About Bill Gates
Bill Gates is the co-founder of one of
the world’s largest corporations, and is himself one of the wealthiest
men in the world. Sure, you already knew that. But, just how much do
you really know about Bill Gates? Did you know that in
university, he told his professors he would be a millionaire by the age
of 30? Or that he used to sign up for classes that had the prettiest
girls and no sessions on Fridays?
Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems said of him, he is “probably the most
dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age.” Indeed, the
billionaire entrepreneur has found himself in the number one spot on
Forbes’ World’s Richest People list for twelve years in a row. What is
it about him that has made him the success he is today? As Stewart Aslop once said, “Gates it the ultimate programming machine.”
He may be one of the most public figures in the world, but there is
still much that many people don’t know of his personal life. For
instance, the very first computer program that he wrote at the age of
17 – a scheduling system for his high school – he was able to sell for
$4,200. And, in a survey conducted by the City University of Hong Kong,
he was found to be more idolized than even Chinese Communist leader Mao
Tse-Tung in a poll of teenagers throughout Hong Kong and China.
What else is there to know about Bill Gates? How about the
fact that he scored 1590 on his SAT standardized test, where the top
possible score is 1600. Or, that this American was given the title of
Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth
II of England. Did you know about Bill Gates and how he met his
wife, Melinda French, at a Microsoft press event in 1987? At the time,
French was working for the company; seven years later, the two would
marry in Hawaii on New Year’s Day.
Despite all his achievements and the popularity of Microsoft products,
not everyone likes what the Microsoft cofounder. American comedian
Dennis Miller said of him, “[He] is a monocle and a Persian cat away
from being the villain in a James Bond movie.” Similarly, British
author Douglas Adams once said, “The idea that Bill Gates has appeared
like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of
technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by
peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.”
Love him or hate him, admire him or loathe him, one thing for sure can be said about Bill
Gates: he is a passionate entrepreneur who has been able to turn his
love for all things computer into a multi-billion dollar fortune, and
revolutionize the world in the process. He may be turning his back on
the company to pursue more philanthropic causes, but the world has
certainly not heard the last about Bill Gates.
Before Microsoft: The Beginning of Bill Gates
“It's fine to celebrate success but it
is more important to heed the lessons of failure,” says Bill Gates.
Failure is something Gates would see little of during his lifetime.
Born on October 28, 1955, William Henry Gates III demonstrated his
intelligence and ambition at an early age. His family was a prominent
one, with a history in business and politics that Gates would later
take to new heights. With his father a lawyer, his grandfather the vice
president of a national bank and his great grandfather a state
legislator, success ran in the family. His mother was also the first
woman Regent at the University of Washington. Gates spent his early
years in Seattle, Washington with his two sisters and his parents.
The family’s affluence allowed Gates to be sent to the best private
schools in his hometown. In elementary school, Gates displayed a
superior knack for math and science. He continued to impress his
parents and teachers at Lakeside School, one of the finest private
schools in Seattle known for its academic rigor.
It was at Lakeside where Gates got his first exposure to computers. In
1968, the school held a fundraiser in order to be able to purchase
computer time on a DEC PDP-10, which was owned by General Electric.
Immediately, Gates became inseparable from the computer, often skipping
classes and failing to hand in schoolwork in order to be in the
computer room and explore the new machine. At the age of 13, Gates
wrote his first computer program, a tic-tac-toe game. It was in this
computer lab where Gates would meet his Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen
and many other of the first programmers that Microsoft would go on to
hire.
After Gates and his friends had used up all the allowed computer time
for the entire school in just a few weeks, Lakeside entered into an
agreement with Computer Center Corporation (CCC) to continue providing
computer time to its students. Though they were once banned from the
system for their hacking activities, Gates and his comrades could not
be stopped.
In 1968, Gates, Allen and two other Lakeside students formed the
Lakeside Programmers Group to try and put their computer skills to good
use. In return for unlimited computer time, CCC hired the group to find
bugs within their own system. “It was when we got free time at C-cubed
that we really got into computers,” recalls Gates. “I mean, then I
became hardcore. It was day and night.”
By 1970, CCC had gone bankrupt. In order to continue honing their
skills, Gates and his friends began using the computers at the
University of Washington, where Allen’s dad worked. After successfully
designing a payroll program for Information Sciences Inc., Gates and
Allen decided to branch off on their own. Soon after, they created
Traf-O-Data, an innovative program that measured traffic flow in
Seattle, and were compensated with $20,000.
In 1973, Gates enrolled in the pre-law program at Harvard University,
but as in high school, found himself skipping classes in order to spend
time in the computer lab. He kept in close touch with Allen, who
remained eager towards the idea of creating a software business with
Gates. The following year, Allen showed Gates a picture in a magazine
that would forever change both their lives.
The Start of Microsoft
When Gates and Allen saw a picture of
the Altair 8080 on the cover of Popular Electronics, they knew their
lives were going to be different. They recognized that the home
computer market was about to explode and that they had the opportunity
to be at the forefront of it all. Immediately, Gates called Micro
Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the company that was
manufacturing the Altair, and told them that he and Allen had developed
a programming language for the computer.
With not a single line of code written and no Altair to work on, Gates
and Allen worked around the clock on Harvard computers to do what they
said they had already done. Eight weeks later, Allen flew to MITS
headquarters in New Mexico to present their code. Without even a
test-run, their program was a success and MITS bought the rights,
making it an industry standard. Within one year, Gates had dropped out
of Harvard and the two high school friends established Microsoft
Corporation.
Their new company’s vision was “a computer on every desk and Microsoft
on every computer.” In 1979, Gates and Allen took their company to
Seattle and it was here where their venture really began to take off.
Gates had learned that IBM needed an operating system for its new PC
and he set out to create it. Buying an existing system from a Seattle
company for $50,000, Gates reformed it into MS-DOS, which he then
licensed to IBM. Thanks to Gates’ good business sense, Microsoft
retained the rights to the program and was able to license it out to
the numerous clone companies that would come out in later years. MS-DOS
became the industry standard and sales for Microsoft rose from $7
million in 1980 to $16 million the following year.
For the next three years, Microsoft continued to grow and dominate the
industry. It wasn’t until Apple introduced its Macintosh computer in
1984 that Gates encountered his first serious competition. In response
to Apple’s user-friendlier interface, Gates took Microsoft public to
generate capital for the development of Windows. While Windows wasn’t
the success that Gates had hoped for, taking the company public had
instantly made him one of the wealthiest men in the world. Microsoft
continued to work out the bugs in the program and by 1993, 85% of the
world’s computers were said to be running Windows.
It was during the mid-1990s when Microsoft’s dominance became almost
untouchable. The company had begun to package its Windows software with
its other applications into ‘Suites’, which were then sold to leading
computer manufacturers to be preloaded onto every computer before sale.
The strategy was a success and by 1999, Microsoft had increased its to
profits to almost $20 million.
Gates’ rise to success has not been without its hurdles. Microsoft has
become a regular participant in court cases, having been sued both by
Apple for copyright infringement and by the US government for
sustaining a monopoly and hindering the development of new technology.
Despite having to make some concessions, the company continues to
expand and retains its leading presence in the industry. Microsoft
currently has over 61,000 employees and earns revenues of over $40
billion and in 2004, Gates topped the Forbes List of Richest Americans,
with a net worth of $48 billion.
Bill Gates Quotes
Capitalism is this wonderful thing that
motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in
this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down.
I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.
I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global
view. Where you don't just think, yes my country is doing well, but you
think about the world at large.
I have 100 billion dollars... You realize I could spend 3 million
dollars a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't
make another dime. Tell you what-I'll buy your right arm for a million
dollars. I give you a million bucks, and I get to sever your arm right
here.
I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most
empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication,
they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
The browser space that we are in we have about 90 percent. Sure,
Firefox has come along, and the press love the idea of that. Our
commitment is to keep our browser that competes with Firefox to be the
best browser - best in security, best in features.
There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like
PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft.
I like my job because it involves learning. I like being around smart
people who are trying to figure out new things. I like the fact that if
people really try they can figure out how to invent things that
actually have an impact.”
If you give people tools, [and they use] their natural ability and
their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise
you very much beyond what you might have expected You need to know
about customer feedback that says things should be better.
The people who resist change will be confronted by the growing number
of people who see that better ways...are available thanks to technology.
We're focused on providing innovations in software, driving the
continuous improvements for a much better experience, and there's a lot
going on here that speaks to this decade and what's going to happen in
this decade. We can kind of sum it up in terms of saying, "Yes, you
can."
My job is about the most fun thing I do, but I have a broad set of interests, going places, reading things, doing things.
You've got to give great tools to small teams. Pick good people, use
small teams, give them excellent tools...so that they are very
productive in terms of what they are doing.
This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because
business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in
the last 50.
I'd say that my job, throughout all this, has been, I think, the most
fun job I can imagine having. And partly the people I've gotten to work
with outside the company. Certainly there are great people inside the
company.
I'm excited by the possibilities I see for medicine, for education and
of course for technology, ... And I believe that through our natural
inventiveness, creativity and willingness to solve tough problems,
we're going to make some amazing achievements in all these areas in my
lifetime.
We bet the company on Windows and we deserve to benefit. It was a risk
that's paid off immensely. In retrospect, committing to the graphics
interface seems so obvious that now it's hard to keep a straight face.
The frontiers were sort of wide open. It was that sense of excitement
that we really wanted to spark in everybody else wherever we went.
The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the
information about what's going on so they can do a lot more than
they've done in the past.
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal
of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
Every day were saying, 'How can we keep this customer happy?' How can
we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don't, somebody
else will.
Great organizations demand a high level of commitment by the people involved.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness.
Intel was a customer for our BASIC. They came out and asked us to do
some custom work. I remember telling them that I could do it in two
weeks. And they said, "Don't say that, don't say that -- say four
months -- say something reasonable." And it turned out that it took
four weeks to do, because configuring their system was so hard.
Information technology and business are becoming inextricably
interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one
without the talking about the other.