So Bill Gates has announced that he will significantly reduce he role at Microsoft in 2008, so he can spend more time being involved with the Gates Foundation. In preparation for this, he has already handed over his current role of Chief Software Architect. He will continue as the Chairman of the Board, but his day-to-day role will be reduced.

I'm sure Microsoft will continue fine as they many many really intelligent people there, but it certainly marks the end of an era. Joel Spolsky reminisces about his first review with the man himself, back when he wrote the spec for Visual Basic scripting for Excel.

But good on Bill for putting more effort into his foundation. I'm sure he can do a lot of good with it, and it definitely has enough resources to put to good use. It has assets valued at around US$29 billion, which is incidentally around about a third of New Zealand's GDP.

Posted by Dave Bryant at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)