The long and successful journey of Bill Gates

William (Bill) Henry Gates III, chairman of the world's largest software company MICROSOFT, is laying down office on June 27, 2008 as full-time chairman of Microsoft Corporation, to take up a full-time philanthropic role in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It's a momentous occasion. Not often one comes across a situation where an extremely successful and active CEO walks out of the primary function of heading a corporation to pursue one's interests, particularly so in the case of Bill Gates who is not an ordinary CEO. He founded the company along with his schoolmate Paul Allen, made it real big, had an outlandish vision of "putting computer on each desk" (when computers were large and consumed most of the room space) and had the luck of realising that dream in his lifetime. In the process, Gates managed to create not just a company but an industry, "the software industry" as we know it today. He also triggered the third wave of computing mainframe era, minicomputer era to personal computing era.
Gates' role change naturally attracts global attention. When he announced his interest in philanthropy in June 2006 when he turned 50, BusinessWeek carried a cover story - 'Bill Gates - A rich life'. The current issue of Newsweek carries his picture on the cover and an interesting piece, 'Microsoft after Gates; Bill after Microsoft'. BBC aired a special interview with Bill Gates, 'How a geek changed the world' on June 18, 2008. Well, there will be many more media stories on Gates in the coming days. Gates of success Undoubtedly, Bill Gates has been a phenomenon. He has been featured in the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest people in the world for 15 years in a row between 1993 and 2007. He has occupied the numero uno position in the list of richest people during 1995 to 2007. For a brief period in 1999, his net worth went past $100 billion, and new term "centibillionaire" was coined. Success of Microsoft Bill Gates' key creation is Microsoft, a company with sales of $51 billion as of June 2007 with 78,000 employees across 105 countries. Almost 90% of the estimated 1 billion computers (desktop and laptop) in the world are run on Microsoft's Windows and Office. The company has products across the layers network, OPERATING SYSTEM database, middleware, application software. There are technologies that power handheld devices and smart phones, software services, hardware and entertainment devices like Tablet PC, XBox and IPTV technology. The launch of Windows on November 20, 1985, brought Microsoft into the mainstream system of software. Its WINDOWS 95 launch on August 25 saw a marketing blitzkrieg worth $1 billion on the day of the launch.
Source ECONOMIC TIMES