BILL GATES
William H. (Bill) Gates – Chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. BornOctober 28, 1955 shortly after 9 PM. He is reported to be the richest private individual in theWorld topping the Forbes list of richest people for both 1996 and 1997
INVENTIONS Gates and his pal Paul Allen produced two programs in the 8th grade: one playedtic-tac-toe. Before long, they were moonlighting as adolescent computer consultants for a localcorporation. In high school, Gates and his friends devised a program that analyzed traffic datafor his hometown.
Windows takes over
Soon after Gates unveiled his Windows 3.0 program in 1990, the applications softwareindustry was crying uncle. Over 60 million copies of the Windows progam were sold, whichestablished Microsoft_s operating system as the PC software standard and left companies likeLotus and WordPerfect scrambling because they had been creating applications for IBM_ssystem, the OS/2. Six years after the Windows launch, Microsoft dominates the word processingand spreadsheet mark.
Corporation as Cult
The suburban Microsoft “campus,” a cluster of 35 low-rise buildings, is set among lawns,groves of white pines and shady courtyards that make the place resemble a college. But incontrast to the sedate intellectualism of the average college, Microsoft rewards the brusque“math camp” mentality: a lot of cocky geeks willing to wave their fingers and yell with the cuteconviction that all problems have a right answer. Among Gates favorite phrases is “That_s thestupidest thing I_ve ever heard,” and victims wear it as a badge of honor, bragging about it theway they do about getting a late-night E-mail from him.
POSSESSIONS
Built into a bluff fronting Lake Washington, the home Gates has been working on formore than four years has 40,000 square feet of living space and a vaulted 30-car garage. One ofhis favorite features: two dozen 40-in. monitors will form a flat-screen display covering an entire
wall. As visitors pass into each room, wearing an electronically -coded pin, music they like willbegin to play. Estimated Value: $40 million.When Microsoft was based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in its early years, Gates boughta Porsche 911 and used to race it in the desert; Paul Allen had to bail him out of jail after onemidnight escapade. Later, he bought a Porsche 930 Turbo he called the “rocket,” then aMercedes, a Jaguar XJ6, a $60,000 Carrera Cabriolet 964, a $380,000 Porsche 959 that ended upimpounded in a customs shed because it couldn_t meet import emission standards, and a Ferrari348 that became known as the “dune buggy” after he spun it into the sand.
THE STOP GATES CLUB
Netscape, Oracle and Sun have publicly made thwarting Gates_s “plan for worlddomination” a holy crusade. They accuse him of trying to leverage Microsoft_s near-monopoly indesktop operating systems unfairly with the goal of dominating everything from word processingand spreadsheet applications to web browsers and content. “Where will it stop? They_ll go on to bundle in content, their Microsoft Network,financial transactions, travel services, everything. They have a game plan to monopolize everymarket they touch,” says Gary Reback, the Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer representing Netscapeand other Microsoft competitors. Gates makes no apologies for integrating his own browser into Windows.