Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2013, right after Steve Ballmer announced he would step down as Microsoft CEO (Satya Nadella succeeded him in 2014). His current wife Melinda and Gates’s status as a very good friend on the Berkshire board reflect 2013; the couple divorced in 2021 and he left the board in 2020.
Bill Gates is in the news again after his old friend Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, announced he was leaving the company, with no official reason given yet. Many people are calling for Gates to take Ballmer’s place as CEO, although, while it hasn’t been ruled out, it’s unlikely that Gates will take on the role himself since he is devoted 100% to his foundation.
It’s time to look back at the life, career and greatness of one of the most successful men in the business world.
Bill Gates was the son of a successful lawyer. Unlike his biggest business rival, Steve Jobs, Gates came from an upper-class family. By the age of 11 Gates had blossomed intellectually, although he wasn’t like other gifted children. Gates was a real headache for his parents, a mix of shy boy and highly mischievous rebel.
At 13, Gates went to a private school in Seattle, Lakeside, where he discovered computers. That’s where he met Paul Allen, and the two of them spent hours playing with the computers. They were probably the first “geeks” in the history of computing, because to everyone else what they were doing was a waste of time, but those two boys already had something up their sleeve to turn into a business.
The school itself supported them in that crazy idea nobody else could see: that clever boy said computer chips would become so powerful that computers and software would turn into a tool found on every desk in every home around the world.
After finishing school, Gates went to Harvard, where he met Steve Ballmer (the man who has just stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO), but Harvard was too small for Gates, so he stayed only a couple of years before dropping out for good to found Microsoft with Paul Allen.
Microsoft started out in New Mexico, and it wasn’t until 1979 that the company moved to Washington State. His partner Paul Allen was diagnosed with cancer (Hodgkin’s lymphoma) in 1982 and was forced to leave the company. Although he eventually recovered from the illness, he never returned.
Steve Ballmer was Microsoft’s first manager, and he was probably the one who came up with the idea of buying the Q-DOS operating system from a Seattle technology company.
That was when IBM hired Microsoft to supply operating systems, and rumor has it that Gates closed the deal with IBM before he even had the product. One way or another, the operating system became MS-DOS and quickly became the dominant operating system for PCs worldwide.
When Bill Gates met Steve Jobs
Although no one knows for sure when these two business titans first met, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography it was in the late 1970s that they had their first encounter and began a fairly good relationship of the “I’ll build it, you provide…” kind, with all sorts of exchanges of ideas, since Steve Jobs was building the first Macintosh and needed a software developer for the Mac.
In 1983, Bill Gates’s big plan came to light when he announced his great creative secret: Windows. When Jobs found out, he went crazy, claiming that Gates had stolen the idea from them, copied their product and, in short, swindled them.
The story goes, according to some of those present, that Gates did not at first deny having “stolen” Apple’s idea; some sources say he shrugged and said something to the effect that Apple stole from Xerox, so there’s nothing wrong with Microsoft stealing from Apple.
Microsoft launched Windows and went public in 1986, as a risky company, since the product was seen at the time as a fad that would probably pass and had no future. Some visionaries studied the company and its prospects and didn’t hesitate to invest in it. Over the next ten years, Microsoft created more than 10,000 millionaires thanks to the strong rise in its share price.
The shares climbed because Gates was building a monopoly in a market that was clearly growing. To date, Microsoft shares have gained more than 33,000% since 1986.
In 1994, Gates married a Microsoft employee, Melinda French, his current wife (Melinda Gates), with whom he has three children. She is co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and is said to be the person who brought out Gates’s more humanitarian side.
In 1995, Gates became the richest man in the world, and held that title almost every year until he was overtaken by Mexico’s Carlos Slim, although some say he practically handed it over once he began devoting himself to other things.
In 1997, Apple was beginning its comeback, and Gates invested 150 million in the company. He announced the investment on a giant screen and was booed by the audience.
In 1998, Microsoft was taken to court for abusing its software monopoly, in a highly publicized trial that portrayed Bill Gates more as a mobster than a businessman. Gates went from being an admired businessman to a man hated in certain circles.
Some say the experience burned Bill Gates out emotionally and he was never the same again. In 2008 he became Microsoft’s non-executive chairman in an attempt to step away from the company’s day-to-day running, although competitors are warned not to be fooled: Microsoft is still Gates’s company, and his opinions and advice still carry a lot of weight.
In 2004, Gates joined the board of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company run by Warren Buffett, a man who managed to inspire Gates again at a time when he thought he had nothing left to learn. (Bill Gates: 3 things I learned from Warren Buffett.) The two have become very good friends.
Although Gates will now oversee the arrival of whoever becomes Microsoft’s next CEO, all he really thinks about is continuing to change the world through his foundation, because he believes there is a lot to change within what he described as misdirected capitalism.
Further reading
Sources: Wall Street Journal | Gates Foundation | Business Insider | CNN
Featured image: edwardhblake, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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