Goodbye Bill Gates

Bill Gates logged off on Friday after 33 years in day-to-day control of the world's biggest software company.

 Gates, 52, is retiring to spend more time giving away his fortune. In a glossy video produced by Microsoft to mark the occasion, he expressed quiet satisfaction: "We've really achieved the ideal of what I wanted Microsoft to become."

He will remain part-time chairman of the board, but the reign of the one-time boy wonder is officially over. After a trip to the Beijing Olympics he plans to set up an office in Seattle's Eastside to delve into the world's medical, biological and environmental challenges for his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"I'll miss doing the work here," Gates told reporters this week. "This is a big milestone."

He has been gradually "transitioning" out of Microsoft for two years and to many in the technology industry the company itself has been fading from prominence - it hasn't released a blockbuster product for 10 years and its mantle as a leading-edge innovator has been usurped by Google.

Yet Rob Helm, research director for an independent consultancy, Directions on Microsoft, says Gates kept a close eye on the company until relatively recently through "Bill G reviews". "A team would go into his office with other interested parties and Gates would grill them about the project they were working on - both from a business and a technical standpoint," says Helm.

These sessions, says Helm, could be sorely missed: "The Bill G review was Microsoft's compass to keep all its groups pointing in the same direction. And only he could really do that - only he had that depth of knowledge."

Microsoft's history has been peppered with controversy over its robust attitude to competition. In the 1990s, its practice of embedding Internet browsers in operating systems caused a particular furore, making it tough for rivals such as Netscape to lure customers. The company has repeatedly been accused of making it hard for rival developers to make applications compatible with its operating systems.

"He could be calculating, devious and brutal," says Marc Aronson, author of a soon-to-be-released book, "Bill Gates: Up Close". "On the other hand, he's created something - he is a builder."

 When Microsoft was threatened with a break-up by the US competition authorities and fined by the European commission, Gates's reputation reached a nadir. A US judge described the company in 2000 as "untrustworthy".

Since then, Gates has reinvented himself as a philanthropist. "Gates always likes to be at a knife-edge point between absolute success and absolute disaster," says Aronson. "Being the richest, or third-richest, guy in the world is not a challenge any more. But fighting malaria is a challenge because there's a high chance of failing."

Critics say that Microsoft has struggled to grasp the trends shaping the latest generation of the internet, dubbed "Web 2.0". The company has resorted to trying to buy its way in by snapping up a stake in Facebook last year and through its recent aborted attempt to buy Yahoo.

 Gates is likely to spend more time with his three young children at his mansion overlooking Lake Washington, but the business world hasn't quite seen the last of him. For future investments, he says he is interested only in "dramatic" scientific breakthroughs that would tie in with his approach of "improving the state of mankind".