The last time Bill Gates played an active role at Microsoft, as chief software architect, he witnessed the company muffing its earliest efforts to become a major player in search, smartphones and tablet computers.
In the six years since then, he has watched as the technology industry changed without him. The personal computer era that Microsoft so ably dominated during and after Gates' heyday as Microsoft's chief executive has started to fade away. Now, the focus is on social media and mobile devices that run in large part on cloud computing.
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