With a wealth of more than 87 billion USD in assets that Bill Gates is still the world’s richest person.
Some might argue that it was a miracle. Though he knew that he will make enemies he was not afraid to take risks throughout his journey.
In 28th October 1955 William Henry Gates iii was born in Seattle. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a banking officer. He was nicknamed as “Trey” in his childhood.
As his parents wanted him to be a lawyer he entered to the Lakeside School. Life at Lakeside school was a life changing journey for him. He met Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen while studying there.
During his school time Lakeside Mothers’ Club had donated 30 Teletype computers from where Gates found his love for computing.
Once these two friends were suspended from computer labs after getting caught for coding with bugs in order to stay in the labs for extended time.
He didn’t take too much time to understand the true value of computing. After finding out that the school’s control board using those computers he manipulated its data and managed to change the time tables so that he could has all those girls in his classroom.
Even before he left Lakeside he managed to begin his 1st business venture with Allen. The 1st attempt of them was to take the data from the traffic counter and sending those data to the traffic engineers. This business gained some momentum at the beginning as well as this was the foundation for the world’s renowned brand “Microsoft”.
In 1973 Gates got selected for the Harvard University after gaining 1590 marks out of 1600. As same as the most of the current university students he also had not clear idea about his future path. He was spending most of his time with the computers.
But he had so many connections with people. Steve Ballmer was one of them. Though these two were in the same dorm at uni they only met at economics classes.
All these things changed in 1974. A company named MITS introduced a processor called Altair 8800 which was a for novice computer scientists. At that time these two gentlemen had no clue about Altair 8800. But they actually wanted to find some money for them. So they tried and got a job at MITS. Actually they went to MITS headquarters at Albuquerque and hacked their one of the versions of product called “Basic”. It was enough for the Altair to recruit them as computer scientists. Though he moved away to New Mexico Bill Gates continued his academics at Harvard.
During this time these two have named their partnership as “Micro-soft” and managed to start a small office at Albuquerque.
In the year of 1977 our story leader had to face a trouble. Once he was caught and booked for the road violations. Following is the world famous mugshot which was taken at that time.
In the 1979 they moved their office to Bellevue, Washington.
In the year of 1980 Ballmer; one of his colleagues at Harvard joined “Micro-soft.” In the 1988 he was appointed as the Executive Vice President for trade.
In the early years of Microsoft they were mainly focused on developing operating systems. It is said that Gates had reviewed all the code which was written by his employees at that time.
In 1980 IBM showed their interest in Microsoft. Gates worked really hard on this and managed to produce the operating system which was named as 86- DOS. It was mainly referred as Disk Operating System IBM changed that name as PC-DOS after purchasing that for 50 000 USD. But there were no mention about the copyright issue of that product. So that was available for free for anyone.
Due to the success achieved with the IBM most of the industry giants started to do business with Microsoft. The industry giants like IBM, Compaq, Dell made their own computer systems. But they all used the DOS operating system. So this was a revolutionary step for Microsoft.
1983 – Sales amount of 55 million USDs. – The biggest company in the computing world.
1986 – 1st public offering of Microsoft. At the end of 1st day 21 million worth shares were traded at 28 million USDs.
1987- Bill Gates became a billionaire at the age of 31
He was ranked as the richest person in 1995 and was able to keep that position until 2007. He was also ranked as the richest man in 2009 and 2014 as well.
In 1985, Microsoft windows 1.0 was released. Nobody thought that this would turn out to be a long time battle with Apple. Gates put up a case against them with the claim that Apple had used their windows GUI concepts. And in the year of 1993 he was able to win the case against them.
He is smart with his words. And while arguing with the board he used to say “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard”.
With the dominance of Microsoft Apple found its very difficult stay competitive. With Jobs becoming the CEO in Apple in 1997 both of these companies decided to set aside their bad history and come to an agreement.
Microsoft agreed to develop their office product compatible with Mac for five years and Apple agreed to use Internet Explorer as their default web browser. And that time Microsoft took a decision to invest 150 million USDs in Apple which had taken whole business world with surprise.
In 1995 Bill Gates authored “The Road ahead” with his novel ideas.
In the late nineties aggressive nature of Gates caused some problems for Microsoft. Even the US government took a case against Microsoft.
Due to those circumstances Gates decided to hand over his position to Ballmer and stepped down as the Chief Software Architect.
At that time their characters were also used in comic programs such as “Austin Powers”
In the year of 2006 he again became the CEO of Microsoft. At that time he also initiated Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which is considered as one of the largest charity organization in the world. They have spent most of those funds in finding out solutions for global problems such as Food Crisis, Energy Crisis etc.
Apart from his success in IT industry he have gained success in other business areas as well. Four Seasons Hotels is a classic example for that.
Although the disputes between Steve Jobs and Gates haven’t came to a conclusion they have decided to offer some respect to each other in taking business decisions.
Apart from donations Bill Gate’s estimated wealth is more than 87 million USDs.
He stepped down from his position in Microsoft in 2014 for the 2nd time and became the Satya Nadella’s technical consultant.
Source : Business Insider
