Bill Gates steps down as the Chairman of Microsoft on July 1st to transition to full time philanthropic efforts with the Gates Foundation. However, I wonder how effective Bill will be other than writing checks. You see Bill's never played well with others.

"Hear what Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates had to say during his last official visit to the UK before he 'retires' later this year. IT PRO attended the special event hosted by the Institute of Directors (IoD) and, after Gates had done his thing there was a Q&A session with the billionaire and industry figurehead." And also note how some of his answers match up rather nicely with F/OSS.

Bill Gates' Searete is looking to make money from natural disasters. IT HAS been a long time since we last wrote about Searete, which is Bill Gates'; very own patent-trolling firm [1, 2, 3]. As the Gates-backed Intellectual Ventures demonstrates, these sleeping giant trolls sooner or later go offensive and proceed to extortion.

Microsoft is beset with competition from all sides, unlike any it has seen in decades, and Bill Gates, who co-founded the company 32 years ago, still intends to step away next year as planned. But so far, Mr. Gates, Microsoft’s 51-year-old chairman, shows no sign of fading away.

To pay so much attention to Bill Gates' retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers.

Will Microsoft become more open to open source with the departure of Bill Gates? It’s a tough call. Observers from both the open and closed source worlds say the exit of Microsoft’s longtime leader won’t usher in a GPL era at the company but it will likely accelerate what is already a changing attitude in Redmond.

In a dramatic development, Bill Gates of Microsoft has taken over as the new Secretary-General of ISO. The outgoing Secretary-General, Illbeser Vile said that since most of the ISO members now belong to Microsoft, this is the most appropriate course of action.

As the cold war between the techno giants- Microsoft and Google continues the big shots are up with big comments. We caught up with Microsoft's founder speculations and round-up on Google Chrome OS. In an interview CNET, Bill Gates went head-on stating Google's Chrome OS looks a lot like a familiar foe: Linux.

LAST YEAR we mentioned Microsoft's "Jihad" talk (the term it uses a lot internally, even Bill Gates). The Microsoft ecosystem is said to be working very closely together and some call it "the Microsoft movement" (a term which is usually used in private conversations). Others even call it a/the "Microsoft religion", so the following new post hit a certain nerve.