Bill Gates - Biography, Achievements and Quotes

William Henry "Bill" Gates is an American programmer, inventor, business magnate and philanthropist. Gates is the former chief executive and current chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest personal-computer software company, which he co-founded with Paul Allen.
He is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2009, excluding 2008, when he was ranked third; in 2011 he was the wealthiest American and the second wealthiest person. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder, with 6.4 percent of the common stock. He has also authored and co-authored several books.
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Gates has been criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect. In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work, and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. Gates's last full-time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as non-executive chairman.

Achievement and Superb Facts about Bill Gates

• Bill Gates full name is William Henry Gates III.
• As of 2011, his fortune is worth $59 billion.
• Gates told his university teachers he would be a millionaire by age 30. He became a billionaire at age 31.
• Bill Gates earns US$250 every SECOND, that’s about US$20 Million a DAY and US$7.8 Billion a YEAR!
• If he drops a thousand dollar, he won’t even bother to pick it up bcoz the 4 seconds he picks it, he would’ve already earned it back.
• The US national debt is about 5.62 trillion, if Bill Gates were to pay the debt by himself; he will finish it in less then 10 years.
• He can donate US$15 to everyone on earth but still be left with US$5 Million for his pocket money.
• Michael Jordan is the highest paid athlete in US. If he doesn’t drink and eat, and keeps up his annual income i.e. US$30 Million, he’ll have to wait for 277 years to become as rich as Bill Gates is now.
•  His three children, currently aged 15, 12 and nine, will reportedly inherit $10 million each (although Gates wouldn't disclose that amount in the interview), a slender sliver of his $56 billion net worth, because Gates says, "I don't think that amount of money would be good for them."
• Now dedicating his career to his $37.1 billion charitable foundation, Gates says when asked if he'll return to Microsoft full-time: "No. I'm part-time involved. But this is my job now."
• If Bill Gates were a country, he will be the 37th richest country on earth.
• Public elementary school,private Lakeside School at age 12, Dropped out of Harvard University junior year.
• Gates graduated high school in 1973 and scored 1590 of 1600 on the SAT.
• He is married to Melinda Gates and has 3 children.
• Bill Gates was influenced by John D. Rockefeller and in 1994, he sold some of Microsoft's stocks to build the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
• The first computer program that he wrote was a tic-tac-toe game that allowed people to play against the computer.
• In 1973 he became a student at Harvard University but dropped out in year 1975 wherein he decided to follow his dreams. He had interest in software and programming since early age.
• At the age of thirteen he started writing his own programs and at the age of twenty years he formed Microsoft. He wrote his first program which was tic-tac-toe game that allowed users to play against the computer.
• He created his first venture – Traf-O-Data , at the age 17 with Paul Allen to make traffic counters built on the Intel 8008 processor.
• Bill Gates functioned as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives in year 1973.
• His company became famous for their computer operating systems – MS DOS and later Microsoft Windows. He worked on aggressively broadening the company’s product line by holding the position of Product Strategist from Microsoft’s founding year 1975 till 2006.
• In year 2000, Bill Gates established Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation along with his wife and has been pursuing number of philanthropic endeavors. His organization has been donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs around the world.
• Why try to cure malaria instead of cancer? Says Gates, "The world is putting massive amounts into cancer, so my wealth would have had a meaningless impact on that."
• At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School’s rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school’s students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. 
• He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he commented on it and said, “There was just something neat about the machine.” After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
• Bill Gates was influenced by John D. Rockefeller and in 1994, he sold some of Microsoft's stocks to build the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
• At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC’s software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC’s offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. 
• The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school’s computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. 
• He later stated that “it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success.” At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.
• Bill was a voracious reader as a child, spending many hours pouring over reference books such as the encyclopedia. Around the age of 11 or 12, Bill's parents began to have concerns about his behavior. He was doing well in school, but he seemed bored and withdrawn at times. His parents worried he might become a loner. Though they were strong believers in public education, when Bill turned 13 they enrolled him in Seattle's Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. He blossomed in nearly all his subjects, excelling in math and science, but also doing very well in drama and English.
• While at Lakeside School, a Seattle computer company offered to provide computer time for the students. The Mother's Club used proceeds from the school's rummage sale to purchase a teletype terminal for students to use. Bill Gates became entranced with what a computer could do and spent much of his free time working on the terminal.
• During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8 percent of the common stock. He has also authored or co-authored several books.
• The investment news along with Jobs stating they would be getting new board members pushed the company’s stock up more than 40%. The $150 million investment was to be used in its core markets of education and creative content. They hoped to gain a higher percentage of its revenue from software and services from these core markets. 
• Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is admired by many, a number of industry insiders criticize his business tactics, which they consider anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.
• Bill Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect. In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
•  He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie, chief software architect and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. Gates’ last full-time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as non-executive chairman.
• His 66,000 sq ft (6,100 m2) estate has a 60-foot (18 m) swimming pool with an underwater music system, as well as a 2,500 sq ft (230 m2) gym and a 1,000 sq ft (93 m2) dining room.
• Also among Gates’s private acquisitions is the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci, which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994. 
• Gates is also known as an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby. He also enjoys playing bridge, tennis, and golf.
• Gates was number one on the “Forbes 400″ list from 1993 through to 2007 and number one on Forbes list of “The World’s Richest People” from 1995 to 2007 and 2009. In 1999, Gates’s wealth briefly surpassed $101 billion, causing the media to call him a “centibillionaire”. Since 2000, the nominal value of his Microsoft holdings has declined due to a fall in Microsoft’s stock price after the dot-com bubble burst and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. 
• In a May 2006 interview, Gates commented that he wished that he were not the richest man in the world because he disliked the attention it brought. Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of $616,667, and $350,000 bonus totaling $966,667. He founded Corbis, a digital imaging company, in 1989. 
• In 2004 he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by long-time friend Warren Buffett. 

Superb Quotes by Bill Gates

• Don't compare yourself with anyone in this world...if you do so, you are insulting yourself.
• If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.
• I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.
• Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. 
• I studied every thing but never topped.... But today the toppers of the best universities are my employees.
•  Life is not fair -- get used to it!
• The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
• If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
• I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.
• Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.
• This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world because business is going to change in the next ten years than it has in the last fifty years.
• The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competitors, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose.
• A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is and lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will go out of business.
• Information flow is the life blood of your company because it enables you to get the most out of your people and learn from your customers.
• Information work is thinking work.
• Business people need to shake off the notion that information is hard to get.
• Bringing together the right information with the right people will dramatically improve a company's ability to develop and act on strategic business opportunities."
• A self service approach can handle 90 percent of employee administrative needs."
• The pace of change and the need for more personalized attention to customers will drive companies to adopt digital processes internally.
• As the internet drives down the cost of transactions, the middle man will disappear or evolve to add new value.
• Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer services.
• Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping -- they called it opportunity.
• If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
•  Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
•  Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
• If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.” 
• I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot. 
• Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose. 
• As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.  
• I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it. 
• Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” 
• Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one. 
• Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There`s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
• I never topped in the university, but today toppers of best universities are my employees...
• Computers are great because when you're working with them you get immediate results that let you know if your program works. It's feedback you don't get from many other things.
• DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.