14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates announced in mid-2007 that June 27, 2008 would be his last day at Microsoft and that he would enter a two year transition period out of his day-to-day responsibilities. Well, the two years are up and the Day is approaching at fast pace, now just a week away. Gates has already given up his title of Chief Executive Officer in favor of Steve Ballmer and only had to pass the role of Chief Software Architect to Ray Ozzie. It will be Ozzie together with Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, that will replace Bill Gates at the head of Microsoft.
"I was about 17 when I first started writing the Basic, and all my work every day has been focused on Microsoft," he stated in an interview for Channel 9. "So this will be a change, to get up in the morning and most of the days be focused on the Foundation. The Foundation, in some ways is much smaller, the goals are very ambitious, the areas are different, so I'm not sure how easy it will be to make the change. I'll certainly miss spending full time at Microsoft, because I love the smart people there, I love how the research gets into products, I live the feedback we get when we do something wrong."
Gates is leaving Microsoft to dedicate his time and efforts to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and his philanthropic work around the world. His vision at this point in time is to employ technology for the benefit of those in need across the world. Just ahead of June 27, market analyst company Gartner announced that the installed base of PCs worldwide has passes the 1 billion milestone. Taking into consideration the fact that over 90% of those machines are running Windows, Gates' original vision involving a computer on every desk in every home has indeed been achieved.
"We've got enough things that we've saved up for, that I hope people will find that are most interesting to them. We'll be showing our modeling work there, the services in the cloud. It's going to be a very big PDC, because yes you've got web services but you want to run some code on the client, you want to take advantage of natural user interfaces, you want to be take these large code bases and be able to work with them in different ways," Gates said, referring to Microsoft's 2008 Professional Developers Conference, at the end of October 2008.