Biography of Bill Gates
CEO Microsoft
CEO Microsoft
William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an
American business magnate, computer programmer and philanthropist. Gates
is the former chief executive and current chairman of Microsoft, the
world’s largest personal-computer software company, which he
co-founded with Paul Allen. He is consistently ranked among
the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from
1995 to 2009, excluding 2008, when he was ranked third; in 2011 he was the
wealthiest American and the second wealthiest person. During his career at
Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect,
and remains the largest individual shareholder, with 6.4 percent of
the common stock. He has also authored or co-authored several books.
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer
revolution. Gates has been criticized for his business tactics, which have
been 
Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of
Microsoft in January 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of
chief software architect. In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be
transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work, and full-time
work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He gradually transferred his
duties to Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, and Craig Mundie,
chief research and strategy officer. Gates's last full-time day at Microsoft
was June 27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as non-executive chairman.
Early life
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H.
Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His parents are of
English, German, and Scots-Irish descent. His father was a prominent
lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First
Interstate Banc System and the United Way. Gates's maternal
grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has
one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was
the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or
"Trey" because his father had the "II" suffix. Early on in
his life, Gates's parents had a law career in mind for him. When Gates was
young, his family regularly attended a Congregational church.
At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive
preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at
the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy
a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on
a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. Gates
took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused
from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program
on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users
to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how
it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that
moment, he said, "There was just something neat about the
machine." After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other
students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers.
One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation
(CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric
Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in
the operating system to obtain free computer time.
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in
CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via
Teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for
various programs that ran on the system, including programs
in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC
continued until 1970, when the company went out of business. The following
year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a
payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties.
After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote
the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the
code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later
stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I
could so unambiguously demonstrate success." At age 17, Gates formed
a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic
counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In early 1973,
Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out
of 1600 on the SAT and enrolled at Harvard College in the
autumn of 1973. While at Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer, who later
succeeded Gates as CEO of Microsoft.
Gates did not have a
definite study plan while a student at Harvard and spent a lot of time
using the school's computers. Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen, and he
joined him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974. The following year saw
the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and
Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer
software company. He had talked this decision over with his parents, who
were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a company.
In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake
sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved
problems presented in acombinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one
of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for
over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent. His
solution was later formalized in a published paper in collaboration with
Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.
Microsoft
BASIC
Microsoft's BASIC was popular with computer
hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the
community and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, Gates
wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that
MITS could not continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality
software without payment. This letter was unpopular with many computer
hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be
able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and
it continued to develop programming language software for various systems. The
company moved from Albuquerque to its new home in Bellevue, Washington on
January 1, 1979, after the former rejected his loan application. After reading the
January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated
the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry
Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that
he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the
platform. In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not
written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS
president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course
of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a
minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's
offices in Albuquerque was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS
to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into
MITS, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS
in Albuquerque in November 1975. They named their partnership
"Micro-Soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque.
Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name
"Microsoft" was registered with the Office of the Secretary of
the State of New Mexico. Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his
studies.
During Microsoft's early years, all employees
had broad responsibility for the company's business. Gates oversaw the business
details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, Gates
personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote
parts of it as he saw fit.
IBM partnership
IBM approached Microsoft in July 1980
regarding its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC. The computer
company first proposed that Microsoft write the BASIC interpreter. When IBM's
representatives mentioned that they needed an operating system, Gates referred
them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the widely
used CP/M operating system. IBM's discussions with Digital
Research went poorly, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM
representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a
subsequent meeting with Gates and told him to get an acceptable operating
system. A few weeks later Gates proposed using 86-DOS (QDOS), an
operating system similar to CP/M that Tim Paterson of Seattle
Computer Products (SCP) had made for hardware similar to the PC. Microsoft made
a deal with SCP to become the exclusive licensing agent, and later the full
owner, of 86-DOS. After adapting the operating system for the PC, Microsoft
delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS in exchange for a one-time fee of
$50,000.
Gates did not offer to transfer
the copyright on the operating system, because he believed that other
hardware vendors would clone IBM's system. They did, and the sales
of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry. Despite
IBM's name on the operating system the press quickly identified Microsoft as
being very influential on the new computer, with PC Magazine asking
if Gates were "The Man behind the Machine?" He oversaw
Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the company
in Washington State and made Gates President of Microsoft and the Chairman of
the Board.
Windows
Microsoft launched its first retail version
of Microsoft Windows on November 20, 1985, and in August, the company
struck a deal with IBM to develop a separate operating system
called OS/2. Although the two companies successfully developed the first
version of the new system, mounting creative differences caused the partnership
to deteriorate. It ended in 1991, when Gates led Microsoft to develop a version
of OS/2 independently from IBM.
Management style
From Microsoft's founding in 1975 until 2006,
Gates had primary responsibility for the company's product strategy. He
aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft
achieved a dominant position he vigorously defended it. He gained a reputation
for being distant to others; as early as 1981 an industry executive complained
in public that "Gates is notorious for not being reachable by phone and
for not returning phone calls."
As an executive, Gates met regularly with
Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. Firsthand accounts of these
meetings describe him as verbally combative, berating managers for perceived
holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's
long-term interests at risk. He often interrupted presentations with such
comments 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? The target of his outburst then had to defend the proposal in
detail until, hopefully, Gates was fully convinced. When subordinates
appeared to be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically,
"I'll do it over the weekend."
Gates's role at Microsoft for most of its
history was 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, but wrote code as late as
1989 that shipped in the company's products. On June 15, 2006, Gates
announced that he would transition out of his day-to-day role over the next two
years to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He divided his responsibilities
between two successors, placing Ray Ozzie in charge of day-to-day
management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy.
Recognition
In 1987, Gates was listed as a billionaire in the pages of Forbes'
400 Richest People in America issue, just days before his 32nd birthday. As the
world's youngest self-made billionaire, he was worth $1.25 billion, over
$900 million more than he'd been worth the year before, when he'd debuted
on the list.
In 1994, he was honored
as the twentieth Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer
Society. Gates has received honorary doctorates from Nyenrode Business
Universities, Breukelen, The Netherlands, in 2000; the Royal
Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2002;Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan,
in 2005; Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in April 2007;Harvard
University in June 2007; the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, in
January 2008,and Cambridge University in June 2009. He was also made an
honorary trustee of Peking University in 2007.Gates was also made
an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British
Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005, in addition to
having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis
gatesi, in his honor. Time magazine named Gates 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 2006. Time also
collectively named Gates, his wife Melinda and U2's lead
singer Bono as the 2005 Persons of the Year for their
humanitarian efforts. In 2006, he was voted eighth in the list of
"Heroes of our time”. Gates 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.
In November 2006, he and his wife were awarded the Order of
the Aztec Eagle for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas
of health and education, particularly in Mexico, and specifically in the
program "Un país de lectores". In October 2009, it was
announced that Gates will be awarded the 2010 Bower Award for
Business Leadership of The Franklin Institute for his achievements in
business and for his philanthropic work. In 2010 he was honored with
the Silver Buffalo Award by the Boy Scouts of America, its
highest award for adults, for his service to youth.
In 2011, Bill Gates was ranked as the fifth most powerful person
in the world, according to rankings by Forbes magazine.