The last time Bill Gates played an active role at Microsoft, as chief software architect, he witnessed the company muffing its earliest efforts to become a major player in search, smartphones and tablet computers.
In the six years since then, he has watched as the technology industry changed without him. The personal computer era that Microsoft so ably dominated during and after Mr. Gates’s heyday as Microsoft’s chief executive has started to fade away. Now, the focus is on social media and mobile devices that run in large part on cloud computing.
And what technologies has Mr. Gates, who turned to philanthropy, been most vocal about during all that change? Things like self-contained toilets and vaccines.
“I am a little obsessed with fertilizer,” reads the first sentence of a column he wrote for a recent issue of Wired, the technology magazine.
Related Posts
- 10000Satya Nadella is Microsoft Corp.'s new CEO. But he ascends as co-founder Bill Gates returns to a more central role at a company struggling to catch up in mobile and other fast-moving technologies. Mr. Gates is giving up the chairman's role to become technical adviser to Mr. Nadella, the 22-year Microsoft veteran who was named…
- 53Why is America’s largest cable TV company buying its biggest rival for $44 billion? Well, not to oversimplify things, but that’s easy to explain: http://qz.com/176837/one-sentence-and-six-charts-explain-why-comcast-is-buying-time-warner-cable/
- 35Yes, Twitter has a growth problem. But more than that, the company has another headache: Getting people to stick around after signing up. According to people close to the company, Twitter has seen more than one billion registrations to its service over the past seven and a half years. Stack…
- 33With the simple flick of its finger, Angry Birds was the launchpad for the multi-billion pound mobile games industry we see today, but while many see it as a an overnight success story for Finnish startup Rovio, the truth is somewhat different. Speaking to IBTimes UK at Rovio's colourful headquarters…
- 32Let’s start with the premise that Twitch, the video-game watching network, is the next ESPN – you know, the jewel in Disney’s crown that, by itself, is worth $50.8 billion. Like ESPN, Twitch is about live competition, and, like ESPN, Twitch does exceptionally well in the highly desirable young male demographic.1 Obviously…