Click to play videoNew Delhi: Bill Gates, the man who initiated millions of people around the world into the computer age, resigned from his job as head of Microsoft on Friday. Gates will now devote all his time and his billions to charity.
At $ 58 billion, he's one of the world's richest men and his company Microsoft is the world's biggest software firm.
"The change we are announcing today is not a retirement; it’s a reordering of my priorities. There's a common thread in my different work at Microsoft and at the Foundation. It's a sense of optimism that smart, committed people with the right support and vision can have a huge impact," the Microsoft co-founder said.
Gates will now be devoting his time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Started ten years ago, it's the largest private charity in the world. The foundation, which is worth more than $ 38 billion, funds international efforts to curb AIDS, malaria, polio, poverty and illiteracy in the third world.
Gates programmed his first computer at age 13. In 1975, he dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft. In 1980, the company wrote the world's first operating system for computers —MS DOS. By 1986, Microsoft was a listed company and at age 31, Gates, the world's youngest billionaire. A ruthless CEO, Gates made Microsoft a monopolising giant, much hated by competitors. Yet, his worst critics still admit he's changed the world.
“If you think about the way we lived our lives in the 70s and the early 80s and how we do now and how we are constantly sitting in front of a computer, we are typing on a keyboard, we have technology with us all the time, and a lot of that has to do with what he envisioned way back then,” Editor-in-Chief, PC Magazine, Lance Ulanoff said.
“People will understand that while there were things that weren't so great about what Microsoft has done and even what Bill Gates did, but by and large what he did was very good and very valuable to society," Ulanoff added.
Gates will still visit Microsoft once a week. But it's Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who'll now call all the shots in the company's future ventures.
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