Microsoft founder Bill Gates has said that his decision to devote more time to philanthropy was a "personal choice" as he felt an increased desire to spend more time with his charity foundation, which spends millions of dollars in India to fight HIV/AIDS and other diseases.
Gates, who announced his surprise decision last week to step down from the day-to-day running of Microsoft in 2008, said he would have continued working "super hard" for developing software if the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn't exist."Clearly if I didn't have the foundation I would be staying here full time and working super, super hard because I love working on software. But I was feeling an increased desire to spend more time on foundation work," Gates told Newsweek in an interview.
A significant amount of his charity work is concentrated in India, where the foundation has committed nearly USD 300 million from its USD 30 billion corpus to fight AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases.
Gates, the world's richest man who announced on Thursday his decision of handing over the title of Microsoft "chief software architect" to Ray Ozziesaid in two years time said, "it was always clear that that day would come at some point.
It's actually pretty rare for somebody to have two things to do that they love and feel like they're important and challenging." The software mogul said he will "miss being at the centre of activity and making these hard decisions" at Microsoft, but maintained he would be happy working for his foundation.
