Bill Gates Steps Aside at Microsoft

Last week, Bill Gates retired from full-time work at the world's biggest computer software company, Microsoft.  He will remain chairman of the company he established with Paul Allen in nineteen seventy-five. 

Microsoft grew at a time when personal computers, or PCs, were replacing big mainframe computers as the main computing tools.  He showed that huge profits could be made in software as PCs increasingly were found "on every desk and in every home."

That is, software is the kind of product that increases in value as more people buy and use it.

Devices like "smart phones" connect people to the Internet.  Google has become a leader in Internet Web searching and advertising.  Microsoft has struggled to change with the new computer environment.  Its efforts to sell music and its latest operating system, Vista, have not been big successes.  And an attempt this year to buy Yahoo for over forty-seven billion dollars failed. 

In two thousand, he gave the job of chief executive officer to Steve Ballmer, a friend of his since their years at Harvard University.  Mister Ballmer has been with Microsoft since nineteen eighty.

He developed the business model that put the Windows operating system on about ninety percent of the world's one billion PCs.  Microsoft now has almost ninety thousand employees.  

 At fifty-two years old, Bill Gates is currently the third richest man in the world. He is worth about fifty-eight billion dollars.  He remains Microsoft's biggest shareholder. 

The foundation is the world's largest charity with over thirty-seven billion dollars.  It provides money for health, education and other projects, mostly in developing countries.

Transcripts and archives of our programs are at voaspecialenglish.com.  I'm Steve Ember.