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Company Founder Biographies: Founder bios of some of the most successful people in business today. |  |
Bill Gates Bio, Founder of Microsoft
When Allen took a programming job at Honeywell in Boston, though, the two friends met up again, and Allen talked Gates into dropping out of Harvard. They relocated to Albuqueque, New Mexico, in order to open their software company, Micro-Soft. Their first product was a BASIC intepreter which Gates presented as a fait accompli in order to attract the interest of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, the manufacturers of the Altair microcomputers; when MITS expressed an interest in seeing the software, Gates and Allen quickly developed an interpreter on an Altair emulator, and successfully sold it to MITS, who distributed it as Altair BASIC with their new machines. Though many computer hobbyists -- then as now -- believed in sharing information and software, Gates took an early stand against software piracy when he discovered that a copy of Altair BASIC had been leaked and was being illegally copied by end-users. The real godsend for Microsoft was their purchase of the QDOS operating system for $50,000, at Allen's instigation. They were able to modify it to suit the needs of IBM, who were searching for a default operating system for their new line of computers, the PC. Microsoft successfully won the contract, and as one of his conditions, Gates insisted that IBM let Microsoft retain its copyright on the software, correctly predicting the decade-defining trend of non-IBM PC-compatible computers which would also run his software. More than any other piece of software, MS-DOS enabled Microsoft to become what it is today. Allen soon retired from an active role in the company. Gates made his college friend Steve Ballmer the Chief Executive Officer of the company, but took primary responsibility for Microsoft's products, and sought dominance whenever possible -- enough to draw an antitrust case in 1998, after the introduction of the Windows operating system (and especially Windows 95 and its successors) had led to such dominance of the market that people were as likely to talk about "Windows machines" as "PC compatibles," shifting the identifying characteristic from hardware to software. Often characterized as hostile, demanding, and short-tempered by his employees, Gates met regularly with Microsoft management to oversee their strategies for the company. In time, his role with the software became less hands-on, but he continued to personally write code through the very end of the 1980s -- a remarkable thing, like an owner of a national restaurant chain who still shows up in the kitchen from time to time. Beginning in 2006, Gates took a step back from the day to day activity of Microsoft to devote more of his attention and considerable fortune to philanthropy. With his wife, he had earlier established the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, which made international headlines when multibillionaire Warren Buffet donated half of his wealth, some $40 billion. The foundation's charitable efforts include medical causes and scholarships, as well as a $1 billion donation to the United Negro College Fund. From 2000 to 2004 -- the four years after being labeled a "centibillionaire" when his net worth exceeded $100 billion -- Gates donated $30 billion to charity, contributing to the trend in recent years of billionaires turning to philanthropy rather than letting their fortunes accumulate and survive them. |
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