Bill Gates Steps Down From The Board Of Microsoft

Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft has stepped down from the board of the tech firm. Gates previously held the position of CEO until 2000 when he stepped down to hold the position of Chief Software Architect to spend more time on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Later on, in 2008, Gates left his earlier role to occupy a non-executive chairman on the board and work part-time. The story continues as today the 14^th of March, 2020, Gate steps down from the board. Gates will now serve as a “technology advisor” to the current CEO Satya Nadella, a role he began in 2014 at Nadella’s request.

In a statement from Satya Nadella, he said “The board has benefited from Bill’s leadership and vision. And Microsoft will continue to benefit from Bill’s ongoing technical passion and advice to drive our products and services forward. I am grateful for Bill’s friendship and look forward to continuing to work alongside him to realize our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

William Henry Gates III (Bill Gates) a computer programmer, entrepreneur, and currently the world’s richest man was born on the 28^th day of October 1955 in Seattle, Washington. He co-founded Microsoft Corporation, the world’s largest personal-computer software company.

Gates wrote his first software program at the age of 13. In high school, he helped form a group of programmers who computerized their school’s payroll system and founded Traf-O-Data, a company that sold traffic-counting systems to local governments. In 1975 Gates, then a sophomore at Harvard University, joined his hometown friend Paul G. Allen to develop software for the first microcomputers. They began by adapting BASIC, a popular programming language used on large computers, for use on microcomputers. With the success of this project, Gates left Harvard during his junior year and, with Allen, formed Microsoft.

Largely on the strength of Microsoft’s success, Gates amassed a huge fortune as the company’s largest individual shareholder. He became a billionaire in 1986, and within a decade his net worth had reached into the tens of billions of dollars

Beginning in 1995 and 1996, Gates feverishly refocused Microsoft on the development of consumer and enterprise software solutions for the Internet, developed the Windows CE operating system platform for networking noncomputer devices such as home televisions and personal digital assistants, created the Microsoft Network to compete with America Online and other Internet providers.

In addition to his work at Microsoft, Gates was also known for his charitable work. With his wife, Melinda, he launched the William H. Gates Foundation (now renamed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 1999) in 1994 to fund global health programs. During the latter part of the 1990s, the couple also funded North American libraries through the Gates Library Foundation (renamed Gates Learning Foundation in 1999) and raised money for minority study grants through the Gates Millennium Scholars program.

The Gates Foundation in the wake of COVID-19 has donated $100 million to public health authorities around the world to fight the COVID-19 outbreak and currently partnering with the University of Washington to offer home testing kits for the novel coronavirus to people in the Seattle area.

While Gates will still be at least somewhat involved with the company he founded through his position as a technology advisor, the move marks the furthest step away from running Microsoft.

Most people know theses three things about Bill Gates:

1. The world’s richest man.
2. Co-founder of Microsoft.
3. A philanthropist through the Bill and Melinda Foundation.

But, below are some interesting facts about the current “technical advisor” to the board of Microsft:

1. As a young teenager at Lakeside Prep School, Gates wrote his first computer program on a General Electric computer. It was a version of tic-tac-toe where you play against the computer.
2. Like many other successful tech entrepreneurs, Gates was a college dropout. He left Harvard University in 1975 to fully devote himself to Microsoft.
3. Gates is on record to have said that each of his three kids will only inherit $10 million each. This might sound a lot but in actuality, it is a small amount compared to Gates multi-billion fortune.
4. Gates two daughters and a son were not allowed to use cell phones until the age of 14 even though he founded one of the largest technology companies in the world.
5. Bill Gates is worth an estimated $96.5 billion with a philanthropic organization that has a $50 billion endowment.

Bill Gates, without a single shred of doubt, has impacted the world positively as we see it and we wish him nothing but the best as he now fully focused on his philanthropic work to make the world a much better place.