Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. He is widely respected for his foresight and ambition.[6][7] He is also frequently criticized as having built Microsoft through unfair or unlawful business practices. Since amassing his fortune, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money (about 52% of his total fortune) to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 2000. In June 2006 he announced that he would move to a part-time role with Microsoft (namely surrendering the power of managing day-to-day operations) in 2008 to begin a career in philanthropy, but will remain as chairman.
Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was wealthy; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and The United Way, and his maternal grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has one older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby.
According to the 1992 biography Hard Drive, Maxwell set up a million-dollar trust fund for Gates the year he was born.[9]
Gates commented on this claim in a 1994 interview with Playboy:
PLAYBOY: Did you have a million-dollar trust fund while you were at Harvard? GATES: Not true. . . . . My parents are very successful, and I went to the nicest private school in the Seattle area. I was lucky. But I never had any trust funds of any kind, though my dad did pay my tuition at Harvard, which was quite expensive.[10]
The 1993 biography Gates calls the trust fund claim one of the "fictions" surrounding Gates' fortune.[11]
Gates excelled in elementary school, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. Bill Gates went to Lakeside School, Seattle's most exclusive preparatory school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1,760). He was known as "Blinker" on account of a chronic facial twitch, which caused one of his eyes to "flash like a Navy signal lamp". Lakeside rented time on a DECPDP-10, which Gates was able to use to pursue an interest in computers, a rare opportunity at the time. Gates was a member of the Boy Scouts of America and attained the rank of Life Scout. While in high school, he and Paul Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a company which sold traffic flow data systems to state governments. He also helped to create a payroll system in COBOL, for a company in Portland, Oregon.
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others had developed a version of the programming languageBASIC for the platform. This was untrue, as Gates and Allen had never used an Altair previously nor developed any code for it. Within a period of eight weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. Allen and Gates flew to MITS to unveil the new BASIC system. The demonstration was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to buy the rights to Allen and Gates's BASIC for the Altair platform. It was at this point that Gates left Harvard to found Micro-Soft, which later became Microsoft Corporation, with Allen.
Anti-piracy efforts
In February 1976, Gates published his often-quoted "Open Letter to Hobbyists". In the letter, Gates claimed that most users were using "stolen" pirated copies of Altair BASIC and that no hobbyist could afford to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment.[14] This letter was unpopular with many amateur programmers, not just those few using copies of the software. In the ensuing years the letter gained significant support from Gates' business partners and allies. Eventually, the closed source, for-profit model Gates had envisioned would become the dominant model of software production and distribution, largely displacing the hobbyist model of open source software produced and distributed for free. Despite Microsoft's reliance on closed source, Gates has said that he collected discarded program listings at Harvard and learned programming techniques from them. [15]
When IBM decided to build the hardware for a desktop personal computer in 1980, it needed to find an operating system. Microsoft did not have any operating system at this point. The most popular microcomputer operating system at the time was CP/M developed by Digital Research in Monterey. CP/M allowed software written for the Intel 8080/Zilog Z80 family of microprocessors to run on many different models of computer from many different manufacturers. This device-independence feature was essential for the formation of the consumer software industry, as without it software had to be re-written for each different model of computer. Bill Gates referred IBM to Gary Kildall, the founder of Digital Research, but when they did not reach immediate agreement with him they went back to Gates, who offered to fill their need himself. He licensed a CP/M-compatible OS called QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products for $56,000, and IBM shipped it as PC-DOS.
Later, after Compaq licensed Phoenix Technologies' clone of the IBM BIOS, the market saw a flood of IBM PC clones. Microsoft was quick to license DOS to other manufacturers, calling it MS-DOS (for Microsoft DiskOperating System). By marketing MS-DOS aggressively to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones, Microsoft went from a small player to one of the major software vendors in the home computer industry. Microsoft continued to develop operating systems as well as software applications.
Windows
In the early 1980s Microsoft introduced its own version of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), based on ideas originally pioneered by the Xerox corporation, and later developed by Apple. Microsoft released "Windows" as an alternative to their DOS command line, and to compete with other systems on the market that employed a GUI. Early versions of Windows were less capable than other GUIs on the market at the time, lacking features such as overlapping windows, and were not received well by PC users. However, Microsoft continued to release new versions and made deals with OEMs to have Windows pre-installed on many systems. By the late 1980s Microsoft Windows had begun to make serious headway against other DOS-based GUIs like GEM and GEOS. Opinions vary about whether the evolution of the system or Microsoft's marketing was the greater factor in these gains. The release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 was a tremendous success, selling around 10 million copies in the first two years and cementing Microsoft's dominance in operating systems. (See History of Microsoft Windows for more details)
By continuing to ensure, by various means, that most computers came with their software pre-installed, Microsoft eventually went on to become the largest software company in the world, earning Gates enough money that Forbes Magazine named him the wealthiest person in the world for several years. Gates served as the CEO of the company until 2000, when Steve Ballmer took the position, and continues to serve as chairman of the board. Microsoft has thousands of patents, and Gates has nine patents to his name.
Bill Gates giving his deposition at Microsoft on August 271998
Bill Gates' role
Since Microsoft's founding in 1975 and as of 2006, Gates has had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy. He has aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft has achieved a dominant position he has vigorously defended it. Many decisions that have led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices have had Gates' approval. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued over the definitions of words such as "compete", "concerned", "ask", and "we." [16] BusinessWeek reported, "early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying 'I don't recall' so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle. Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail Gates both sent and received." [17]
Gates meets regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. By all accounts he can be extremely confrontational during these meetings, particularly when he believes that managers have not thought out their business strategy or have placed the company's future at risk. [18][10] He has been described shouting at length at employees before letting them continue, with such remarks as "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!" and "Why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?"[19] However, he often backs down when the targets of his outbursts respond frankly and directly.[20] When he is not impressed with the technical hurdles managers claim to be facing, he sometimes quips, "Do you want me to do it over the weekend?".[21]
Gates' role at Microsoft for most of its history has been primarily a management and executive role. However, he was an active software developer in the early years, particularly on the company's programming language products. He has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100 line, but he wrote code as late as 1989 that shipped in the company's products.[22]
On June 152006, Gates announced his plans to transition out of a day-to-day role with Microsoft effective July 312008[23], to allow him to devote more time to working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. During an interview with Fortune.com published on June 26 says his recent decision to "shift priorities" his day-to-day role has changed to June 2008 instead of the original date of July 2008. After that date, Gates will continue in his role as the company's chairman and act as an advisor on key projects. His role as Chief Software Architect will be filled immediately by Ray Ozzie who joined the company last year due to Microsoft taking over his company Groove. One of his last initiatives before announcing his departure was the creation of a robotics software group at Microsoft.
In 2000, Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization, with his wife. The foundation's grants have provided funds for college scholarships for under-represented minorities, AIDS prevention, diseases prevalent in third world countries, and other causes. In 2000, the Gates Foundation endowed the University of Cambridge with $210 million for the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. The Foundation has also pledged over $7 billion to its various causes, including $1 billion to the United Negro College Fund; and as of 2005, had an estimated endowment of $29.0 billion. He has spent about a third of his lifetime income on charity. However, some suggest that these donations have self-serving motives.[24]
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has stated that Gates is probably the most "spammed" person in the world, receiving as many as 4,000,000 e-mails per day in 2004, most of which were junk. Gates has almost an entire department devoted to filtering out junk emails.[27] In an article, Gates himself has said that most of this junk mail "offers to help [him] get out of debt or get rich quick", which "would be funny (given his financial state) if it weren't so irritating".[28]
Gates is widely considered one of the world's most influential people. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century, as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005 and again in 2006. Gates and Oprah Winfrey are the only two people in the world to make all four lists. He was listed in the Sunday Times power list in 1999, named CEO of the year by Chief Executive Officers magazine in 1994, ranked number one in the "Top 50 Cyber Elite" by Time in 1998, ranked number two in the Upside Elite 100 in 1999 and was included in The Guardian as one of the "Top 100 influential people in media" in 2001. Gates has been number one on the "Forbes 400" list from 1993 through to 2006 and number one on Forbes list of "The World's Richest People" from 1995-2006 with 50 billion US dollars. In 2004, he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by Warren Buffett, the second wealthiest person in the world according to Forbes and a long time friend of Gates.[29]
In 1999, Gates' wealth briefly surpassed $100 billion making him America's first centibillionaire.
Since 2000, Gates' wealth has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's share price and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. According to a 2004 Forbes magazine article, Gates gave away over $29 billion to charities from 2000 onwards. These donations are usually cited as sparking a substantial change in attitudes towards philanthropy among the very rich, as philanthropy eventually became the norm for the very rich. [30] The Gates received the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation on May 4, 2006, in recognition of their world impact through charity giving.[31]
Gates owns a lavish home, with its gardens and art collection. Gates also rents or leases a home on Mustique, an exclusive island in the Grenadines. In contrast, his former associate Paul Allen has used his wealth in perhaps a more typical manner—owning sports teams, vintage airplanes, and multiple residences. Gates also claimed, in 2005, that he has gone to work every day since 1975, which in recent years includes both his role at Microsoft, and his leadership position at the Gates Foundation.
In May 2006, Gates said in an interview that he wished that he was not the richest man in the world, stating that he disliked the attention it brought.[32]
Gates is often characterized as the quintessential example of a super-intelligent "nerd" with immense power and wealth. This has in turn led to pop culture stereotypes of Gates as a tyrant or evil genius, often resorting to ruthless business techniques. As such he has been the subject of numerous parodies in film, television, and video games.
Gates has published several essays throughout the years based on his theories, predictions and visions of the computing industry. In these publications he often expresses his personal views on current topics, and discusses Microsoft's plans. His writings have been published by BusinessWeek, Newsweek, USA Today, The Economist and Time. Some of his publications since 1997 include:
^Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews (1993). Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself The Richest Man in America. Touchstone. ISBN 0385420757.
^A survey of philanthropy by The Economist25 February2006 noted, "The media, which used to take little notice of charitable donations, now eagerly rank the super-rich by their munificence..."
