William “Bill” Gates III is the wealthiest living American and second wealthiest person in the world. Bill Gates amassed his fortune as co-founder of Microsoft Corporation in 1975 along with partner and child hood friend Paul Allen. Within 25 years he built Microsoft into a multibillion dollar multinational company and the dominant market leader in the computer software industry. Microsoft became so successful that the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company in 1998 ruling it was a monopoly in the market of desktop computer operating systems.
Much of Bill Gates success can be contributed to his parents William Gates Sr. a lawyer and Mary Maxwell Gates a school teacher. They cultivated an atmosphere of being both warm and close but also encouraged Bill and his two sisters to be competitive and to always strive for excellence. Bill Gates favorite games as a child were Risk and Monopoly. He also frequently read reference books such as the encyclopedia. Bill’s mother instilled a passion for philanthropy into her son. She volunteered in schools and various other community
…show more content…
Rather than selling the software to IBM he licensed it to them and retained the copyright to license the software to other PC makers in the future. This turned out to be one of the best business strategies Bill Gates could adopt for Microsoft. It is also a strategy that competitor and rival Steve Jobs at Apple failed to recognize in the early years of the industry. As other companies such as Compaq began to duplicate and copy the IBM PC they purchased licenses to use Microsoft’s operating system on their PCs. MS-DOS quickly became the standard operating system for the industry. Much of Bill Gates business strategy was based on his vision of “A computer on every desk and in every