ONE PARAGRAPH BILL GATES VS. STEVE JOBS
BILL GATES
Born: October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington, United States
Other Names: Gates, William Henry, III; Gates, William (American philanthropist); Gates, William H., III
Nationality: American
Occupation: Philanthropist
Microsoft cofounder and former chairman Bill Gates became the wealthiest man in the world and one of the most influential personalities in the ever-evolving information technology and computer industries. He has since stepped back from his role at Microsoft to focus on his role as a philanthropist.
Gates ranks among the more famous business personalities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His supreme accomplishment was to design and develop innovative software for the personal computer (PC), making PCs universally popular machines. In user-friendly language, communicating with computers is a matter of translating human language into the codes that a computer understands. The easier this translation is to make, the easier it is to work with the computer, and the more accessible and widely used the computer becomes. Gates's gift for software design, as well as his skills in business, made Microsoft, the company he cofounded with a high school friend in Richmond, Washington, a multibillion-dollar empire.
Love of Computer Technology
William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. He was the second child and only son of William Henry Gates Jr., a prominent Seattle attorney, and Mary Maxwell, a former school teacher. Gates had two siblings. Kristi, one year his senior, became his tax accountant. Libby was nine years his junior. Although Gates's parents had a law career in mind for their son, he developed an early interest in computer science and began studying computers in the seventh grade at Seattle's Lakeside School. Lakeside was a private school chosen by Gates's parents in the hopes that it would be more challenging for their son's intellectual drive and insatiable curiosity. At Lakeside Gates became acquainted with Paul Allen, a classmate with similar interests in technology who would eventually become his business partner.
Gates's early experiences with computers included debugging (eliminating errors from) programs for the Computer Center Corporation's PDP-10, helping to computerize electric power grids for the Bonneville Power Administration, and founding with Allen a firm called Traf-O-Data while still in high school. Their small company earned them $20,000 in fees for analyzing local traffic patterns. While working with the Computer Center's PDP-10, Gates was responsible for what was probably the first computer virus, a program that copies itself into other programs and ruins data. Discovering that the machine was connected to a national network of computers called Cybernet, Gates invaded the network and installed a program on the main computer that sent itself to the rest of the network's computers and caused systems to crash. When Gates was found out, he was severely reprimanded and he kept away from computers for his entire junior year at Lakeside. Without the lure of computers, Gates made plans in 1970 for college and law school, but by 1971 he was back helping Allen write a class scheduling program for their school's computer.
The Article That Started It All
Gates entered Harvard University in 1973 and pursued his studies for the next year and a half. His life was to change in January of 1975, however, when Popular Mechanics carried a cover story on a $350 microcomputer, the Altair, made by a firm called MITS in New Mexico. When Allen excitedly showed him the story, Gates knew where he wanted to be: at the forefront of computer software design.
Gates and Allen first wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair computer. BASIC was a simple, interactive computer language designed in the 1960s. "Interpreter" describes a program that executes a source program by reading it one line at a time, performing operations one line at a time, and performing operations immediately. MITS, which encouraged and helped Gates and Allen, finally challenged them to bring their software in for a demonstration. Because they did not own an Altair (nor had they seen the 8080 microprocessing chip that was at the heart of the machine), Gates had to write and test his BASIC interpreter on a simulator program that acted like the 8080. Nonetheless, their BASIC ran the first time it was tested at MITS.
Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975, ending his academic life and beginning his career in earnest as a software designer and entrepreneur. At this time, Gates and Allen cofounded Microsoft. They wrote programs for the early Apple and Commodore machines and expanded BASIC to run on microcomputers other than the Altair.
Gates's big opportunity arrived in 1980 when he was approached by IBM to help with its PC project, code-named Project Chess. Working with IBM engineers to rewrite and overhaul an existing piece of software from another vendor, he codesigned the disk operating system (DOS), sharing the rights to the software with IBM. When architecturally modified versions of the IBM PC entered the market, Gates's version of DOS, called MS-DOS, became the unofficial standard for these so-called IBM-compatible machines. More than two million copies of MS-DOS were sold by 1984, and more than one hundred million copies by the early 1990s, making the operating system the all-time leader in software sales. For his achievements in science and technology, Gates was presented with the Howard Vollum Award in 1984 by Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
In 1987 Gates entered the world of computer-driven multimedia when he began promoting CD-ROM technology. CD-ROM was an optical storage medium easily connected to a PC, and a CD-ROM disc had an incredibly large capacity that could store encyclopedias, feature films, and complex interactive games. Gates later expanded his business by combining PCs with the information reservoirs provided by CD-ROM and marketed a number of multimedia products.
Gates's competitive drive and fierce desire to win made him a powerful force in business but consumed much of his personal life. In the six years between 1978 and 1984, he took a total of only two weeks' vacation. In 1985 a popular magazine included him on their list of most eligible bachelors. His status did not change until New Year's Day 1994 when he married Melinda French, a Microsoft manager, on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. The ceremony was held on the island's Challenge golf course, and Gates kept it private by buying out the unused rooms at the local hotel and by hiring all of the helicopters in the area to keep photographers from using them. His fortune at the time of his marriage was estimated at close to $7 billion. By 1997 his worth was estimated at approximately $37 billion, earning him the "richest man in America" title. In Hard Drive, James Wallace and Jim Erickson quote Gates as saying, "I can do anything if I put my mind to it." His ambition made him the head of a robust, innovative software firm and the richest man in America.
Future for Microsoft
In the midst of global success, Gates emitted the same competitiveness, drive, ambition, and need to win that were present when he dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft. Allen left Microsoft to become a hi-tech venture-capital investor. However, he returned to serve on Microsoft's board. Gates hired Steve Ballmer--a former Harvard classmate and close friend and advisor--away from Proctor & Gamble in 1980 with the lure of a $50,000 yearly salary and a share of the business. In an interview with Newsweek, Gates said, "I think it's a phenomenal business partnership.... And within the company, everyone has understood that we work very closely together and have a very common view of where we want to go." Gates shared his vision for the future of Microsoft with Information Outlook. Gates said, "We're in four businesses today, and in ten years we'll be in the same four businesses; desktop operating systems, productivity applications, server software, and interactive content business." As of 2013, the company had added other services and products, but its focus remained on the four services mentioned by Gates.
Gates's detractors criticized him not only for his success, but also because they felt that he had unfairly, and perhaps illegally, leveraged his company's dominance of the desktop operating system market. With Windows 97, Microsoft integrated Explorer, its Internet browser, and the Microsoft Network into the Windows Operating System, to create the ultimate active desktop. Critics feared it would put all other entries at a disadvantage. "If improving a product based on customer input is willful maintenance of trying to stay in business and not have Netscape turn their browser into the most popular operating system, then I think that is what we are supposed to do," was Gates's response to his critics, according to an article in Time.
Microsoft's market domination prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to bring an antitrust lawsuit against the company in 1998. Gates vehemently denied that Microsoft had an illegal stronghold on the software industry and maintained that the company's success over rivals such as Oracle and IBM was simply the result of smart, strategic decision making. U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Jackson did not agree, and in November of 1999, found Microsoft to be a monopoly that used, "its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm [competing companies]." The prospect of breaking up the company seemed an unlikely result initially, but Jackson's highly critical comments reintroduced the notion as a real possibility. Both Microsoft and the Justice Department were to prepare briefs about how the law should apply in this case. Gates expressed a willingness to settle, but not if the federal government tried to dictate the content of Microsoft products. In 2001 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the lower court's conclusion that Microsoft had violated antitrust laws. But, by a 7-0 vote, the appeals court ruled that a new judge would have to decide what penalty Microsoft should pay because Judge Jackson had given the appearance of having a personal bias against the company. In conjunction with the Justice Department, the parties arrived at an agreement in the fall of 2001, preventing the breakup of Microsoft. Gates for his part agreed to furnish certain information about Windows to other software developers and to structure the software to facilitate the use of non-Microsoft products.
On January 13, 2000, Gates handed off day-to-day management of Microsoft to Ballmer, adding chief executive officer to Ballmer's existing title as president. Gates retained his position as chairman in the reshuffle and added the title of chief software architect. Though it was speculated that the management change was prompted by the confirmation on January 12, 2000, that Justice Department lawyers proposed splitting Microsoft as resolution to the department's antitrust suit against the company, Gates and Ballmer insisted that the reshuffle was designed to allow Gates to focus on development strategies for Microsoft.
Philanthropy
Aside from his fame in the business world, Gates also distinguished himself as a philanthropist. He and wife Melinda established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focused on helping to improve health care and education for children around the world. Pledges have included $1 billion over 20 years to fund college scholarships for about 1,000 minority students, $750 million over 5 years to help launch the Global Fund for Children's Vaccines, $50 million to help the World Health Organization's efforts to eradicate polio, and $3 million to help prevent the spread of AIDS among young people in South Africa. Gates and his wife also gave the largest single gift to a U.S. public library in November of 1998 by donating $20 million to the Seattle Public Library. Another of Gates's charitable donations was $20 million given to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build a new home for its Laboratory for Computer Science.
On July 12, 2000, the foundation announced nearly $50 million in grants to help prevent the transmission of AIDS. The pledge came on top of a separate $50 million grant to help prevent and treat AIDS in Botswana. Later that month, the foundation gave Johns Hopkins University a five-year, $20 million grant to study whether inexpensive vitamin and mineral pills might help save lives in poor countries. On November 13, 2000, Harvard University's School of Public Health announced that it had received $25 million from the foundation to study AIDS prevention in Nigeria. The grant was the largest single private grant in the school's history. Contributions have included $51.2 million to public high schools for academically advanced low-income students in New York and donations to medicine that include millions to fight malaria and for tuberculosis research. By 2001 Gates and his wife had endowed more than $21 billion for philanthropic causes. Of this amount, more than $2 billion went to global health initiatives, $500 million to improving learning opportunities, $200 million to community projects in the Pacific Northwest, and $29 million to special projects and annual giving campaigns. Gates pledged $3 million in aid for the victims of a tsunami that hit two continents on December 26, 2004. He received honorary knighthood in 2005, for his "contribution to enterprise" in the United Kingdom.
In December of 2005, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it would disburse $84.3 million in grants to Save the Children and the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, for programs that fight infant mortality in developing countries. In that same month, Gates, along with his wife Melinda and U2 singer Bono, were named Time's Persons of the Year for their charitable work toward reducing poverty and disease throughout the world. In January of 2006, Gates announced that his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was increasing its spending on eradicating tuberculosis to $900 million. This wa triple the foundation's previously announced spending on that goal. And in April of that year, the Foundation donated $75 million to the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) to fund development of an anti-pneumonia vaccine.
Also in 2005 British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that Gates would help to fund a panel of international dignitaries to monitor aid to Africa. The panel, which planned to track countries' progress toward meeting the goals set at the Gleneagles G8 summit, was chaired by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Gates announced that his foundation would donate $287 million to 16 groups of scientists to fund research into a vaccine against HIV.
Stepped Away from Microsoft
In June of 2006, Gates announced that he would begin to reduce his role in the day-to-day running of Microsoft. He stepped down as the company's chief software architect and announced that he would give up all of his managerial positions at the company in July of 2008. For several years, Gates continued to be Microsoft's chairman and part-time technical adviser, but he devoted most of his time to directing the activities of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Early in 2014, Gates announced that Satya Nadella would replace Steve Ballmer as CEO. Nadella was head of Microsoft's enterprise and cloud divisions, and the company hoped to meet the challenges of mobile computing and other innovations in his areas of expertise. At Nadella's request, Gates agreed to spend more time at the company to advise and help define the new products the company develops; however, Gates still planned to spend about two-thirds of his time on work for the foundation.
Continued Work with Foundation
In September of 2006, the foundation donated $150 million to improve agriculture in Africa. The foundation planned to partner with the Rockefeller Foundation to create the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which would work to "dramatically increase the productivity of small farms, moving tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty and significantly reducing hunger, according to a report in Forbes.
Gates's personal worth was estimated at more than $57 billion in 2007, and he was ranked the richest person in world by Forbes magazine in 2009 for the fourteenth time. In Computerworld, David Moschella wrote of this wealth and Gates's use of it: "At various times, Gates has been underestimated, loved, admired, feared, hated and even deemed irrelevant. Now, it's time for him to find a new game. As it happens, the one he has chosen is enough to challenge both his and Billionaire businessman Warren Buffett's wallets." Gates continued to challenge his and Buffet's wallets in 2010 when he, his wife Melinda, and Buffet created the Giving Pledge, which is a pledge that other billionaires can sign to indicate that they promise to give away at least half of their fortunes to charity. Notable billionaires who signed the pledge included Marked Zuckerberg and Ted Turner. Buffett also pledged to make an annual gift of stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as long as either Bill or Melinda remained involved in directing the foundation's activities. Buffett also announced that he was rewriting his will so that the stock donations would continue after his death. The first year's gift, 500,000 shares, was estimated to be worth more than $1.5 billion.
In early 2011 Gates announced that the foundation would focus on completely eradicating polio and giving vaccinations to the world's poorest children, and by 2014 it had spent $1.5 billion in the efforts. Forbes reported that Gates was the world's richest person once again, estimating Gates's wealth at $76 billion in 2014. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also provided grants toward the development of a new condom that would get more people to use them to prevent pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV. Gates also supported higher academic standards in the United States, a project that became known as the Common Core. The foundation contributed some $200 million, not only for development of the standards, but also to build political support for the large-scale changes that states and school districts would have to make to implement them.
In 2015 Gates remained the wealthiest person in the year with Forbes estimating his wealth at $79 billion. He continued his work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, focusing on improving and distributing vaccinations, eradicating the Ebola crisis in Africa, improving education in the United States, improving health care around the world, establishing international mobile banking, and helping Africans sustain themselves. The foundation invested $52 million into the Germany company CureVac, which makes vaccines in March of 2015. As of 2015, the foundation has given more than $29 billion to help those in need.
Personal Life
Gates and his wife had their first child, Jennifer, in April of 1996. A second child, a son, Rory John, followed in 1999. In 2002 the family added a third child, a girl named Phoebe. Although many described Gates as cold, relentless, and impersonal, his friends found him more reflective since his marriage and the birth of his children.
