Gates, William, III (Bill)

Gates, William, III (Bill)

(1955–  ) American

Entrepreneur, Programmer

Bill Gates built Microsoft, the dominant company in the computer software field and in doing so, became the world’s wealthiest individual, with a net worth measured in the tens of billions. Born on October 28, 1955, to a successful professional couple in Seattle, Gates’s teenage years coin-cided with the first microprocessors becoming available to electronics hobbyists.

Gates showed both technical and business talent as early as age 15, when he developed a computerized traffic-control system. He sold his invention for $20,000, then dropped out of high school to work as a programmer for TRW for the very respectable salary of $30,000. By age 20, Gates had returned to his schooling and become a freshman at Harvard, but then he saw a cover article in Popular Electron-ics. The story introduced the Altair, the first commercially available microcomputer kit.

Gates believed that microcomputing would soon become a significant industry. To be useful, however, the new machines would need software, and Gates and his friend Paul Allen began by creating an interpreter for the BASIC language that could run in only 4 KB of memory, making it possible for people to write useful applications without having to use assembly language. This first product was quite successful, although to Gates’s annoyance it was illic-itly copied and distributed for free.

In 1975, Gates and Allen formed the Microsoft Cor-poration. Most of the existing microcomputer companies, including Apple, Commodore, and Tandy (Radio Shack) signed agreements to include Microsoft software with their machines. However, the big breakthrough came in 1980, when IBM decided to market its own microcomputer. When negotiations for a version of CP/M (then the dominant oper-ating system) broke down, Gates agreed to supply IBM with a new operating system. Buying one from a small Seattle company, Microsoft polished it a bit and sold it as MS-DOS 1.0. Sales of MS-DOS exploded as many other companies rushed to create “clones” of IBM’s hardware, each of which needed a copy of the Microsoft product.

In the early 1980s, Microsoft was only one of many thriving competitors in the office software market. Word processing was dominated by such names as WordStar and WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the spreadsheet roost, and dBase II dominated databases (see word processing, spreadsheet, and database management system). But Gates and Microsoft used the steady revenues from MS-DOS to undertake the creation of Windows, a much larger operating system that offered a graphical user interface (see user interface). While the first versions of Windows were clumsy and sold poorly, by 1990 Windows (with versions 3.1 and later, 95 and 98) had become the new dominant OS and Microsoft’s annual revenues exceeded $1 billion (see Microsoft Windows). Gates relentlessly leveraged both the company’s technical knowledge of its own OS and its near monopoly in the OS sector to gain a dominant market share for the Microsoft word processing, spreadsheet, and database programs.

By the end of the decade, however, Gates and Microsoft faced formidable challenges. The growth of the Internet and the use of the Java language with Web browsers offered a new way to develop and deliver software, potentially getting around Microsoft’s operating system dominance (see Java). That dominance, itself, was being challenged by Linux, a version of LINUX created by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds (see linux). Gates responded that Microsoft, too, would embrace the networked world and make all its soft-ware fully integrated with the Internet and distributable in new ways.

However, antitrust lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice and a number of states began legal action in the late 1990s, accusing Microsoft of abusing its monopoly status by virtually forcing vendors to include its software with their systems. In 2000, a federal judge agreed with the gov-ernment. In November 2002, an appeals court accepted a proposed settlement that would not break up Microsoft but would instead restrain a number of its unfair business prac-tices.

Gates’s personality often seemed to be in the center of the ongoing controversy about Microsoft’s behavior. Posi-tively, he has been characterized as having incredible energy, drive, and focus in revolutionizing the development and marketing of software.

On the other hand, Gates has been unapologetic about his dominance of the market. During the 1990s he often appeared defensive and abrasive in giving legal depositions or making public statements. As an executive, he has at times shown little tolerance for what he considers to be incompe-tence or shortsightedness on the part of subordinates.

There is another face to Bill Gates: He is one of the leading philanthropists of our time. In 2000 he and his wife founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation’s endowment was about $33 billion by 2006, and Warren Buffet pledged to nearly double that through Bill Gates is the multibillionaire cofounder of Microsoft Corpo-ration, the leader in operating systems and software for personal computers. The company has faced antitrust actions since the late 1990s.  (Microsoft Corporation) stock donations. The foundation gives over $800 million a year to global health programs (including vaccination pro-grams), supports a variety of global development efforts, and donates money and software to libraries and educa-tional institutions. In June 2006 Gates announced that he would be withdrawing from involvement in the day-to-day affairs of Microsoft, in order to devote more time to philan-thropy.

Since 2004, Gates has been featured on Time magazine’s annual list of 100 most influential people. In 2005, the magazine made Gates, along with his wife and U2’s lead singer Bono, “Persons of the Year.” Gates has also received four honorary doctorates.