Bill Gates

Since Microsoft's founding in 1975 and as of 2006, Gates has had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy. He has aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft has achieved a dominant position he has vigorously defended it. Many decisions that have led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices have had Gates' approval. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued over the definitions of words such as: compete, concerned, ask, and we.[32] BusinessWeek reported, "early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying 'I don't recall' so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle. Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail Gates both sent and received." [33] Despite denials by Bill Gates, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization and tying, blocking competition, in violation of the Sherman Act.

Gates meets regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. By all accounts he can be extremely confrontational during these meetings, particularly when he believes that managers have not thought out their business strategy or have placed the company's future at risk. [34][10] He has been described shouting at length at employees before letting them continue, with such remarks as "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!" and "Why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?"[35] However, he often backs down when the targets of his outbursts respond frankly and directly.[36] When he is not impressed with the technical hurdles managers claim to be facing, he sometimes quips, "Do you want me to do it over the weekend?"[37]

Gates' role at Microsoft for most of its history has been primarily a management and executive role. However, he was an active software developer in the early years, particularly on the company's programming language products. He has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100 line, but he wrote code as late as 1989 that shipped in the company's products.[38]

On June 15, 2006, Gates announced his plans to transition out of a day-to-day role with Microsoft effective July 31, 2008[39], to allow him to devote more time to working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. During an interview with Fortune.com published on June 26 says his recent decision to "shift priorities" his day-to-day role has changed to June 2008 instead of the original date of July 2008. After that date, Gates will continue in his role as the company's chairman and act as an advisor on key projects. His role as Chief Software Architect will be filled immediately by Ray Ozzie who joined the company last year due to Microsoft taking over his company Groove. One of his last initiatives before announcing his departure was the creation of a robotics software group at Microsoft.


Personal life

Bill Gates and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Davos. January 26, 2003Bill Gates married Melinda French of Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. They have three children: Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). Bill Gates' house is one of the most expensive houses in the world, and is a modern 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is just under $1 million. Also among Gates' private acquisitions are the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994 [40], and a rare Gutenberg Bible.[citation needed]

In 2000, Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization, with his wife. The foundation's grants have provided funds for college scholarships for under-represented minorities, AIDS prevention, diseases prevalent in third world countries, and other causes. In 2000, the Gates Foundation endowed the University of Cambridge with $210 million for the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. The Foundation has also pledged over $7 billion to its various causes, including $1 billion to the United Negro College Fund; and as of 2005, had an estimated endowment of $29.0 billion. He has spent about a third of his lifetime income on charity.[citation needed]

Gates has received two honorary doctorates, from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002 and Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan in 2005. Gates was also given an honorary KBE (Knighthood) from Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in 2005,[41] in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.[42]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has stated that Gates is probably the most "spammed" person in the world, receiving as many as 4,000,000 e-mails per day in 2004, most of which were junk. Gates has almost an entire department devoted to filtering out junk emails.[43] In an article, Gates himself has said that most of this junk mail "offers to help [him] get out of debt or get rich quick", which "would be funny (given his financial state) if it weren't so irritating