Bill Gates Leader Report

Favorite Leader Report

My favorite leader is William Henry Gates III, or Bill Gates to most people. Bill Gates is a computer engineer and world-class entrepreneur. He founded Microsoft Corporation in 1975 with a high school friend named Paul Allen. The leadership role that he serves is chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation. Up until 1998, Gates was CEO of the company, but he relieved himself of those duties, and currently is only a software architect and serves on the Microsoft committee. He currently is involved in all the new creations of new Microsoft technology and products. Microsoft is currently the most powerful computer company on the face of the planet. They create everything from video games and personal pc’s to even cell phones. Bill Gates is also well known for being one of the richest human beings on the face of the planet.

Bill Gates was born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. He has two sisters, his father William H. Gates II, who was an attorney, and his mother Mary Gates who was a schoolteacher. He married on January 1, 1994 to Melinda French Gates, and currently has three children. He went to a public school until the seventh grade, when he enrolled in Seattle’s private school, Lakeside School. At Lakeside School, Gates met Paul Allen, who would later be the co-founder of Microsoft. At the age of thirteen, Bill Gates was first introduced to computers and the different program languages. Lakeside School purchased a Teletype machine which was connected to a mainframe over the phone line. This school was one of the very first in the entire country to allow students to have access to computer devices. Students at Gates’ school convinced a local computer company to allow them to study a minicomputer made by Digital Equipment Corporation. Gates and his friends would study the minicomputer and try to discover any malfunctions or problems with the device. While studying the minicomputer, Gates studied and mastered the programming languages of BASIC, Fortran, and LISP. At the age of 17, Gates and Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a company that designed machines for car counting for traffic analysis. Three years later Bill Gates attended Harvard University. While at Harvard, Gates helped design a new version of BASIC program language for the first personal computer called Altair 8800. They sent their new software to Altair, and MITS, and then decided to form Microsoft to develop versions of their BASIC program for other computer companies. Just after forming Microsoft, Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior year, to put all of his time and effort towards Microsoft.

In 1980, Gates made a deal with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to provide them with his BASIC program to use on their IBM personal computers. Gates and Microsoft then began licensing their operating system to other companies. IBM had great success with Gates’ BASIC, which was later titled MS-DOS. The success lead to MS-DOS becoming an industry standard wanted by all. Microsoft’s business took off while every major computer company wanted their operating programs. In 1986 Microsoft had grown so much that they began to offer their stock to the public. The next year the worldwide success of the corporation made Bill Gates at 31, the youngest ever self-made billionaire. Four years later, Microsoft’s Windows had become the new standard for operating excellence. Even to this day, Microsoft Windows is the top selling and most popular computer operating system on the market.

Bill Gates has had many achievements and great success in his life. He co-founded the most powerful Computer Industry on the planet in Microsoft. His sale of BASIC to IBM basically catapulted him into a whole new way of living. He is currently worth tens of billions of dollars, and has been the richest human being on the face of the planet for the last twelve years. His operating system of Microsoft Windows is in almost every home in America. It’s practically a way of living to most people. In 1989 he founded Corbis Corporation, a company that owns the largest collection of digital images in the world. In 2004, Microsoft had revenues of $36.84 billion for the year, and employed more than 55,000 people in 85 different countries. Bill Gates is one of the most involved if not the most involved leader in philanthropy in the entire world. He established the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which is one of the largest foundations in the world. The foundation was established to improve health and education around the world. It has grossed over 27 billion dollars. Gates is the author of two books. One of his books, The Road Ahead spent seven weeks at number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Bill Gates has had much success, but failure is something he is not used to. One main occurrence of failure in his life was in 2000 when he was accused