June 27, 2008
Today Bill Gates will transition out of his day-to-day role at Microsoft, to spend the majority of his time focusing on global health issues, and education work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Although Mr Gates will continue to remain Microsoft's Chairman, he'll only be involved with select projects, chosen by himself, and CEO Steve Ballmer.
Gates told reporters this week, "I'll miss doing the work here. This is a big milestone."
For future investments, Gates says he's only interested in "dramatic" scientific breakthroughs.
"If somebody says to me 'OK, we can do new cookie stores and we can make zillions', I have no interest in spending a minute on that," he told his home town newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "I hope somebody goes and does that, but that's not for me."
Naming the company for its mission of providing microcomputer software, Bill Gates established Microsoft with friend, Paul Allen, back in 1975, in Albuquerque. Five years later they landed a deal providing operating systems to IBM. Microsoft went public in 1986, and the next year the soaring stock made Bill Gates the youngest self-made billionaire, at the age of just 31 years old.
Gates wrote in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead, "When I was 19, I caught sight of the future and based my career on what I saw. I turned out to have been right,"
On the Microsoft Website, where he's listed as Chairman, I think his quote manages to sum up his success at Microsoft as a whole... (well, to put mildly that is!)
“We've really achieved the ideal of what I wanted Microsoft to become.”
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/videos/
You can view exclusive childhood photos of him, along with his description of each picture, and more at the following link:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/storysupplement/gates_microsoft/index.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/368475_gatesnext26.html
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/
