Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates to Step Down from Microsoft
Geoffreyerffoeg writes "According to Microsoft PressPass, Bill Gates will be leaving his role at Microsoft in July 2008. He'll be staying with the company, but is also moving to a more fulltime position with the Gates Foundation. 'Microsoft Corp. today announced that effective July 2008 Bill Gates, chairman, will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company announced a two-year transition process to ensure that there is a smooth and orderly transfer of Gates' daily responsibilities, and said that after July 2008 Gates would continue to serve as the company's chairman and an adviser on key development projects.' CTO Ray Ozzie will assume Gates' role of Chief Software Architect, and CTO Craig Mundie will also take on more leadership responsibility."
Give the boy credit, for planning to devote his time to charity work.
....to create a new Microsoft icon for /.
I felt a slight chill as I read the article, realizing that if Bill Gates is stepping down, he must be getting kinda older....which means I'm getting kinda older.
It's been an interesting ride through the years with Microsoft.
Thanks for everything, Bill, and best of luck with your philanthropy. My city in particular (Windsor, ON, Canada) has benefitted from the B&MG foundation with new computers in our library for public use.
Anyone can walk on water....think WINTERTIME.
Let's see:
Gates - creates world's most successful company, becomes world's richest man, leaves day job to spend billions on charity.
Us - Made lame borg jokes for 5 years, finally released a browser that's better than IE if you ignore all the unfixed copy/paste bugs. Convinced a few people that Unix sucked less than Windows.
Dude, I think *he* won.
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Gates DID make computers affordable.
Fair weather and calm seas on your new journey...
MBC1977
(US Marine, College Student, Future Business Owner, and Good Guy!)
Regards,
MBC1977,
Being the chairman of the board is very different from being an employee for a company. The chairman of the board is _not_ an employee, he is an owner and is supposed to represent the interests of the owners. Owners != Employees. Basically, sounds like Bill is stepping down from his day-to-day activities managing the organization. But he still has billions of dollars tied up in an ownership position -- it would be incredibly stupid of him not to protect that investment.
Visualize the world of wine
If analogies could ever be valid (warning; this one isn't) Microsoft is still the 800 lb gorilla and its cane is a fucking solid steel girder. Makes you wonder who Mario is...
Microsoft is anything but irrelevant. Take a look at their market share.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would just like to say thanks to Bill for his continuing work with the Gates foundation. I don't see the other multibillionares (Google guys, Redhat guys, Ellison, Jobs, etc) stepping up to the plate and making any commitment EVEN CLOSE to the level he has. All I see those guys doing is buying fighter planes, boats, sports teams and big houses. Good luck Bill!
Just a picture of a chair. It'd be beatifully subtle, but sufficiently childish.
I think he's serious. Gates did force a power-hungry company on us - but he forced a power-hungry company that made a profit from popularizing the personal computer. I doubt the PC would be quite as popular today as it is if it weren't for Gates.
Bill Gates is doing the same thing that Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, and the other 19th century robber barons did - he is transitioning from the persona of a despised, cut-throat, take-no-prisoners monopolist to that of a benign philanthropist, and spending the billions he acquired in order to ensure his legacy. And just like the robber barons the 1800s, I have no doubt that Gates will be viewed as a wonderful benefactor of humanity a hundred years from now. Only the historians will remember how many people and companies he mercilessly crushed to create his fortune.
Gates is still ambitious.
Bill Gates has achieved what most people only dream of in terms of their life's ambitions. What do most people want? Money? Sure, but that is not the end of everything. Most (normal) people actually want to make a contribution to society/the world; to leave a legacy, if you will. (Granted, Bill has already done that.)
So when you have succeeded beyond your wildest ambitions, then what? Gates cannot actually spend his money on himself fast enough. There comes a point when you start to want to spend it on your legacy instead. Hence, the charity funding. But this is still ambition.
(Of course, I wish more people would reach that stage.)
I thought when you get that card you have to pay everyone else $50. And yes, I do think that is appropriate use of money.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Microsoft 'leans on its entrenched install base to survive' in the same way that Rupert Murdoch 'would be nothing without his billions of dollars and his global media network'. You're right, but it's not very meaningful.
I guess some could be excited about Gates leaving, but do we really want Dick Cheney, er, I mean Ballmer to be in charge of things?
Ian W.
Yes -- brilliant! You've captured the essences of the Slashdot v Microsoft "drama".
And congratulations to Bill for having the sense to move on with his life. Microsoft may not be the most ethical of companies, but they are no Enron. Bill Gates is no Kenneth Lay. If you want some other perspective, compare Gates with Jobs. I don't know what Larry Ellison is doing these days, but in the past, his main "philanthropic" ambition was to donate to an anti-aging research foundation.
Is this sig nificant?
There are still new features in Vista?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I think this about him too. He's not stupid - he knows Windows isn't that good and that his wealth is largely undeserved. It's a recipe for guilt.
I'm glad he does the charity stuff though and hope he manages to give most of his money away.
One thing people don't really appreciate is that Gates' wealth is (to a certain extent) unavailable to him. If he pulled that much money out of MSFT the share price would tank and he would lose big-time.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Like him or not, Bill Gates did a lot for personal computers, and honestly, those of us who use them and even the world. MicroSoft wrote a lot of good compilers and a lot of good programs, and while many may gripe, windows, windows98, windowsNT and windowsXP were pretty damn good products.
Bill was rare in that he had vision and the ability to do technical things, and was a very driven person. He was the guy we all loved, then when he got rich he was the guy we all loved to 'hate'. But I remember what it was like before him, and he really did help change the world.
At this point the only person left from the original shakers and movers is Steve Jobs. Steve isn't much of a technical person, but he has been a visionary in the past equal to Bill. I have to wonder how much longer till he bows out?
And to be completely honest, it makes me wonder what the next bunch of 'snotty nosed kids' (as my compsci prof used to call Gates, Jobs, and Woz) will come up with. Every time an Era ends, a new one starts after all...
Yeah, it would have been terrible if we'd have had to suffer with Amigas or Atari STs or something equally cool, instead of boring PCs with trailing-edge technologies.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
God I love it when people twist the Ugly Reality of Bill Gates into the Beautiful Legend of Bill Gates. Yeah, he built one of the most successful companies ever, using dirty tricks, outright theft, and funding backhanded lawsuits against competitors.
Meanwhile, the Open Source community, usually reviled by people like you as the "communist bad guys" have built an entire software stack that is available to the world free of charge. If you had to put a dollar sign behind the distribution of code used worldwide, it would amount to BILLIONS of dollars worth of software available to anyone the world over for free of charge. How many hundreds of thousands of people, their families and their communities, are now employed in places like South America, China, Africa, etc thanks to the generous spirit of the Open Source community? How many MORE people will have the opportunity to learn new modern technologies thanks to the availability of open source software? THe B&MG foundation is a great way to redistribute wealth that was accumulated by questionable means, but the open source movement is a far more effective way to build and maintain the health of impoverished areas that wouldn't otherwise be able to afford the costs that do nothing but line the pockets of organizations like the B&MG foundation.
As they say, you can feed a man with a fish for a day, or you can teach him to fish and feed him for life.
And how did the Lisa sell? Yeah.
There is a big difference between technologically advanced and actually able to get anywhere in the market. If it weren't for the "You want to go here today" attitude of Microsoft, a lot of people wouldn't realize why they wanted a personal computer. This was still the era of "I believe there is a world market for at most 5 computers." (Yes, by the time MS got started, many large companies and universities had mainframes and workstations, but it's still a long way from workstations to home PCs.)
I've never met Ozzie, and I wasn't favorably impressed by Lotus Notes, but it was at least shipped on a schedule.
We've seen that MS fails utterly when trying to make major innovations in their products. If they switch instead to shipping bug fixes and minor feature additions on a 12 to 18 month cycle, they might be able to preserve their near-monopoly for a decade or more. Another Longhorn though, and they're in serious trouble.
Meanwhile those of us in the rest of the industry will benefit as MS becomes the new IBM: still massive, but stripped of the power to coerce anybody's choices of technology. We'll know we're there when Dell and HP feel safe enough to offer Linux, BSD, or whatever else you want pre-installed.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I resent that. Why is it that every time a woman convinces a man to do something (against which he might not even have had strong feelings) she's controlling him? You know, it's entirely possible that Bill wasn't too averse to the idea of donating some of his money to charity, and his wife might have just given him that nudge.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
This will be my final post with slashdot, i'll be moving to digg for my news after today.
This guy wants to quit his day to day responsibilities to give away his money to the less fortunate and all you guys want to do is bash him. Hey, I like Linux, I own a Mac and have tons of Windows experience, but just because you don't like his business practices or his OS dosn't give you the right to belittle him. Will you manage to give away 80% of your fortune before you die? Didn't think so fucktard!
Give the guy a break, he's one of the few modern day humanitarians!
My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
You must be new here, etc. etc.
Thing is, the Slashdot-crowd is becoming increasingly singleminded when it comes to issues such as Copyright Infringment, Micro$oft (never forget the dollar sign, or you'll never blend in!) and the Bush Administration. I blame the moderation system. Pimping Linux and Booing Bill, if done with some degree of artfulness, is a surefire way to get modded up. Why take the contrarian position if your point of view is going to be modded "Troll" or "Flamebait" in a matter of nanoseconds?
For what it's worth, I agree with you. Microsoft's business practices can be questioned (though they're not much worse than other companies in similar situations), but the humanitarian efforts of Bill Gates should not be underestimated or scoffed at. Sure, he's still filthy rich despite how much he has given, but if he was as evil as many slashdotters would like to have it, why wouldn't he keep it all? Or spend the money to build an evil headquarter in an inactive volcano?
One of a Kind <-- You probably won't be interested..
Yeah. Yeah, maybe Hitler wasn't a bad guy either. Maybe the guy who ordered the deaths of millions of his own citizens wasn't as bad as the guy who runs an extremely successful business on buggy software releases.
I, Anonymous Coward, call Godwin on your bullshit. And it is bullshit. Even if Gates deserves nothing but contempt, you have to be deranged to think Hitler has anything to do with Gates' philanthropy.
'Does giving away drug money make someone a "good guy"?'
Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly makes you a far better man that the one who kept the drug money -- even if it was about your image. Tax the idiots (of which there are legions) and give it to Africa. Frankly, there are parallels to Robin Hood that could be made -- after all, Robin Hood supplanted leadership of the Merry Men and consolidated the entire highway-robbery cartel.
But frankly, what makes you think he gives a shit about his image? For that matter, I think he has a remarkably good image in the non-geek crowd even without the philanthropy, just for being a successful businessman.
And what if he does give a shit about his image? Fine, then let him improve his image. It's amazing that people can twist legitimate charity into a bad thing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If I had the kind of money these guys carry around, that's EXACTLY where I'd be plugging it.
Even for my smaller money, that is the one and only place I'd think of donating putting it.
There's nothing even remotely on the scale of the amount of good to humanity in general, to EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US, that comes close dealing aging a blow. The amount of subsequent evils this would postpone, reduce or even, at some point, completely obliterate, from cancer to heart disease to any other form of our bodies growing frail, falling apart, and eventually killing 100,000 of us *each day*, is by many orders of magnitude bigger than feeding any number of kids in Africa. In the long term, even to the kids in Africa themselves.
Every dollar in places such as the multi-million M-Prize competition encourages 10-20$ in research, if past competitions such as the X-Prize are to serve as an indicator.
Every dollar spent on targeted research (as opposed to research for the sake of research, only stumbling on useful anti-aging applications by chance) towards fixing things we *know* deteriorate in our bodies and that ideas (that require research) on how to fixing them are on the table, is nothing short of helping humanity as a whole. In the most literal sense of the word. Every dollar there increases our (read: your and my) chances of benefiting from them and living *significantly* longer (read: more than the 5-8 years on average that the linear graph anticipates for us at this stage. 15 Would be great. 25 Would be wonderful. And if those 25 get us to the point when better treatments are available that can keep us vigorous another 15 years, you won't see me objecting to that either).
Your sarcasm as put forth by the quotes is misplaced.
Real Anti-Aging research (as opposed to the cosmetic/snake-oil industry that shares the same name) that targets aging on the cellular level, is the by-far single most important charity one can donate to.
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Gates did force a power-hungry company on us - but he forced a power-hungry company that made a profit from popularizing the personal computer. I doubt the PC would be quite as popular today as it is if it weren't for Gates.
Frankly, I think the PC became popular in spite of Bill Gates, not because of him.
We should really thank IBM, for creating a PC design that (unlike Apple's) could be "commoditized", and then Compaq, for creating the clone industry. That's what really led to the popularity of the PC, not the mediocre software that ran on it.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Hi, I'm posting anonymously because I've moderated in the thread.
I use a modified threshold for viewing comments (-2 to 'funny', for example), and I view only at level 5. Of the messages currently modded +5 for me, there are seven posts that are positive or congradulatory regarding Bill Gates. There are three posts that are simply factual (clarifying his role as Chairman, for example), and zero posts that bitch about Gates/Microsoft (in other words, posts that are following the "surefire way to get modded up).
I think any population as large as the Slashdot crowd is going to have it's supply of vocal morons, but there are quite a few thoughtful people around as well.
Guys like Gates, Jobs and such are realizing that they've out lived the challenges of their field. Think about it, the challenges are not new nowadays [to them], and it's only about market positioning, ego, and politics. Really, I don't see any new wiz-bang discovery in tech for another 4 years at the current situation. Now only if Ellison would get the picture, we can move the industry forward, faster.
As for Microsoft itself, they do know that companies live and die, and they see it--they're fighting for survival and playing fair isn't always the right strategy.
You could always use Slashdot AND digg.
Somewhat surprisingly, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
C-x C-s C-x k
What's funny is you just posted a comment about how messed up the moderation system is, and yet you get modded up to +5 for pointing out the flaws, and supporting Bill Gates. Guess it's not as messed up as you thought it was.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Obviously, slashdot is mostly visited by people who use free software, and Microsoft under Bill Gates has tried all thing they can to kill free software.
I'm sure that a lot of people here will forgive Bill Gates if adopts open standards and stopped fighting dirty, for example see IBM, which was a figure of hate sometime back.
He is a business man, I judge him by his business practices primarily. His philantropy while it is phenomenal, does not dimish the fact that his company's business practices are dirty.
Actually, predicting that you'll be modded down or complaining about how the moderation system is going to screw you is one of the surefire ways to make sure you get mod points on slashdot. The mods don't want to look like assholes and don't want to prove you right. Why do you think posts that say "expecting the mod down in 3...2...1..." almost always end up with +4 or +5? The simple fact is that doing that sort of thing is basically asking to be martyred, and people refuse to martyr you.
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
I call bullshit. /governments/ not the people. At least the Foundation can give it to independent organizations/people.
the quote "Don't forget, for every Bill Gates, there have to be many "less fortunate" to be exploited^W marketed to" just bleeds ignorance.
1. Almost all of the people he is trying to help via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wouldn't be helped by American tax dollars anyway. And before you say "foreign aid", remember that the money we give to other countries goes to the
2. I'm not going to defend goods/money laundering, but do you really live in such a fantasy world that you think that if the US Government had a bunch more money that anything would be better? They would waste it on more earmarks and pork barrel crap and we would still have the same problems. The amount of funding going to important areas is basically kept to as high as it can be without cutting into the politicians pet projects (read, pork for their state) but they won't put it low enough to piss people off, because they might then catch on to the scam.
For every bill gates there are LESS, less fortunate people. New industries are created (example, a huge section of the IT market), and tons of new jobs are created. Just because there arent as many people as wealthy as him does not mean he has done something bad.
Also, maybe you should get into your head just what "less fortunate means".
We are so pampered in the US and don't understand that "less fortunate" here basically means "not living comfortably". "Less fortunate" in say, Africa, parts of Asia, parts of the middle east, etc means at risk of death a lot of the time.
Quite frankly, I am glad that the money is going someplace other than the Government, just about anywhere else would be better.
Constant Pie econonics is FUD
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
So a charity with 40 billion $ is going to outweight a Software Industry worth of thousands of billion dollars. Now Bill Gates is a sort of Robin Hood. It stole from the rich to give to the poor.
:)
Drug dealers in South America also benefit the poor peasants. I guess the end do justify the means
Let's be honest. We have no way to know whether Microsoft (and the resulting charity) had not been there, the world would be a better or worse place today.
I personally think that companies like Ubuntu create more value for the people. All the people.
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
What does legal have to do with right or wrong?
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?