Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 and through his leadership and business acumen transformed the company into the global software giant it is today. His early focus was on software rather than hardware, which proved pivotal. Key deals with IBM established Microsoft's dominance with its MS-DOS and Windows operating systems. By the 1980s Microsoft was hugely profitable. Gates helped drive adoption of the internet by giving away Microsoft's browser software. He has since become the richest person in the world but also dedicates significant funds to philanthropic causes through his foundation.

1. Business History

2. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• Like Henry Ford with his Model T, Bill Gates envisioned the
mass appeal of the personal computer, but unlike Ford, he
didn’t want to build it. Gates’ genius was never in hardware;
instead, he provided the brains – the software and
operating systems.
• Bill Gates understood brand: The various iterations of his
Window software, all named by year, were introduced at
press conferences that wrapped high tech. in the glitz of a
Miss Universe pageant.
• One more way that Gates resembles so many of the moguls
who came before him: He began the business that was to
make him the World’s richest man out of nothing more than
a dominating idea borne on an iron will

3. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• Henry Ford empowered his workers – and kept unions at
bay – by creating the $ 5 a day wage. Bill Gates
empowered his workers – and kept them from fleeing to
other software companies – by sharing the wealth through
stock options.
• At his company’s prime, Gates was earning at a pace
nearly 175 times.
• With his own money, Gates built a 40,000 square foot home
sunk into bluff overlooking Lake Washington, outside
Seattle.

4. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• Gates has expressed a desire to spend much of the second
half of his life giving away his money. Through a foundation
run by Gate’s father, Gates and his wife, Melinda, have
donated billions of dollars, mostly for education, libraries
and public health.
• For the year 1999, grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation included nearly $ 950 million for vaccines
against preventable diseases and an even @ 1 billion to
fund the Gates Millennium Scholars program, to enhance
minority access to higher education.

5. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• Among the points of attraction between Gates and Buffet,
who is 25 yrs his senior, is a fascination with games of all
sorts, and a marathon-like capacity to pursue them.
• The first time America’s two richest men got together with
their wives at Buffett’s San Francisco home, they ended up
playing nine straight hours of bridge.
• Gates’ immediate rivals seem to take almost demonic glee
in attacking the man, his products, and his company.
Borland CEO Philippe Kahn once compared Microsoft to
Germany under Adolph Hitler; another time, he likened
Microsoft’s Windows system to AIDS.

6. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• Lotus founder Mitch Kapor looked around the landscape of
the software industry and declared that Microsoft’s
dominance had left it “the kingdom of the dead,”
• Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is probably the most antagonistic
of Gate’s many industry competitors.
• As the Justice Department was moving against Microsoft,
Ellison told a May 1998 Harvard computer conference that
the company’s business practices were “patently
illegal…more blatant than anything
• Oracle also hired a Washington detective agency,
Investigative Group International, to dig up dirt on its rival,
literally going through Microsoft’s trash.

7. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• In Cyberspace, things only get worse. Half a year into the
new millennium, you could use a MS operating sytem and
MS internet navigator to find websites with names like
Boycott Microsoft, Punch Bill Gates, the MS Hate Page etc.
• Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock, which tracks Gates’ gross
worth by the fractional second, based on the 141,159,990
million shares of Microsoft he owned as of 1995, adjusted
for splits in 1996, 1998 and 1999.
• As of Dec. 15, 2000, with the MS share price sitting at $
48.875, Bill Gates was worth $ 55.19 billion, the clock
noted.

8. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• By the end of 2005, the wired worldwide population is
predicted to hit 765 million people, and as the numbers
grow, the digital wealth will spread.
• At the outset of the 21st century, about 43% of all Internet
users were Americans.
• Almost overnight, Australia and Finland, the 11 time zones
of the former Soviet Union, New Delhi, Madagascar, Rome,
and New York City had all become just a log-on away.
• A web had been created – a literal web: Touch it anywhere
and you are in touch with its whole being. And as the Web
was spreading exponentially, opportunity was spreading
with it.

9. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• Microsoft, AOL, Macintosh, Lotus, Netscape, Bill Gates, Steve
Case, Steve Jobs, Vint Crf, Bob Kahn, and tens of thousands
of others had all played a role in launching an opportunity
machine such as the world had never known – one that
spread the chance for a better economic life to places that can
seem almost unimaginable.
• To see how the new interconnected world creates opportunity,
though, it’s useful to look at three women who have made
their global interconnection : Me Tha, Vivian Wee, and Nikone
Nanong.
• They have travelled the World, helping businesses in remote
countries like Laos learn how to use e-commerce and the
World Wide Web so that can compete globally and take
advantage of the global appetite for goods.

10. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• Nikone’s Internet site (www.aworldforall.com) is operated by A
World for All, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to improving
community life in impoverished areas. The site includes
artisans from Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, as well as
Nikone’s Lao weavers.
• Through the site, crafts people working in some of the World’s
most forlorn economies can compete with other weavers and
textile entrepreneurs in every corner of the planet.
• And in a nation like Laos where yearly income in 1999
averaged less than $ 1,300 a person, it takes only a relatively
few e-business sales to make an enormous difference in the
standard of living for the craftspeople and the families and
communities they help support.

11. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• The Netherlands grew rich in the 16th & 17th centuries as a
trading center where rare goods brought out of North Africa,
the Levant, and further East at great cost could begin to make
their way to the marketplaces of Europe.
• Godric grew rich a half a millennium earlier by doing much the
same at far greater risk.
• But today, the Internet accomplishes all that Godric and the
Dutch East India traders did in the blink of an eye.
• Goods from all over the globe are available to shoppers all
over the globe, 24 hours a day and via every sort of barter
exchange; meet a price, name a price, bid a price.
• Today, through the internet, stocks, bonds, mortgages, and
mutual funds are all bought and sold online, and currency

12. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• Now the internet provides both the power source and the bulk
of the infrastructure for many businesses like Nikone’s
Handcraft Centre – at a fraction of the cost.

13. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• Born to wealthy parents in Seattle – where his father was a
prominent attorney and his mother a childhood of Me
Greenfield, the longtime editorial-page editor of the
Washington Post – Gates attended the fashionable and
academically rigorous Lakeside School.
• By tenth grade, Gates was writing a program that handled
class scheduling for Lakeside.
• After Graduating from Lakeside in 1973, Gates moved on to
Harvard. Two years later, in Jan. 1975, came the event
enshrined in Microsoft mythology as the moment of
conception.
• It was that Bill Gates became Harvard’s most famous dropout
– he and Allen set up shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico and
Microsoft was launched.

14. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• Micro-soft, as it was first spelled, ended in 1975 with three
employees and $ 16,500 in revenues, but Gates and Allen
were well on their way to settling a fundamental question that
was to make all the difference in the company’s success.
• Hardware, after all, was the business that nearly all the
computing giants of the time were pursuing. Gates wanted to
do software only, and luckily for Microsoft’s eventual
shareholders, he prevailed.
• By 1980, Microsoft moved to Washington State, and was a
40-person company earning about $ 7.5 million in revenues.
The company would end 1981 with three times as many
employees and more than double the revenue.

15. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• On Aug.12, 1981, IBM introduced with great fanfare its
Personal Computer: Far less noticed at the time was the 16-bit
brain inside the PC – Microsoft’s Disk Operating System, or
MS-DOS, for short – or the fact that Gates had pressured the
industry behemoth into giving MS sole rights to license MS-
DOS.
• By the mid 1980s, Microsoft’s market dominance was
beginning to pay off in a serious fashion. Revenues for 1985
stood at over $ 140 million, more than nine times what they
had been when the company’s operating system was first
introduced.
• To make certain that computer users would head into
cyberspace using Microsoft products, the company gave away
its Internet navigation software, called the MS Internet
Explorer.

16. Business History
Businesses that changed the World
Bill Gates and Cyberspace
• In time, Microsoft would spread itself all over the Internet and
intranets, and into multimedia, on-line magazine publishing,
Web TV, and just about anywhere else that a company with a
limitless appetite and some $ 15 billion in annual revenues
could take it.
• Bill Gates, who prefers to think of himself as a technologist, not
a businessman, had become both one of the world’s most
admired men as well as its richest citizen.