Bill is moving out to spend more time with his foundation. He's currently the head software architect, but over the next 2 years he's going to slowly phase out all of his responsibility till all that remains is his title.

In other news, Microsoft's stock is at an all time low.

Steve Ballmer's still CEO, but we're working on that

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is has over 30 billion dollars in assets and works for education and global health care.

lol

Bill Gates: Hmm... I have over 40 billion dollars in the bank. I think it's a good time to quit now. Not like I need anymore money than that to play Golf for the rest of my life anyways.

There should be an "oh well" option.

I think that's great. He seems to be better at funding social improvement programs than creating software.

My school is partly funded by that foundation. I say the more time he focuses on my school the better!

No, he's not leaving M$.

He's going to take time out his "day-to-day" schedule to help with his foundation. He's still in it.

And he won't until July 2008.

everybody knocks gates, but in reality he gives more money to charity than anyone else in the world (considering he's the richest that's not so suprising) and the fact that he has done so well for himself in what was at the time an area of industry that didn't look too promising is an amazing achivement.

I mean who here wouldn't want to swap places with the man??

If I were Bill Gates. I would fund the creation of some sort of dooms day device. Though, who says he hasn't already done that!? Windows could be a ticking time bomb! Windows ME could stand for Mighty Explosion!

I know seriously, Mellinda is one hottie.

and she's rich!

Where can i get her number.

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

One of my professors was explaining that it was Bill Gates' plan to eventually donate 95% of his wealth to charity, and leave the rest for his kids. That means they would be left with a paltry 2 billion dollars.

...Your kidding, right?

gbk gbk...

Like you could do better.

Fixed.

With 40 billion dollars I could do 40 billion times better.

maybe he finds her attractive and likes her personality?

Or maybe she was hot 20 years ago, or somethng.

It's sort of like a modern-day robin hood story. Steal money from the masses, save it up till you have 40 billion, then give it out to the ultra-poor and look good doing it. I wonder if this was in his head the whole time, or he just got tired of screwing people over?

Apparently the bloke who's going ot be taking over from him is a bit more into Open Source so we might start to see (eventually) a shift in the focus from "If we protect our code we can pay pros to make it so it's the best" to "If we let other clever people see our code they might think of something our insular people haven't".

I don't begrudge Gates on a massive scale, but I think it'll be good to see some change.

Ok.

GET IT

Micro$oft! THEY HAVE MONEY.

The problem with windows is that no one marketed a viable alternative to the mass market (I know that there's still Macs, and a few people use Linux- but that's not always fessible for everybody- and definately not convenient) soon enough for there to be a serious competitor. It's "our" fault for not supporting alternatives earlier on when we still had the chance (consider the old BBC/Archimedes/Acorn computers- they were awesome, and better than Windows machines at the time, but just not well marketted enough to dominate the home-user market.)

Of course Microsoft are making money off us, but isn't that ultimately the goal for any business- I don't begrude paying for software that I've been using on a daily basis for years. (Just a note so people don't criticise me as a complete Microsoft supporter, I'm running gentoo linux atm :p- but I regularly restart into Windows XP so that I can play games without too much hassle/setting up.)

Oh, and on the subject of Bill Gates- I don't think that it particularly matters that he's stepping down- he's done a lot for the company, but now there are plenty of people probably more qualified than him to make software architecture decisions- and his time will be well spent running his trust foundation. I voted "not care" because there was no "positive" I support his leaving option.