Today we (Msft employees) received an email from CEO Steve Ballmer informing us that there would be an important press conference this afternoon.

Tuning in to the webcast, I found out that it was to announce that Bill Gates will be reprioritizing his life, and leaving his position as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect in 2 years time (2008), in order to engage full-time with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (the largest charitable foundation in the world).

Bill will remain as Chairman of the board of directors at that time, but in a significantly reduced, advisory role, and in any case, serving as Chairman is very different from serving as a company employee, since he would be looking at the company from the perspective of  a majority shareholder.

I'm not at all surprised at this announcement, only that it took so long. After his late mother (Mary Gates) persuaded him to get into philanthropy sooner rather than later, and after he married Melinda French and became a father(which softened him as a human being considerably), I could see that he was devoting an increasing amount of energy and attention to building up his foundation, and that the foundation's work was where his heart was increasingly moving towards.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation focuses on two big areas (to the best of my limited knowledge - there may be much more, and likely is, considering their endowment amounts to the tens of billions of dollars). They focus on 3rd world immunization and communicable disease prevention (through distributing and encouraging the use of contraceptives, etc.), and increasing literacy throughout the world (for example by providing local libraries with Internet-connected computers).

I applaud him for this move. He has done great things with Microsoft, one of the most important being establishing a corporate leadership that is ready to take over the reins of the company and run it well. The first generation of Singapore's leaders (LKY's generation) took great pains to ensure a competent set of successors were in place, and that there was a smooth transfer of power. It would appear that Gates is doing the same with Microsoft.

While some company employees may be a bit disappointed that their great leader is moving on, perhaps they may take some comfort in the fact that he is moving on to a much greater and noble cause. Microsoft has undoubtedly transformed the world with its software (for better or for worse is an argument best left to another time), but as Gates said (reminiscent of Spiderman), "With great wealth comes great power." Gates is now in the unique position of being able to dramatically improve the welfare and lives of the millions of suffering peoples in the third world nations of the world.

I'm sure that it must hurt him to slowly let go of his baby. To slowly release the reins of a company that he has run for so long, that he has become almost inextricably intertwined with. Yet, his willingness to do this at this point in time shows his foresight and his realization that the time to act to better the world is not in the future, but right now.

Bill Gates, villianized as you may have been by the rest of the world (in some instances at least), you're my personal hero, not for acquiring all the wealth that you did, but for what you are doing with it.