The Rise of Microsoft and Bill Gates

Bill Gates is a well known entrepreneur and billionaire, who co-founded Microsoft and helped turn it into one of the most successful and recognized brands in the world. He and Paul Allen founded the tech giant in 1975 in their garage. Microsoft was predominately focused on the software for computers.

The net worth of Bill Gates is almost $100 billion, which makes him one of the richest people in the world. He went from dropping out of Harvard University, to being the instrumental figure behind one of the most powerful businesses. He had a drive and will power like no other and this is just a couple of the reasons he has become so successful over the years.

Bill Gates went to Harvard University because his parents really wanted him to become a lawyer. Lucky he didn’t stick it out at Harvard because we may not have Microsoft at all. He met Paul Allen at school and they quickly bonded over the love of tinkering with computers.

During is short time at Harvard, Bill Gates was able to make a lot of solid connections and this helped set up the future of Microsoft and laid the path for success. A short while after dropping out of Harvard, Bill Gates and Paul Allen opened up a small office in Albuquerque.

When Microsoft was first getting started, the employees were focusing mainly on writing new programming languages. Bill Gates even took the time to review all the employee’s code, during the early days. The year of 1980 was a great year for Microsoft as IBM needed a new operating system, for which Microsoft was chosen.

It was at this time that Microsoft made its first real purchase, it bought a start up working on a Disk Operating System (DOS) and then renamed it and sold it to IBM. Microsoft was able to continue to sell this version of the operating system because there weren’t any copyright infringements.

This project was so successful that other companies wanted to do the same or similar thing, and if that’s what they wanted they would need Microsoft, which is what sparked the quick growth in the company. There were a lot of companies that were building computers, but they all still needed the DOS that Microsoft had.

Microsoft was a very hot commodity and everyone who was anyone wanted to do a deal with them. It didn’t take too long before that where making millions upon millions in sales and by 1987 Bill Gates became a billionaire, at the age of just 31 years.

He was able to achieve billionaire status due to the fact that in 1986 Microsoft went public. The day they went public the shares started at $21 and at the end of the same day the shares had jumped to $28. Today Microsoft shares are worth around $200 each, so $28 does seem like a real bargain.

Bill Gates was given the status as the world’s richest person in 1995 and was able to remain the richest until 2007. He regained the title a few times between then and now, but currently the title of the world’s richest person sits with Jeff Bezos, who is the CEO of Amazon.

Bill Gates is known to be highly competitive in nature and doesn’t like to lose. It was this type of mentality that helped Microsoft remain so competitive when other big players came onto the market, included none other than Apple. Over the years Bill Gates’ priorities changed, he has now taken a step back from Microsoft, and is focusing more on the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation.