David Shapshak
Bill Gates meets Hugh Grant at a party and gets Divine Brown’s phone number from him, goes the joke doing the e-mail rounds this week.
After a night-long romp with Brown, Gates says to her: ”Now I understand why you use the name Divine.”
”Having spent the night with you,” comes the response, ”I understand why you use the name Microsoft.”
This humour is emblematic of how the universe of computer users, who openly proclaim their hatred of Gates but rely on Microsoft products, wish to believe the bernerd has at least one weakness.
Gates is the ultimate geek next door who made good. At 42, he has made himself into one of the world’s most influential men through his Windows operating system. Microsoft’s newest product – Windows 98, the successor to the ubiquitous but problem- ridden Windows 95 – was launched this week.
Under his direction, Microsoft has grown from the upstart little software firm he founded when he dropped out of Harvard in 1975 into the world’s largest, most powerful and dominant, software company.
This is due in most part to Gates’s vision, his tenacity and the hard-sell, aggressive marketing Microsoft has used to topple almost all of its rivals. And a bit of luck.
When IBM was shopping around in the late 1970s for an operating system for their new personal computers, their first-choice programmer was so confident of getting the contract, he went flying. Gates, with his MS-DOS operating system, was second on the list. The rest is history.
Microsoft has consistently confounded its critics and today pretty much dictates the course of the global information technology (IT) industry.
With Gates at the helm, little seems to be able to hinder that, not even the United States Department of Justice, which sued Microsoft in May for allegedly using its dominance in computer operating systems – 95% of all new personal computers come installed with Windows – to muscle into the Internet browsing software market.
With his characteristic arrogance he said this suit was brought on by his firm’s success. This week Microsoft scored a major public relations victory when the Appeals Court overturned a preliminary injunction which prevented Microsoft from bundling its Internet browser – which is the onramp to the next generation of global business in the form of electronic commerce – with its operating system.
So while some analysts are predicting the US government may ultimately win their case, others say its short-term gains are irrelevant to Gates’s long-term vision.
He has stakes in a variety of new technologies which could possibly achieve the technological dominance of Windows as an operating system.
Legend has it that one day, after writing off the importance of the Internet, Gates called his top executives in and told them to trash whatever projects they were working on and focus all their resources on the Net.
The company did a 180 turn and in the two short years since Microsoft began aggressively pursuing the Internet, it has stolen more than half of the 90% market share previously dominated by its archrival, Netscape’s Navigator browser.
Perhaps the most improbable coup of Gates’ reign was his purchase of a chunk of the PC platform’s main rival, Apple Computers.
Apple, then the king of the computer castle, refused to buy his operating system and, in return, Microsoft swiped their icon-based interface.
”Bill, thank you. The world’s a better place,” Time magazine ran as its cover headline last August, quoting Apple’s co- founder Steve Jobs after Gates invested $100-million in his struggling rival.
Still, there’s a brooding satire about him that permeates through the computer and Internet communities. Microsoft-bashing, a favourite of the online community, is barely superseded by Bill-bashing as a pastime.
Gates’s techno-mansion – a veritable next- generation cyberdream with 45 rooms outfitted with hi-tech gadgetry and costing an estimated $100-million – is a regular target. As is his marriage to a former senior employee, Melinda French, in January 1994. They have a two-year-old daughter, Jennifer Katharine.
”Jealously makes you nasty,” might as well be the reply of the world’s richest man.
Microsoft had revenues of $11,3-billion for the fiscal year ending last June, and employs more than 25 000 people in 58 countries. Gates alone is worth about R270- billion, according to a Forbes magazine survey announced this week.
His net worth has jumped 40% since a year ago and his Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, comes in at the world’s third richest, with R111-billion, says Forbes.
Gates is as much a target for his wealth as for his company’s success. Websites have sprung up detailing his worth. According to the Bill Gates Wealth Index, which calculated Gates’s income (when it was only $40-billion) based on his working a 14-hour day for the 22 years Microsoft has been around, he earns $500 000 an hour, or about $150 a second.
This, the site concludes, means if Gates dropped a $500 bill on the ground, it wouldn’t be worth his time to take the four seconds required to bend over and pick it up.
Born: October 28 1955 in Seattle
Defining characteristics: Geekish, prone to laughing off US law suits and industry rivals
Favourite people: Software users who upgrade regularly
Least favourite people: US anti-trust chief Joel Klein, Macintosh users, and Belgian pie-throwing pranksters
Likely to say: ”I’ve done nothing wrong, they’ve got the wrong guy”
Least likely to say: ”I’d love to include a Netscape icon on the Windows desktop”
Least favourite fruit: Apple