In the end of an era, Bill Gates announced today that he will transition out of day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft over the next 2 years. Bill will devote most of his time to charity work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but remain as chairman of Microsoft and be a senior technical advisor. Ray Ozzie, he of Lotus Notes fame (sic.), will become the new chief software architectie.
Bill has guided Microsoft to a market cap of $225.14B and is personally worth about 9% of that amount – he indicates that almost all of his wealth will be returned to society, mostly by means of the foundation, which has dispersed just over $10B to date.
Insofar as it’s possible to summarize a life via simplistic and bombastic epithets laced with hyperbole, while some may say of Gates: “Behind every great fortune there is a great crime“, we instead lean towards something that’s more along the lines of “Here was a Caesar! when comes such another?“.
Microsoft Announces Plans for July 2008 Transition for Bill Gates – Microsoft press release, June 15, 2006
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Definitely a colossus in the history of American business.
I wonder if he’s actually spent a lot more time in the Microsoft offices since his “retirement” in ’06 than he was expecting to.
Given all his charity work, it doesn’t seem like it.