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Ivan Petkov

There is a rarely changing ranking and it is that of the richest people in the world. William Henry Gates III, or as he is known, Bill Gates, a co-founder of software giant Microsoft, has been literally subscribed to the first place in it in recent decades. He is one of those billionaires who have earned their fortune rather than inheriting it.

                                                                        Bill Gates

In January 2000, Bill Gates left the position of CEO of Microsoft and, together with his wife, Melinda, they founded a charity foundation aimed at giving up half of their fortune to charity. Financial genius and philanthropist Warren Buffett had been attracted into this endeavour too. Together, they were able to convince another 100 of the richest people on the planet to participate in the venture. For this purpose, every year, Bill Gates sells part of his shares in Microsoft and analysts predict that if he continues at this rate, he will come out of the company by the end of the decade.

The future of philanthropist may seem quite bright for Bill Gates, but the challenges to the company founded by him are greater than ever. Microsoft, being the sole leader in operating systems for desktop computers and having a huge market share in the corporate sector, has lagged behind with regard to the development of hardware devices as well as of mobile operating systems and related services. To put it in simple terms, the company has been late in presenting an operating system for smartphones and tablets, which is why its competitors in the face of Apple and Google are dominant in these devices.

After a long delay and the initial unsuccessful attempts to seriously interfere in the distribution of this market, Microsoft has decided to completely change its successful model and move towards a closed model similar to that of Apple. The company wants to control every component that builds the PC-ecosystem.

So far, Microsoft has worked with its partners, which produce the hardware running the Windows operating system. During this year, the software giant has made it clear that it wants to control the hardware and the application store from which the applications are being installed on each device such as smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer. In terms of the decline in the sales of traditional computers, this is a risky move and Microsoft partners are not too pleased with this course of developments.

The partners of the company from Redmond are not the only dissatisfied parties. Rumours and analysts claim that the approval of CEO Steve Ballmer in Microsoft was critically low. Such was the investors’ perception as well. Ballmer is only the second person at the head of the company after the withdrawal of Bill Gates. After several months of more overt and hidden internal "wars", Steve Ballmer announced in August that he would leave his post and, over the next year, the company will seek a person to replace him. He has headed the company for 13 years now. It is interesting to note that Ballmer is among the few billionaires who have earned their fortune without having their own business.

                                                                       Steve Ballmer

The search for a manager to restructure the company and make it a leader again has become an epic that has been able to combine all these considerations into a boiling pot of opinions, strategies, moves, competitions... However, we are talking about the future of one of the largest and most expensive companies in the world and about hundreds of billions of dollars!

Internal contradictions while selecting the successor

The search for a new manager of Microsoft shows the differences in the board itself as regards to the development to which the software concern should turn and the requirements which the next manager should meet.