billion in endowment.
At the World Economic Forum in
Davos on January 24, 2008, Gates noted the irony that “the great
advances in the world have often aggravated the inequities in the
world. The least needy see the most improvement, and the most needy
get the least—in particular the billion people who live on less
than a dollar a day.
“There are roughly a billion
people in the world who don’t get enough food, who don’t have
clean drinking water, who don’t have electricity, the things that
we take for granted.
“Diseases like malaria that
kill over a million people a year get far less attention than drugs
to help with baldness. So, the bottom billion misses the benefits of
the global economy, and yet they’ll suffer from the negative
effects of economic growth they missed out on.”
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