Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates retirement to spell end of an era

BILL GATES, the Microsoft co-founder, will officially retire from his day-to-day operating duties at the software giant on Friday,June 27th. After retiring, he will still remain the non- executive chairman of the Microsoft board and its largest shareholder too. He is leaving to begin a new life as a full-time philanthropist heading his charity, the charitable foundation he had set up with his wife Melinda in 2000, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Foundation has donated billions of dollars to fund medical research in AIDS, malaria, tuberculoses - the silent mass-murderers of the 20th and 21st centuries and other such diseases. It has also set up scholarships for minority colleges and other literacy efforts .They do help in a few other additional causes as well. It is the largest transparently operated charitable organisation in the world and allows its benefactors access how the money is being spent, unlike other major organisations.

Three people will take over the reigns after Bill Gates retires from the company, which he and a friend, Paul Allen, co-founded in 1975. In fact the transition had started about a couple of years back itself. A former classmate of Gates at Harvard, Steve Ballmer will be the chief executive at the software colossus in Seattle, while his job as chief software architect has been handed over to Ray Ozzie and Gate’s chief research and strategy officer duties has been inherited by Craig Mundie. Even though he is admired and seen by many as an inspiration, a large number of industry insiders criticise his business tactics, which they consider as anti-competitive.

Bill Gates, a Harvard drop-out left college after two years to find the firm that would change the world - Microsoft. He later received honorary degrees from Harvard and other universities. Bill Gates was an exceptionally bright and geeky high school kid from Seattle, who spent all his spare time meddling with computers .He sold his first software program at the age of 17 and by the time he went to Harvard University, he had already sold timetabling software to his school and a traffic planning system for state governments.

His exit coincides with an escalating rivalry with and other competitors who are using the Internet to block Microsoft’s software dominance. Microsoft has built its empire by charging one-time license fees for software such as Windows and Office, which are run locally on a computer’s hard drive. Then, after a few years, it would promote customers to upgrade to a new version of the software . Meanwhile, Microsoft’s competitors like Google, are offering free online programmes with advertisements and softwares through web browsers that compete with Office and other packaged software sold by Microsoft.

Analysts say that there are signs that Microsoft has been struggling since Gates moved away from managing operations a few years back. Microsoft’s Windows and Office softwares, on which its fortune is built have faltered with Firefox and OpenOffice as its main competitors. Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system, which was released in January of 2007 has flopped with customers, many of whom are still clinging to its forerunner the Windows XP. Meanwhile, Apple’s Macintosh computers have been gaining popularity and even though Windows is still used on 90 per cent of the world’s computers, Macintosh.

Bill Gates, who paved the way for the home computer age and took the globe and put it on our computer screens and made the entire world a global village will truly and justly go down in history as a person who made a tremendous impact on the modern world . As Gates gets ready to ride off into the software sunset, we wish the nerdish, bespectacled Bill Gates, who has been the image of Microsoft, all the very best in his charitable endeavours and hope that he will change the world by his benevolent work as he did with the software.

source:merinews.com