Bill Gates… The Philanthropist

You have probably heard that Bill Gates is retiring, the extent to which he is ‘retiring’ is not crystal clear, nevertheless when he has time in between his new philanthropy goals he will most probably be going back to Microsoft on occasions, since he remains a large shareholder in Microsoft.

You can hear a snippet of Bill Gates final speech at SeattlePi.com, clearly his final speech was heart felt and he released a croak or two of emotion. Gates closed with,

“You’ve made it so much fun for me, there won’t be a day in my life that I’m not thinking about Microsoft and the great things that it’s doing.”

Watching the BBC’s ‘The Money Programme’ titled, ‘Bill Gates: How a Geek Changed the World’ we learnt a little more about Bill Gates. Fiona Bruce, who interviewed Gates pointed out that he doesn’t emit any sort of power even though he has been the richest man in the world for a large proportion of his life. This is lack of visible power is shown in his farewell video which can be seen at YouTube, it includes the likes of George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore and Jay Z. It depicts Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft and he isn’t afraid to poke a little fun at himself.

(The image the the left shows the original Microsoft team with Gates highlighted)

The programme showed Bill Gates life from 28 October 1955 when he was born, up until 27 June 2008 when he retired from Microsoft. You can find a brief history of his life at the BBC, which shows the key events of his personal and Microsoft years.

We’re sure that he will make waves in charity with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

All this praise, but never forget, the man did bring down Netscape and some might say he crushed smaller businesses to achieve his goals. But where would we be without Windows? (Struggling with Unix possibly)