Bill Gates Leaving His Fortune to Charity, Not His Kids

[shan]

BY Terrence O'Brien, posted Jun 20th 2008 at 4:01PM


While being the child of Bill and Melinda Gates no doubt has its share of perks, financial security may not necessarily be one of them. Bill Gates has promised that he will leave his vast $58 billion fortune to the charity started by him and his wife, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and not to his offspring.

Gates -- who is officially stepping down as the chairman of Microsoft next Friday -- said of the decision that he and his wife made, "We want to give it back to society in the way that it will have the most positive impact."

The money will go to fund educational and health projects around the globe, which is certainly a much more positive use than buying a yacht for the kids.

While being the child of Bill and Melinda Gates no doubt has its share of perks, financial security may not necessarily be one of them. Bill Gates has promised that he will leave his vast $58 billion fortune to the charity started by him and his wife, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and not to his offspring.

Gates -- who is officially stepping down as the chairman of Microsoft next Friday -- said of the decision that he and his wife made, "We want to give it back to society in the way that it will have the most positive impact."

The money will go to fund educational and health projects around the globe, which is certainly a much more positive use than buying a yacht for the kids.

[shan]

GREAT man , he will be still the richest man in the world  in his next life

gong de wu liang

[shan]

nice family

[The Smoking Man]

It would be nicer if he gave it back to the companies he killed using illegal business practices and maybe gave the world a refund on the operating systems he produced that never worked.

[The Statutory Ape]

I'm sure that mummy and daddy have enough money to put their children through school and the connections to get them positions as little corporate dictators long before they die.

[The Smoking Man]

I'm sure that is how he got started.

I believe his father was a corporate lawyer for IBM.

[shan]

BBC NEWS

As Bill Gates finally bows out of Microsoft to pursue his charity interests, we look at some of the hits and misses of the software company he founded.


MISSES

NO MORE SPAM

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In early 2004, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland Mr Gates predicted that within two years the problem of spam - junk e-mail - would be solved.

A triumvirate of technical innovations, financial measures and filters would soon make it uneconomical for anyone to indulge in the practice of sending unsolicited e-mail in bulk.

Four years further on and it is clear that Mr Gates prediction has not been borne out. If anything spam has got worse.

Now junk mail, be it spam or error messages, make up more than 80% of all e-mail traffic.

While technical innovations have reduced the amount that makes it into e-mail inboxes, billions of junk mail messages are sent every day and many spammers make a very healthy living out of it.

THE INTERNET

The rise of the net and the success of the world wide web took a lot of people by surprise - Bill Gates included.

In 1995 Mr Gates co-wrote a book entitled The Road Ahead which gave little mention to the rising tide of interest in the net and its looming influence.

Later editions of the book were re-written to correct the omission but there is no doubt that Microsoft came late to the dotcom boom.

In late 1995 following the writing of a famous memo entitled "The Internal Tidal Wave" Mr Gates re-worked Microsoft to put the internet at the heart of everything it did.

Despite the dramatic turnaround Microsoft has always been seen as a laggard when it comes to online life.

Google, whose founders met at college in 1995, has set the pace that Microsoft struggles to match.

WINDOWS SECURITY

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Bill Gate on the Vista operating system
In January 2002 Bill Gates sent out one of his regular memos that defined the priorities for Microsoft over the coming months and years.

That memo was entitled "Trustworthy Computing" and declared an intent to put the security and integrity of user's data at the heart of everything Microsoft did.

Internally at Microsoft that meant lots of training courses for staff working on software and updates for Windows products to make good on this promise.

Windows Vista was intended to be the ultimate result of this change of strategy and has built in to it several innovations and technologies that try to limit what hi-tech criminals can do to it.

Despite Microsoft's efforts hi-tech crime is booming and Windows PCs are at the heart of it. Some anti-virus companies now report that there are more than one million items of malware in existence and Windows PCs are the target of choice for the bad guys.

INNOVATION

It is something of a myth that Microsoft is a hive of innovation that regularly pumps out products that take on the world.

In reality it is a good populariser of ideas but few can be said to have originated on Microsoft's campus or at the research labs it has set up around the world.

The innovations that it has ridden to success on - the graphical user interface, the mouse, spreadsheets, the web, the web browser - all started life elsewhere.

Even now the company regularly pays huge sums to snap up companies, such as Hotmail, that are experts in areas where it is lacking.

In some senses this is not a surprise as few investors are likely to bankroll a start-up that has the declared aim of tackling Microsoft head-on. Even so given its research budget - billions every year - Microsoft rarely wows the world with its new products.