The Man
William H. Gates III, erstwhile Chairman/“Chief Software Architect” of Microsoft Corporation, and now co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, famously ranked as the wealthiest man in America for fifteen years running. Though he had an attorney for a father, it is likely that his entrepreneurial spirit came from a “multi-tasking” mother, Mary Gates, who juggled teaching, being regent at the University of Washington in Seattle, and chairing United Way International.
The story of how Bill Gates helped lay the foundation for the desktop personal computer revolution – first by cooperating with Steve Ballmer to “port” the mainframe language BASIC for microcomputers right in their Harvard dorm rooms and, after dropping out of Harvard, by writing the Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) with lifelong friend Paul Allen – parallels the entrepreneurial legend of Steve Jobs at Apple Computer in the mid-1970s.
The evident personal philosophy of Bill Gates comprised being hard-driving, looking out for long-term results, being a ruthless competitor, defending market gains, and maximizing profits. This last typifies even the couple’s philanthropic foundation, which has been accused of investing for returns more than donating to alleviate poverty in developing countries. In Mintzberg’s typology, therefore, Gates has shown himself more interested in being, first, the entrepreneur, and subsequently figurehead/ spokesperson, and world-renowned leader.
The Company
Microsoft was registered in 1975 as a privately-held corporation and went public with an initial public offering in 1986. From then on, or for the next 23 years, the company has held the top position in the global software industry by a combination of ruthless and unethical business practices.
Right from the start, Microsoft concentrated on writing the software that would interface between machine language (that only programmers had the patience to learn) and true end-user software such as word processors, spreadsheets, accounting programs, or Internet browsers. These interface software layers are called compilers and one of the first the company developed was the TASC, The “AppleSoft Compiler”, to run BASIC on the unique machine language that was Apple’s, The aforementioned BASIC was written for the Altair 8800, one of many start-up brands competing for a fair share of the embryonic desktop computer market at that time.
The real breakthrough came when Microsoft repackaged a clone of the CP/M operating system and licensed it to IBM, then about to launch the category-creating modular IBM PC, as “IBM DOS”. When other hardware makers managed to clone the IBM BIOS (the “Basic Input/Output System”), Microsoft sold the same thing to all manufacturers as MS (Microsoft) DOS. Since the product by then cost nothing except the nominal expense of disk-to-disk copying, the foundation was laid for the enormous cash flow that allowed now Seattle-based Microsoft to develop dozens of end-user software packages far into the future.
Since Bill Gates was never shy about proclaiming his dream of seeing “a computer in every home,” the Microsoft target markets comprise both consumer and industrial users. To attain this goal, the company struck deals with PC makers/ assemblers to have MS-DOS pre-installed on every PC sold. Next, the company developed the Windows operating system in a blatant attempt to imitate the Apple graphic user interface, which was extremely intuitive and easy to use. Not till version 3.1, however, did Microsoft have something the market could grudgingly accept. Then Microsoft struck at all the software companies that tailored their end-user software to work on MS-DOS and Windows. Again by striking pre-installed deals and bundling everything possible into Microsoft Office, the company killed off, in succession, Netscape, Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar, dBase III, Eudora, Freelance Graphics, and even Norton Utilities. By the time regulatory authorities in the U.S. and the EU could file suit for monopolistic practices, the dust had settled and bloated Microsoft software owned the market.