Carrefour/Russia: Two stores and you’re out. The decision by Carrefour to pull out of Russia comes as a surprise. The French retailer opened its first store in Moscow barely four months ago. It was followed in September by another one in Krasnodar. And the company kept hinting about grand projects in the country.

Now it will leave. Lars Olofsson, the company’s new chief executive, may have wanted to throw a small bone to some activist shareholders. Colony Capital, the US real estate fund manager, and Bernard Arnault, the French luxury billionaire, aren’t amused by their euro 1.5 billion paper loss on the 13.5 per cent stake of Carrefour they’ve owned since March 2007. They have suggested the group divest some of its emerging market operations. But selling the Brazilian or Chinese operations, as the they proposed, would have been absurd. By retreating from Russia, Olofsson at least shows them that he’s focusing on Carrefour’s main business.

A failed acquisition effort may also be part of the reason for the abrupt decision. Earlier this year Carrefour offered more than $1 billion to buy Seventh Continent, a major Russian retailer, from its over-leveraged oligarch owner, who was facing margin calls. But talks stalled, and Carrefour can’t hope to get a significant share of the Russian market by organic growth alone.

But the Carrefour u-turn may also say as much about Russia as about the French group. Russia is a highly promising market and a highly corrupt country - retail clearly being one of the most corrupt sectors. The high hidden costs of doing business in Russia may have been too much to swallow for Carrefour without a local partner to guide it through the peculiarities of local mores. Last summer Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant, went public with its frustrations. In a rare case of candour for a western company operating in Russia, it said it would freeze its investment there due to red tape and corruption.

Carrefour hasn’t gone that far. It’s still open to a major acquisition in Russia, should the opportunity arise. Then it will want to make sure that the returns are worth the risks.

Gates-food: When Bill Gates was a young man, he wanted to turn his taste for software into a successful business. The Microsoft founder got rich beyond any technologist’s dreams. But Gates has changed over the years. His latest idea isn’t quite to get poor through low technology, but he will be giving away money to help people engaged in the simplest of economic activities: subsistence agriculture.

Gates-food: When Bill Gates was a young man, he wanted to turn his taste for software into a successful business. The Microsoft founder got rich beyond any technologist’s dreams. But Gates has changed over the years. His latest idea isn’t quite to get poor through low technology, but he will be giving away money to help people engaged in the simplest of economic activities: subsistence agriculture.

The shift has been gradual, but at some point in the last few years Gates started to dedicate more of his time to charity than to profit-seeking activities. Of course, he’s still running a business – a foundation with a $30 billion endowment. But the culture of giving is quite different from the world of developing and selling commercial products.

When he embarked on his path away from Microsoft, Gates retained his conviction that advanced technology was the key to solving problems. Early dreams of software-based solutions to poverty were quickly abandoned. Gates learns fast – but the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has often been criticised for paying too much attention to researchers in laboratories and too little to work in the field.

The complaints may have been exaggerated, but it has been hard for Gates to shake off his techno-geek air. He is making progress. His speech at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa, was largely about field work – about looking “through the eyes of small farmers” in Africa.

The perspective leads to some investment in high technology, especially in seed research. But in Africa, the greater challenge is to make use of what is already known. The foundation plans to focus on such distinctly low-tech concerns such as grain transport, farmer education and market support.

Gates hasn’t abandoned business thinking. He continues to insist that foundations should do good as efficiently as possible. And his entrepreneurial vision persists, transformed for the new domain. At Microsoft, Gates always looked for big, under-served markets. When it comes to charity, the self-sufficient farmers of Africa offer the same sort of opportunity.