In the end of an era, Bill Gates announced today that he will transition out of day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft over the next 2 years. Bill will devote most of his time to charity work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but remain as chairman of Microsoft and be a senior technical advisor. Ray Ozzie, he of Lotus Notes fame (sic.), will become the new chief software architectie.

Bill has guided Microsoft to a market cap of $225.14B and is personally worth about 9% of that amount - he indicates that almost all of his wealth will be returned to society, mostly by means of the foundation, which has dispersed just over $10B to date.

Insofar as it’s possible to summarize a life via simplistic and bombastic epithets laced with hyperbole, while some may say of Gates: “Behind every great fortune there is a great crime“, we instead lean towards something that’s more along the lines of “Here was a Caesar! when comes such another?“.

Microsoft Announces Plans for July 2008 Transition for Bill Gates - Microsoft press release, June 15, 2006

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 10:52 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.