Essays

A Life Worth Knowing About"

William Henry Gates, also known as 'Bill', has established himself as the richest man in the world. He is the youngest self-made billionaire, and perhaps the best businessman in the world.

Bill, was born October 28, 1955. Gates began his career in PC software, programming computers at age 13. In education, he attended a well-known private school in Seattle, Washington called Lakeside. At Lakeside, he met his future business partner Paul Alien. Bill Gates entered Harvard in 1973. He created the programming language' BASIC. Gates attended Harvard University as a freshman. After a few years, Gates and his business partner Paul Allen dropped out of Harvard to begin the Microsoft Corp. in 1975.

Throughout his life. Gates had many experiences with business. Alien and Gates started a small company called Traf-Data. They sold a small computer outfitted with their program that could count traffic for the city. Gates -also worked as a Congressional Page and at a programming company called TRW. After all his minor jobs, Gates and Alien founded Microsoft in 1975, the largest computer based company in the world. Gates is the Chief Executive officer and Paul Alien is VP They are both very wealthy due to this business.                     

Microsoft's wealth and power just grew and grew. Microsoft became so rich that it could buy out an entire year's production of his 99 nearest competitors, burn it, and still be worth more than Hugh Hefner and Michael Jordan. Microsoft's $25 billion market value tops that of Ford, General Motors, and 3M, Boeing, General Mills, or Anheuser-Busch.

With size comes power. Microsoft dominates the PC market with its MS-DOS operating system, the basic software that lets the computer understand your commands and carry them out. MS-DOS runs on 90 percent of the world's IBM computers. Microsoft has extended from MS-DOS to Windows, which is probably the most important operating system Microsoft has released. Windows '95 is a graphics interface environment that runs on top of MS-DOS and will, according to Gates, replace DOS in future versions. Microsoft also supplies about 50 percent of the world's software applications: programs such as Excel (spreadsheets), Microsoft Word (word processing) and Access (data bases). It is also in the business of networking. And multimedia. And CD-ROMs. And books. And as an early supporter of the Macintosh computer, Microsoft virtually owns the Mac application market. It has been calculated that Microsoft controls 80-85% of the entire PC software industry. The company has hundreds of products and nearly 18,000 employees making it one of the largest companies to date. Many of the company's shareholders are now millionaires and a few including Bill Gates and Paul Alien are billionaires. Microsoft is no doubt the fastest growing company in the PC software industry.

Most of Bill's personal beliefs revolve around working hard and trying your hardest to succeed. He believes that if you are intelligent and know how to apply your intelligence you can accomplish anything. Bill is obviously a visionary but he also works very hard and very competitively to carry out his vision. His belief in high intelligence and hard work is what put him where he is today, as well as being in the right place at the right time. He doesn't believe in luck or any sort of god, just hard work and competitiveness. These beliefs are few but they are quite powerful in the computer software industry and will continue to increase Bill's wealth and his monopoly on the industry. Bill Gates along with his wife have donated over 800 million dollars to charitable causes. Bill's primary choice to send money involves educational purposes, and civic acts.

William Gates III or 'Trey' as he is called at home is a remarkable man who has been able to overcome his geek status and go into the world spotlight as a genius at what he does. Through his hard work and determination he up till today is worth about 41,000,000,000 dollars.

Bill Gates is important because not only did he change the computer technology in America, he also became the biggest, strongest, richest and the most powerful company in the world. Bill Gates, the self made billionaire, is the best businessman in the world, and still today rules over every other computer product with Microsoft.