Gates: From Redmond to philanthropic pastures

Gates: From Redmond to philanthropic pastures

As the billionaire entrepreneur turns in his badge and moves on to philanthropic pastures, he creates ripples of interest all over the world again

Pratima Harigunani

Friday, June 27, 2008

PUNE, INDIA: He is the third richest person in the world after US investor Warren Buffet and Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim. He is one of the 100 people that most influenced the 20th Century according to a TIME list. He's America's most eventful business magnate and has graced the “Forbes 400” list from 1993 through 2007 and also the Forbes list of “The World’s Riches People” from 1995 to 2007.

And from today he opts for a full-time role in the terrains of philanthropy.

The 1955 Seattle born William Henry Gates III is finally relinquishing an identity that has been dominantly instrumental in creating all the other ones that followed.

Today, the co-founder of Microsoft retires officially from a 1975 garage start-up that has grown to become the software and technology giant, now revered as Microsoft Corp.

Not many are able to make billions of net worth out of a childhood fascination with computer code.

And so the 52-year-old Gates deserves all the limelight, hype and hoopla that his last day at Microsoft has strummed up.

Gates has come a long way and has donned many hats right from the onset - a technophile, an entrepreneur, a genius who could recognize the right opportunities and convert them into a big business, a mentor, a chairman, a chief architect, and a charity man.

As a 13-year-old student in Washington, he used to fiddle with programming and computers. He even impressed the school officials and made them allow him to swap computer time for his services.

From Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems and his first brush in the computer industry with Altair BASIC, through the IBM partnership when Microsoft made the BASIC interpreter for the IBM PC and later package Microsoft's PC-DOS to becoming a formidable software giant, Microsoft and Gates have seen it all. What started as a brilliant idea when Gates saw the software and PC business opportunity in Intel 8080 CPU chip as the most affordable chip to run inside a personal computer, soon turned to a northbound flight with co-founder Paul Allen.

There was literally no looking back when Microsoft launched its first retail version of Microsoft Windows in late 80s to a milestone where Microsoft software is used on about 90 per cent of the computers worldwide.

An avid techie, and probably the most talked about geek, who in the early days reviewed every line of computer code written, has continued to maintain his love and time as a technophile even as he occupied most of his Microsoft's hours in a management and executive role.

Gates is known to be an active software developer particularly on the company's programming language products. But throughout Microsoft's growth he has been hands-on with company's product strategy and known as a smart shopper with many smart acquisitions and savvy-cum-audacious businessmen amidst many anti-trust suits and monopoly charges or litigations.

Gates, probably one of the most famous, rich and successful entrepreneurs has been equally admired as a suave techie and criticized for his alleged anti-competitive business tactics.

He later took charge of Microsoft in a different avatar as the Chief Software Architect after he gave the CEO reins to his Harvard peer and friend Steve Ballmer.

Listed last with an approximate net worth of around $58.0 billion, Gates now chooses to follow more dedicatedly and whole timely a track that influential friends like David Rockefeller and Warren Buffet have treaded.

About two years back, Gates announced that he would transition out of his day-to-day role to philanthropy and split his responsibilities between Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie.

Featured in TIME’s cover in 1984, 1997 and 1999, Gates has been known to pursue many philanthropic projects, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000 with his wife Melinda French from Dallas, whom he married in 1994.

Some of the projects have been awarded and appreciated with honors like the Order of the Aztec Eagle that Bill and Melinda got for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education, particularly in Mexico.

He would still remain a major shareholder and chairman of company's board of directors at Microsoft.

As an 1998 article by David Gelernter in TIME magazine described him saying, "As for Gates himself, he is no visionary; he is a technology groupie with a genius for showing up, for being at the right place at the right time."

It seems the leap from business to the avowed pursuit of full-time charity is again the right place in Gates's mind for now; even if he leaves behind friends, peers and critics alike missing him.

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