Bill Gates steps down as head of Microsoft

Nearly 30 years after setting up a small IT firm with his childhood friend Paul Allen, Bill Gates is finally stepping down as the chairman of the world's biggest software company.

Gates, who is one of the world's richest men with an estimated $58 billion fortune, will today step down from his role at Microsoft to concentrate on the charitable foundation he set up with his wife, Melinda.

Although he will become a full-time philanthropist, Bill Gates will remain on Microsoft's board in a non-executive role, and as the company's largest shareholder.

A programming genius, Gates’s instinctive business sense helped turn Microsoft from a small 30-man operation based in Albuquerque, New Mexico to a multi-billion dollar corporation that employs 80,000 people in 100 countries.

Gate’s masterstroke came in 1980 when IBM, the computer manufacturer, approached him to design an operating system for its PCs.

Gates created the PC-DOS system for IBM for a one off-fee of $80,000 but crucially kept the copyright for the product, which formed the foundation for Microsoft.

The company grew to dominate the desktop with its Windows operating system, first launched in 1985, and used today on 90 per cent of the world’s computers.

Microsoft Office, released in 1989, created the word processor and database tools used in the majority of the world’s homes and offices.

Crucially, Microsoft’s control of the desktop could not be translated to ruling cyberspace. Gates has said that the decision not to create a dedicated search engine was “stupid as hell,” allowing Google to gain dominance over the world wide web.