"I will continue to be involved with important decisions," said Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp, at a press conference May 7, 2008. He announced that he will retire from frontline management on July 1, 2008.
"Microsoft will become my part-time job, and my full-time job will shift to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation," he said.
Gates said, "A new decade of digitalization is set to begin," emphasizing the need to establish a new platform by connecting software and services. "Windows Vista and Microsoft Office will be the fundamental technologies of the platform," Gates said.
He also revealed that the next version of Windows Media Center will support "ISDB-T," a Japanese digital broadcasting specification and that Microsoft will offer its development tools to students for free.
Commenting on how computers will change in the next ten years, Gates said the methods for interaction between computers and people will change.
"Methods that are more natural for human beings, such as pens, voices and faces, for example, will be used instead of keyboards and mice," he said.
As for locations where computers will be operating then, "We can think of three forms, namely local, server computing and SaaS, but it will depend on user choices whether the computer will be driven by the client or the server and how the balance between them will be," Gates said.
Regarding Microsoft's withdrawal from the attempted acquisition of Yahoo! Inc, he stated, "Microsoft will independently advance its online business. Although Google Inc currently enjoys a large share in the search market, we believe we can catch up with and outperform Google through technical innovation. We welcome the competition."
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