Technical entrepreneurs Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Technical entrepreneurs - Essay Example Rated by Forbes Magazine as the 2005 wealthiest person in the world for the twelfth consecutive year, Bill Gates estimated wealth amounts to $27.38 billion based on Microsoft's current stock price (Marcus, 2006). Bill Gates is the co-founder, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the world's largest software company. He is also the founder of a digital image archiving company that goes by the name of Corbis, which is one of the world's most promising resources of visual information - a broad digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections worldwide. He is one of the best known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution and is widely respected and also widely criticised as having built his business through unfair, illegal, or anti-competitive business practices, and this was recently demonstrated by the US government taking Microsoft to court, an action which was repeated in Europe as well (Didion, 2004). Despite his vast wea lth, Bill Gates has donated approximately 51% of his total fortune to various charitable organisations and scientific research programmes. Bill Gates was born on the 28th of October 1955 in Seattle, Washington to William Gates Senior and Mary Maxwell Gates (McSheriff, 2002). His family was wealthy, and had a strong tradition of education and professionalism. His father was a prominent lawyer, his mother was the first woman regent of the University of Washington and his maternal grandfather was a national bank president (McSheriff, 2002). It is safe to say that Bill Gates came from a privileged background. Bill Gates also has two younger sisters, Kristanne and Libby Gates. Bill Gates was educated at some of the most prestigious schools in the state, and he particularly excelled in elementary school in mathematics and sciences (McSheriff, 2002). Bill Gates went to Seattle's most exclusive preparatory school, Lakeside School where tuition in 1967 was $5 000, more than that at Harvard which was $1 760 (McSheriff, 2002). It was at this school that Bill Gates got introduced to computers as the school rented time on a server, which allowed Bill Gates to pursue an interest in computers at a time when they were not commercially available. He was also a member of the Boy Scouts of America, even attaining the rank of Life Scout during his membership (Peerman, 1999). When he was at high school, he founded a company which sold traffic flow data systems to state governments with Paul Allen. He also helped to create a payroll system in COBOL for a company in Portland, Oregon (Peerman, 1999). In 1973 he enrolled in Harvard University for a pre-law programme where he met his future business partner Steve Ballmer. During his second year, together with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff, he co-wrote Altair BASIC for the Altair 8800, and dropped out of Harvard during his third year to pursue a career in software development (Murdock, 1998). Despite his success, Bill Gates was briefly jailed in Albuquerque for racing his Porsche 911 in the New Mexico desert. Bill Gates first recognized an opportunity in 1975 after reading an issue of the Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800. Bill Gates contacted the creators of the new microcomputer to inform them that he and others had developed a version of the