BBC News has interviewed Bill Gates as he prepares to end his full-time work at Microsoft.

“Most of our competitors were very poorly run,” he tells Fiona Bruce, for The Money Programme.

“They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together. They did not understand how to go around the world.”

Sir Alan Sugar, one of Britain’s computer pioneers with his Amstrad range, testifies to Microsoft’s global mobility even as a comparatively small company in the 1980s.

Amstrad, in Brentwood, Essex, was visited by a Microsoft salesman – or “mid-Atlantic smoothie” as Sir Alan describes him – who came to sell Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system.

Check out the interview on BBC News.