Bill Gates Photo Archive

       

About Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American entrepreneur, philanthropist and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft he has held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and he remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8% of the common stock. The annual Forbes magazine’s list of The World’s Billionaires has ranked Gates as the richest person in the world from 1995 to 2007, with recent estimates putting his net worth near $56 billion. When family wealth is considered, his family ranks second behind the Walton family, heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. In July 2007, Fortune Magazine reported that the increase in value of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim’s holdings of stock caused him to surpass Bill Gates as the world’s richest man.

Forbes however maintains that Slim is still second to Gates as of its last calculation of billionaire fortunes. Forbes does not plan to recalculate Slim’s wealth until next year.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is widely admired, his business tactics have been criticized as anti-competitive and in some instances ruled as such in court. Since amassing his fortune, 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.

In the early 1980s Microsoft introduced its own version of the graphical user interface (GUI), based on ideas pioneered by the Xerox corporation, and further developed by Apple. Microsoft released “Windows” as an addition and alternative to their DOS command line, and to compete with other systems on the market that employed a GUI. By the early 1990s, Windows had pushed other DOS-based GUIs like GEM and GEOS out of the market. The release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 was a tremendous success, selling around 10 million copies in the first two years and cementing Microsoft’s dominance in operating systems sales.

By continuing to ensure, by various means, that most computers came with Microsoft software pre-installed, the Microsoft corporation eventually became the largest software company in the world, earning Gates enough money that Forbes Magazine named him the wealthiest person in the world for several years. Gates served as the CEO of the company until 2000, when Steve Ballmer took the position. Microsoft has thousands of patents, among which 2 US patents (5,552,982 and 7,106,725) include Gates as co-inventor.