Bill Gates on the future, the past and the brilliance of fertilizer…

Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard University more than 30 years ago to run Microsoft, steps down from full-time work on Friday. He'll remain chairman and a part-time Microsoft employee.

The Microsoft co-founder took some time out of his schedule recently to sit down with silicon.com sister site CNET News.com to offer some reflections on the early days of the PC market, as well as thoughts on where Microsoft is now and what technologies he will need in his new role, working full time for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Nearing transition time, the things playing on his mind are…
Bill Gates: Well, for 33 years I've worked at Microsoft and come in every day, and thought about what are the new things we need to do, and what's my personal role in that, a lot of e-mail, lot of meetings, lot of product reviews. So, in a sense it's hard for me to project what it's going to be like for me or Microsoft when I'm not here.

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As long as I'm here, I'm still sending a lot of email and in a lot of meetings, and so the real change in terms of people having an opportunity to step up and do things, to some degree, will be after 1 July when my involvement is only a very specific involvement on particular projects as opposed to the overall strategy thing.

Everybody likes to pick the current competitive battles that we're in, and kind of think, okay, those are the big things. For me, I'd pick, like, tablet or interactive TV that are, according to me - but I've been over-optimistic before - on the verge of big, big impact. So, I've been sending a lot of mail to the tablet and interactive TV team, sort of sending the mail I would have sent three months from now, now, just giving them encouragement. Because, you know, all the big successes, whether it's Office integration or Windows, it takes a long time for those things to get established.

We thought it would be a good idea for me to go to the Windows 7 group and go see the work, and I was thrilled. Steven Sinofsky took me around, showed me what they're doing.

On product group farewells…
Well, in terms of big meetings, that's pretty much done. Like the Windows group had a meeting, and the Surface group had a meeting, but this is more just sitting down with the top executives, so Stephen Elop, Craig Mundie, Kevin Turner.

The timing is actually pretty good. We just did our business reviews. We do the business planning, which is for the next fiscal year, which starts 1 July. So, we have the plans in place, and I sat through that last set of reviews but it's a perfect example of something that as just a board member working on projects I won't sit in those business plan reviews in the future. I mean, Steve [Ballmer] may ask me to sit in on one that touches directly on something I'm doing but the default is that I'm not there at all.

For more from this Q&A click here…