Jakob Nielsen, the usability expert, recently published his latest mobile usability guidelines. He summarizes:“Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users. Two designs, two sites, and cross-linking to make it all work.”

I disagree (mostly) with the idea that people need different content because they’re using different types of devices.

Firstly, because we’ve been here before, in the early years of this century. Around 2002, the huge UK supermarket chain Tesco launched Tesco Access—a website that was designed so that disabled people could browse the Tesco website and buy groceries that would be delivered to their homes.

It was a great success—heavily stripped down, all server-generated (as in, those days screen readers couldn’t handle much JavaScript) and it was highly usable. One design goal was “to allow customers to purchase an average of 30 items in just 15 minutes from login to checkout.” In fact, from a contemporary report, (cited by Mike Davis), “many non-disabled customers are switching from the main Tesco site to the Tesco Access site, because they find it easier and faster to use!” It also made Tesco a lot of money: “Work undertaken by Tesco.com to make their home grocery service more accessible to blind customers has resulted in revenue in excess of £13m per annum, revenue that simply wasn’t available to the company when the website was inaccessible to blind customers.”

However, some blind users weren’t happy. There were special offers on the “normal” Tesco website that weren’t available on the access website. There were advertisements that were similarly unavailable—which was a surprise; whereas most people hate advertisements, here was a community complaining that it wasn’t getting them.

The vital point is that you never know better than your users what content they want. When Nielsen writes that mobile websites should “cut features, to eliminate things that are not core to the mobile use case; [and] cut content, to reduce word count and defer secondary information to secondary pages,” he forgets this fact.

Tesco learned this:

“We have completely redesigned Access so that it is no longer separate from our main website but is now right at the center of it, enabling our Access customers to enjoy the same features and functionality available on the standard grocery website. As part of this work we have had to retire the old Access website.”

Nielsen writes:

“Build a separate mobile-optimized site (or mobile site) if you can afford it … Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users. Two designs, two websites, and cross-linking to make it all work.”

From talking to people in the industry, and from my own experience of leading a dev team, I’ve found that building a separate mobile website is considered to be a cheaper option in some circumstances—there may be time or budgetary constraints. Sometimes teams don’t have another option but creating a separate website due to factors beyond their control.

I believe that this is not ideal, but for many it’s a reality. Re-factoring a whole website with responsive design requires auditing content. And changing a production website with all the attendant risks, then testing the whole website to ensure it works on mobile devices (while introducing no regressions in the desktop website)—all this is a huge task. If the website is powered by a CMS, it’s often cheaper and easier to leave the “desktop website” alone, and implement a parallel URL structure so that www.example.com/foo is mirrored by m.example.com/foo, and www.example.com/bar is mirrored by m.example.com/bar (with the CMS simply outputting the information into a highly simplified template for the mobile website).

The problem with this approach is Nielsen’s suggestion: “If mobile users arrive at your full website’s URL, auto-redirect them to your mobile website.” The question here is how can you reliably detect mobile browsers in order to redirect them? The fact is: you can’t. Most people attempt to do this with browser sniffing—checking the User Agent string that the browser sends to the server with every request. However, these are easily spoofed in browsers, so they can’t be relied upon, and they don’t tell the truth, anyways. “Browser sniffing” has a justifiably bad reputation, so is often renamed “device detection” these days, but it’s the same flawed concept.

On mobile, Twitter.com automatically forwards users to a separate mobile website.

More troublesome is that there are literally hundreds of UA strings that your detection script needs to be aware of in order to send the visitor to the “right” page. The list is ever-growing, so you need to constantly check and update your detection scripts. And of course, you only know about a new User Agent string after it turns up in your analytics—so there will be a period between the first visitor arriving with an unknown UA and your adding it to your detection scripts (in which visitors will be sent to the wrong website).

Despite all this work to set up a second parallel website, you will still find that some visitors are sent to the wrong place, so here I agree with Nielsen:

“Offer a clear link from your full site to your mobile site for users who end up at the full site despite the redirect … Offer a clear link from your mobile site to your full site for those (few) users who need special features that are found only on the full site.”

Missing out features and content on mobile devices perpetuates the digital divide. As Josh Clark points out in his rebuttal:

“First, a growing number of people are using mobile as the only way they access the Web. A pair of studies late last year from Pew and from On Device Research showed that over 25% of people in the US who browse the Web on smartphones almost never use any other platform. That’s north of 11% of adults in the US, or about 25 million people, who only see the Web on small screens. There’s a digital-divide issue here. People who can afford only one screen or internet connection are choosing the phone. If you want to reach them at all, you have to reach them on mobile. We can’t settle for serving such a huge audience a stripped-down experience or force them to swim through a desktop layout in a small screen.”

The number of people only using mobile devices to access the Web is even higher in emerging economies. Why exclude them?

[Note: Have you already pre-ordered your copy of our Printed Smashing Book #3? The book is a professional guide on how to redesign websites and it also introduces a whole new mindset for progressive Web design, written by experts for you.]

Mobile Usability

I also agree with Nielsen when he writes:

“When people access sites using mobile devices, their measured usability is much higher for mobile sites than for full sites.”

But from this he draws the wrong conclusion, that we should continue making special mobile websites. I believe that special mobile websites is like sticking plaster over the problem; we generally shouldn’t have separate mobile websites, anymore than we should have separate screen reader websites. The reason many “full websites” are unusable on mobile phones is because many full websites are unusable on any device. It’s often said that your expenditure rises as your income does, and that the amount of clutter you own expands to fill your house however many times you move to a bigger one. In the same way, website owners have long proved incontinent in keeping desktop websites focussed, simply because they have so much room. This is perfectly illustrated by the xkcd comic:

A Venn diagram showing “Things on the front page of a university website” and “Things people go to the site looking for.” Only one item is in the intersection: “Full name of school.” Image source: xkcd.

As I wrote on the website The Pastry Box on April 13th:

“The mobile pundits got it right: sites should be minimal, functional, with everything designed to help the user complete a task, and then go. But that doesn’t mean that you need to make a separate mobile site from your normal site. If your normal site isn’t minimal, functional, with everything designed to help the user complete a task, it’s time to rethink your whole site.

“And once you’ve done that, serve it to everyone, whatever the device.”

In a previous article, Nielsen wrote in September 2011 that he dropped testing usability with featurephones:

“Our first research found that feature phone usability is so miserable when accessing the Web that we recommend that most companies don’t bother supporting feature phones.

“Empirically, websites see very little traffic from feature phones, partly because people rarely go on the Web when their experience is so bad, and partly because the higher classes of phones have seen a dramatic uplift in market share since our earlier research.”

This is a highly westernized view. Many people can’t afford smartphones, so they use feature phones running proxy browsers (such as Opera Mini), which move the heavy lifting to servers. This is often the only way that underpowered featurephones can browse the Web. Statistics from Opera’s monthly State of the Mobile Web report (disclosure: Opera is my employer) shows that lower-end feature phones still dominate the market in Eastern Europe, Africa and other emerging economies—see the top 20 handsets worldwide for 2011 that accessed Opera Mini. Since February 2011, the number of unique users of Opera Mini has increased 78.17% and data traffic is up 142.79%.

A caveat about those statistics: not every user of Opera Mini is a featurephone user in developing countries. They’re widely used on high-end smartphones in the West, too, as we know that they are much faster than built-in browsers, and users really want speed.

Nielsen’s dismissal of feature phones reminds me of some attitudes to Web accessibility in the early 2000′s. His assertion that companies shouldn’t support feature phones because they see little traffic from feature phones is the classic accessibility chicken and egg situation: we don’t need to bother with making our website accessible, as no-one who visits us needs it. This is analogous to the owner of a restaurant that is up a flight of stairs saying he doesn’t need to add a wheelchair ramp as no-one with a wheelchair ever comes to his restaurant. It’s flawed logic.

Developing Usable Websites For All Devices

The W3C Mobile Web best practices say:

“One Web means making, as far as is reasonable, the same information and services available to users irrespective of the device they are using. However, it does not mean that exactly the same information is available in exactly the same representation across all devices. The context of mobile use, device capability variations, bandwidth issues and mobile network capabilities all affect the representation. Furthermore, some services and information are more suitable for and targeted at particular user contexts.”

There will always be edge cases when separate, mobile-specific websites will be a better user experience, but this shouldn’t be your default when approaching the mobile Web. For a maintainable, future-friendly development methodology, I recommend that your default approach to mobile be to design one website that can adapt to different devices with viewport, Media Queries and other technologies that are often buzzworded “Responsive Design.”

Combining these techniques in a smart way with progressive enhancement allows your content to be viewed on any device (and with richer experiences available on more sophisticated devices), with the possibility of accessing device APIs such as geolocation, or the shiny new getUserMedia for camera access.

Although many other resources are available, I’ve written “Mobile-friendly: The mobile web optimization guide” which you’ll hopefully find a useful starting point.

Source: Smashing Magazine

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Wyse Technology is launching a new app for Android users today called Wyse PocketCloud Explore, which will allow you to search for files you have stored on any phone, tablet, PC or Mac. The app works in conjunction with a software client installed on your computer, so you can perform universal file searches, then view the files, rename them, move them into folders, share them or download them to your device.

The software lets you perform unlimited copying and moving of video, image and audio files between your Windows or Mac computer and your Android device. Meanwhile, other files types can be opened or edited in your preferred Android application (e.g., QuickOffice). You can also choose to email the file via Android’s email client.

PocketCloud is somewhat of an attack on cloud storage products like Dropbox or Box.net, which provide you with a set amount of free online storage, but then charge you when you need more. Instead, this app appeals more to the host-it-yourself crowd, since there’s only the one-time fee of $4.99 and no monthly service charges.

That said, hosting your files in the cloud may be pricier, but it’s often more secure. Unless you regularly backup, your computer is a single point-of-failure for your most valuable documents, while cloud storage providers have multiple copies of files spanned across servers which are backed up religiously.

But for $5, PocketCloud Explore is not a bad app to have on hand in case of a file emergency. Wyse also offers a full version of PocketCloud that provides remote access to your computer (iOS and Android). You can grab Explore from the Android Market here.

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An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Galaxy Nexus

You have to hand it to Google. They know that I prefer Apple products and have been generally critical of many Google moves in the past couple of years. And yet, they’re unafraid to give me their newest products to test out. To be honest, I’m not sure Apple would do the same. But I think this is a smart move on Google’s part. On one hand, they may get a negative review but they know that many will discount the negativity coming from me. On the flip side, if it’s positive: gravy train time.

Thus: my thoughts on the Galaxy Nexus. But before I begin…

Rather than do a full-on review — you’ve probably already seen plenty of those — and given that I now write an Apple-centric column for TechCrunch, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to continue my “An iPhone Lover’s Take…” series. For some background, here are my previous stories from the same angle on the Nexus One, the HTC EVO 4G, the Nexus S, a Windows Phone, and even the iPhone 4.

My colleague Jason Kincaid took a similar approach for a post a few weeks back, but did it from a slightly different angle — call it: An Original iPhone Lover Who Learned To Love Android Until Switching Back To The iPhone… Reviews The Galaxy Nexus. Oddly, he just had just switched back to the iPhone after years of Android use — but he says the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich in particular may get him to switch back yet again. Meanwhile, GigaOm’s Darrell Etherington also looked at the Galaxy Nexus from an iPhone user’s perspective and ultimately decided the iPhone 4S was still the device for him. So I’m here to break the tie.

I’ve been using an iPhone since the day the first one launched in 2007. It is without question my favorite and most-used gadget of all time. Over that same span, I’ve tried about a dozen different Android devices ranging from the G1 to the Nexus S — the results have been decidedly mixed. I pretty much hated the G1, generally liked the Nexus One, thought the EVO 4G was more or less crap, and basically enjoyed the Nexus S. But none, in my mind, could touch the iPhone.

So what about the Galaxy Nexus?

I was given the device shortly before I took off for Europe a couple weeks ago. Given that it’s unlocked and I got a 3G SIM, I’ve been using it a lot — just as much as I’ve used any of the other Android devices listed above. For a few nights, it has been my primary device when I’ve been out and about. Unfortunately, I have not been able to test any sort of 4G network with it, so consider all of this a Galaxy Nexus 3G review.

First and foremost, the Galaxy Nexus is way too big. The 4.65-inch screen is nice when I’m sitting on my couch, but out and about it feels like I’m Zack Morris holding his Gordon Gekko phone. I’d consider myself to have average sized hands for an adult male, and the screen is so large that it killed several one-handed operations for me (especially since many Android apps use a top nav system). I’ll admit that for some apps, like Gmail, having a screen larger than the iPhone’s 3.5-inch variety is very nice. But 4.3-inch may be better. This is just too big.

While the screen is too big, I am happy that Google has finally decided to get rid of hardware menu buttons and go all-in on the screen. Previous Android hardware was always made worse by the decision to include fixed nav buttons along the button. With Ice Cream Sandwich, all these buttons can now be software-based. There isn’t even a home hardware button like the iPhone has anymore — it’s all software.

I like this. The iPhone home button wears down over time and it makes noise when you click it. (Of course, the Galaxy Nexus still has a wake/power button of the right side.) I hope Apple does something more inventive with the button if they choose to keep it in future iPhone hardware iterations. Perhaps a multi-touch top on the button that allows you to swipe between open iOS apps would make the continuation of the physical button worth it.

I also like the inclusion of an indicator light on the Galaxy Nexus. Both the Galaxy Nexus and iPhone have options to vibrate or give you audio cues to alert you to new messages, but if the phone isn’t on me, I often miss those. The light allows you to see if you have new message waiting without having to turn the screen on. This is one of the few things BlackBerry got right that Apple for whatever reason hasn’t bothered to mimic.

The rest of the Galaxy Nexus hardware leaves something to be desired. The iPhone feels like a completely and thoughtfully designed object. By comparison, the Galaxy Nexus still feels rather cheap and plastic-y. It’s not awful, but you’d think Samsung could do better at this point. Some people will like having the option to remove to the back to get at the battery, but the method for doing so remains a joke. You essentially have to rip it off. I feel like I’m peeling a nail away from a finger every time I do it — it’s that unpleasant.

The battery life itself on the device is very good. I felt like the Galaxy Nexus was lasting at least as long as the iPhone 4S on a fully charged battery, perhaps even a bit longer if some cases. Again, I didn’t try it on a 4G network, which is known to drain battery quicker. (I also haven’t had the battery discharge issues that some iPhone 4S users have been reporting since the launch.) But fear not, this is not the EVO with its temper-melting 30-minute battery.

The camera on the Galaxy Nexus is definitely worse than the iPhone 4S, both in megapixels (8 vs. 5), and in image quality. But the iPhone 4S is also a ridiculously good camera. The Galaxy Nexus is still a fine point-and-shoot replacement, in my opinion. The camera seems better than any other Android device I’ve used. One nit is that while there is a method to go right into the camera from the lock screen (just like iOS 5 has), it’s too slow if the camera isn’t previously running. You’ll hit the camera button and watch as the Android main screen loads and then the camera apps loads. This feels like more of a macro than a feature.

And let’s talk about Ice Cream Sandwich. The artist also known as Android 4.0 is very solid. There is no question that the software is much improved over previous iterations in terms of speed, but mainly usability. I really like things like the multi-task tray and some of the new widgets.

Unfortunately, the system still lacks much of the fine polish that iOS users enjoy. The majority of Android users will probably think such criticism is bullshit, but that has always been the case. I imagine it’s probably hard for a Mercedes owner to describe to a Honda owner how attention to detail makes their driving experience better when both machines get them from point A to point B. As a Honda owner myself, I’m not sure I would buy it — I’d have to experience it to understand it, I imagine. And most Android lovers are not going to spend enough time with iOS to fully appreciate the differences.

Still, if the Android team ever wants to convert (or at least convince) most iOS users, they still have quite a bit of work to do here. Then again, they probably don’t (or shouldn’t) care too much about converting iOS users over to Android. All the non-smartphone users out there remain the much bigger prize to go after (for both Google and Apple).

Other things that will sound like nits but drove me crazy with ICS included the constant focusing on text fields only to have to click again to get the keyboard to pop up. If I’m in a text field, I clearly want to type something. Why should I have to click again? This doesn’t always happen, but it happens a lot — particularly in third-party apps.

Another: why is there a separate app for Messaging and Google+ Messenger? Apple baked iMessage into their SMS app, why didn’t Google? If they’re worried about anti-competitive concerns, why would they bundle all the Google+ stuff into ICS to begin with? Similarly, why do Gmail and Email continue to be two separate apps? And why on Earth is the web browser not Chrome yet!?

The new People app social unification is nice — I love the big pictures. But my god Google needs help with their duplication/merging detection. One of my friends has four separate entries — one for his phone number, one for his Gmail/Google+, one for Twitter, and one for another email. Several others had three different entries. Most had at least two. Also, Google provides an option to link your Facebook account in Accounts & sync, but it does nothing. I’m sure this is due to the Google/Facebook fracas, but why include something in your OS that is completely broken?

Ice Cream Sandwich’s voice command functionality is a joke compared to Siri — but that may be changing soon, we’ll see.

In his write-up, Jason noted that iOS is still far behind Android when it comes to notifications, I have to disagree. I find Android’s notification tray to be far less useful than it is on iOS. For example, if I get three new emails, with Android, I just see that I have three new emails all grouped together. With iOS I can see at least some of the context. Same with Tweets. The size of the alerts in this tray also isn’t uniform in Android, so Facebook alerts seem more important with their huge logo.

I do like the ability to “clear all” in Android’s notification tray though. The iOS micro clear button remains a joke that badly needs to be fixed.

When it comes to web browsers, arguably the most important feature on any of these devices, there is no question that iOS still has a big edge here. I’ve seen arguments on both sides for why one is faster than the other — most recently, data today favors iOS — but just doing a simple use case test, mobile Safari kicks the ass of Google’s don’t-call-it-Chrome mobile web browser across the board. Some pages still refuse to render correctly on Android’s browser. And the ones that do cannot seem to get the simplest feature right: double-tap to zoom. You do it on Android and there’s a good chance you could end up looking at the middle of a random paragraph.

You’ll also still see a bit of lag in ICS when you do seemingly simple things like this. It’s still not as smooth as it should be. For the most part, ICS fixes many of Android’s performance issues, but there are plenty of times that you’ll still see stutters here and there.

And then there are the apps.

To be fair to Google, Ice Cream Sandwich is currently only on the Galaxy Nexus and it still hasn’t even officially launched in the U.S. But there’s a lot of work to do here. One app that I had on my Nexus S constantly crashes now on the Galaxy Nexus. And rather than quietly closing in the background, I get a nice big Windows-style pop-up that it has stopped running. Many other apps look fairly bad on the larger screen simply because they’re not optimized for it — again, something a wider release of ICS will hopefully fix.

The main problem I have with Android apps on the Galaxy Nexus/ICS remains the ones that are also available on iOS. When the apps exist on both platforms, it’s easy to compare them and the iOS version almost always wins — and often by a landslide. Take the latest version of Twitter, for example. It was just updated to run on both. On iOS it’s smooth, on ICS, there is noticeable stutter when scrolling. It’s much worse on Facebook Messenger and Facebook itself — no big deal, only the biggest app on both platforms.

The reason for the app differences between the two platforms remains a hot topic of debate. Again, all I know is what I see: app to app, iOS still easily beats Android in most cases. One counter-example, which I talked about on stage at LeWeb last week, is SoundTracking. I actually think their app is better on Android. But that has less to do with performance, and more to do with the fact that it can access hooks that iOS doesn’t offer, like background Spotify integration. Android developers should focus more on these benefits of Android and less on making their apps exact ports of their iOS ones. Something always seems to get lost in translation — often badly lost.

Now it just sounds like I’m focusing on the negative. It’s important to emphasize the fact that the Galaxy Nexus is without a doubt the best phone I’ve ever used that’s not an iPhone. And there is no question that it does certain things better than an iPhone — namely all of the Google apps and any third-party background/OS integration beyond Twitter, which is now baked into iOS 5. Google has also managed to just about match Apple in app quantity. This is all good — competition is good.

The next step that Google needs to take (or to help third party developers take) involves around app quality. Put simply: they need to create better tools for developers to use in order to take advantage of the strengths ICS offers. This won’t happen in 6 months, but it can happen if Google works at it.

After that, it’s the intangibles where iOS holds the huge advantage. And just like in sports, it’s not clear how well you can “teach” those. At some point, Google may simply have to acknowledge that iOS looks and feels better than Android because Apple’s entire fabric is woven with design, tight integration, and attention to detail. Google’s strengths are elsewhere; they should embrace that.

Google has done some very nice work here. Both the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich are a new pinnacle of the Android platform. But in the end, it still comes down to something very simple: which device do I want to use day-to-day? Which phone do I reach for when I’m not doing a review? It’s still the iPhone. Without question.

Keep at it, Google.

Source: TechCrunch

It’s the motion in the ocean that counts, right? Wrong. Well, at least that’s how it looks when it comes to mobile advertising. (Look out, inneractive infographic below!) If you take Google at its word, then 2011 has been the year of the tablet. Or in their words, this year tablets “went mainstream”. Sure, Google would say that, as the creator of a rapidly-propagating mobile OS, right? Well, with total number of tablets sold expected to get close to 60 million by the end of the year, I think we may be able to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, when it comes to advertisers and developers considering mobile platforms, the question of where revenue is going to come from — and just how much — is crucial. In terms of mobile apps, freemium is certainly here to stay, but mobile advertising, as you’ve heard, is growing like gangbusters, with U.S. advertisers expected to spend upwards of $1.23 billion on mobile advertising in 2011, a number that’s projected to increase to around $4.4 billion by 2014.

And, perhaps more importantly, the numbers show that nearly 80 percent of consumers are comfortable with or neutral towards mobile advertising. Of course, as adoption of smartphones and tablets continues at a record pace, for that comfort level with mobile advertising to remain high, Google’s research shows that users are increasingly expecting more interactive and touch-friendly ads on their mobile devices. That’s why, last week, Google launched new tablet-specific ad formats that “make it easy for advertisers to create rich media ads for tablets using existing assets (photos, logos, etc.)” and fire them out across mobile platforms.

This is great, yes, but advertisers and mobile developers want to know which platforms, OSes, and devices have the highest average click-through-rates, because high CTRs lead to monetization, and monetization leads to, well, happy developers, better ads, and hopefully happier consumers. As we saw in Sarah’s recent coverage, Apple has topped Android in mobile ad performance, but Windows is still leading the pack in Q3 mobile CTRs. And with Windows leading, while Mango “rolled out without the promised in-app purchasing support”, again, it’s all about ad monetization — especially for budding Windows developers.

So, as CTRs have become increasingly important for developers looking to monetize on mobile platforms, an interesting supplemental question has become: When it comes to the performance (CTRs) of mobile advertising, does size of the device matter? Or, in other words, should developers be turning their focus for this (and other) reason(s) to tablets?

Google holds that the audience is certainly there for tablets, and they (among others) are trying to walk the walk by developing optimized formats for advertising on all those tablet-y devices. In support of this, inneractive, a mobile app monetization exchange, has created an infographic to address whether or not mobile CTRs are higher for larger devices. Their research shows that advertisers (and developers) have a clear advantage when offering optimized ads for larger formats.

Thus, it seems that size does indeed matter when it comes to click-through-rates — and that we have yet another confirmation that tablets will be leading the way in 2012. In more ways than one.

In the end, we’d like to see results for more devices, but this is a great start. Check it out:

• INNERACTIVE

inneractive is the industry’s premier mobile ad mediation provider with over 100 ad networks and local agencies available at the click of a button. With inneractive, mobile developers know they are getting the highest performance and widest global coverage, while not compromising on personal and high quality customer care. inneractive is on the side of the developer!

inneractive offers the most advanced real time optimization platform for mobile advertising campaigns that ensures developers are maximizing in app revenue and not…

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Dismissing rumors that he might be making a comeback at Microsoft, founder Bill Gates went down under to rule out the possibility of ever returning to the software behemoth full-time.

Instead, he says, he’ll be working full-time at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation until the day he dies. Gates stepped down from his day-to-day role at Microsoft in June 2008.

In an interview with Fairfax Media, Gates declared:

“I’m part-time involved with Microsoft, including even being in touch this week to give some of my advice but that’s not going to change – the foundation requires all of my energy and we feel we’re having a great impact.”

He also says some things about Steve Jobs, but nothing that will surprise you: he was a brilliant person who was tough on Microsoft because its machines outsold his machines by a lot, and he was kinder to Gates in his last years. Sounds about right.

Gates also pointed out that it’s summer in Sydney but that he wished it was a “tiny bit warmer”.

(Image courtesy of World Economic Forum / Flickr)

• BILL GATES
• MICROSOFT

William (Bill) H. Gates was chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft had revenues of US$55.12 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2007, and employs more than 78,000 people in 105 countries and regions.

On June 15, 2006, Microsoft announced that effective July 2008 Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health…

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Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software.

Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured.

Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market.

Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and…

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