Jap Import

Bill Gates prepares to step down from his role of chairman of the company he founded, Microsoft.
He plans to stand down at the end of the month after 33 years.

Just thought the geeks amongst us would like to know

bob269

I thought he already did 6-12months ago?

Iain Young

Didn't he announce this like 6 months or so ago?

Good on him though. Respect for anyone who can build an empire like MS from almost nothing. There's an episode of the Money Program on Friday (7pm, BBC2) which is dedicated to talking about the whole Bill Gates / Microsoft story. Could be interesting

pimmo2000

iTrader: (6)

He is still a major share holder though.

Jap Import

He is in fact still Chairman to this date, and only gives the title up month end.

Dr.No

Have you watched "Pirates of Silicon Valley" Iain - well worth finding and viewing... The whole MS / Apple story from the early days.

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

watched it

Iain Young

No, I've not seen that one. Must keep an eye out for it

GaryK

I dont know why the beeb get second raters to interview him though. Last time it was that buffoon paxman (their best interviewer, really???) and all he rambled on about, and was completely fixated by was gates' wealth asking dumb schoolboy questions like "Is it true if you dropped $10k you wouldnt bother picking it up as you'd earn more in interest in the same time?"

I mean come on, he's supposed to be a good interviewer? Mind boggling! Tonight its the turn of Fiona Bruce, probably another mind numbing experience and major boll0ck drop missign the chance to ask some interesting questions.

chrisowe

What do you mean, questions like why does windows keep crashing.

bob269

We had a linux sql server at work which crashed daily

I've total respect for the guy, he's injecting a large chunk of his wealth (30 billion) into charity, the interest he earns he would have a hard time spending but thats besides the point, i genuinely think he's never been money driven.

corradoboy

Computers don't have fences or doors, so they don't need either Gates or Windows.

33 years trying to catch up with Steve Jobs, if it weren't for the money he'd consider himself a failure

bob269

Call me niave but i had to google steve jobs

corradoboy

In short, he wrote the OS that Bill turned into Windoze after knicking it. Although, Steve knicked it from Xerox I believe Like most plagiarism, it was, is, and will never be as good as the original

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

Dave
Actually steve and a few other Apple engineers appropriated parts of the technologies that Xerox Parc had invented, the mouse, the GUI, WYSISWYG etc and then turned it into something which you now still use today in OS X.

In the lawsuit between Apple & MS, it was deemed that MS had done the same thing, though just on a larger scale. That was without doubt one of Gates biggest achievements after MS-DOS. You got to give the guy some credit for his achievements, regardless of some of the ways he got there.

Shark Man

Gates: Best salesman in the world: Buying the rights to someone's OS and selling it on to IBM - genius.

Don't think Tim Patterson thought very much of that at the time, nor Gary Kildall who Tim based his OS on .

boxst

I just watched the money program and it was interesting. I think that Bill Gates has done a phenomenal job. Whatever you may say about Windows (Microsoft) it is because of them I can send a document or a presentation to almost anyone in the world and they can display it.

To validate that, I grew up in the age where there were operating systems everywhere and it was very irritating that it was incredibly complex to share anything.

Whether Microsoft will succeed or (finally) the distributed computing idea where software is held centrally and run locally (a la Google) wins it doesn't take away from the impact that Microsoft had.

Steve

spectrum48k

Not the best interview by any means, but interesting nonetheless.

Anyone who's kept his company at the top of the pile for as long as he has deserves massive praise.