Bill Gates: The making of a philanthropist

Andi Haswidi ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Fri, 05/09/2008 9:38 AM

Philanthropists come from different backgrounds and have their own unique ways of accumulating resources-even those known as the "pirates" of Silicon Valley.

The historic event that set William "Bill" H. Gates on the path to becoming one of the world's leading philanthropists was the day he pitched an operating system to IBM in 1981 for its upcoming personal computers.

There was nothing unusual about a man trying to sell something; except for the fact he didn't actually have the product he was trying to pitch at the time. He just knew it existed and could do the job.

Somehow, IBM, which was already the biggest computer manufacturer in the world, bought the idea of this young software developer from an infant company called Microsoft.

After securing a deal with IBM, Gates went to see fellow software developer Tim Paterson, who worked for Seattle Computer Products and who had already developed an operating system called QDOS, an acronym for "Quick and Dirty Operating System".

Gates bought the rights to QDOS -- the embryo for the creation of what we now know as Microsoft Disk Operating System or MS-DOS -- for US$50,000, while keeping the IBM deal a secret from Seattle Computer Products.

MS-DOS then became the highly successful operating system that came with an IBM computer.

His "sense of entrepreneurship" didn't stop there. Already making Microsoft a household name in the industry, Gates was summoned by Steve Job, the charismatic -- almost to the level of a cult leader to many information and technology enthusiasts -- founder of Apple Computers, and showed him Apple's prototype computer, which was code-named "Lisa".

"Lisa" was to become the world's first personal computer to adopt graphic-user interface, or GUI, which was initially developed by the Xerox Corporation. GUI allowed users to interact with the operating system through graphical windows, pull-down menus, clickable buttons, scroll bars, icons, images and a mouse or pointer.

Jobs gave Gates a "Lisa", told him to study it and come up with an application that could improve the prototype.

Rather than developing the prototype, Gates went on to create his own operating system using GUI, which he named Windows 1.0. He introduced his system to public in 1983, the same year Apple's next-generation computer after "Lisa", the Apple Macintosh, reached the market.

Outraged by this, Jobs filed a lawsuit against Gates, whom he once called "little brother Microsoft", claiming his Windows 1.0 system had too much of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh.

Gates reportedly responded to Jobs' accusations with: "Steve, I think its more like we both have a rich neighbor named Xerox, and you broke in to steal the TV set, and you found out I'd been there first, and you said 'Hey that's no fair! I wanted to steal the TV set!'."

The lawsuit ended when Gates finally acknowledge that Microsoft had licensed GUI elements from Xerox and that the use of such technology was open to future versions of Windows, which later outstripped Macintosh in terms of sales and became the most popular brand for computer-operating systems in the world.

Details on how Bill Gates created his business empire, as well as eye-witness accounts of what happened during the era of rivalry between Microsoft and Apple, are documented in a book titled Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer, written by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It was later adapted into a docudrama for television and called Pirates of Silicon Valley, by Martyn Burke, in 1999.

Nowadays, with an estimated total net worth of about US$58 billion, Gates is ranked by Forbes Magazine as the world's third-richest person as at the end of February this year -- just two positions below one of his best friends, Warren Buffet.

In 2006, Gates announced he would quit Microsoft to allow him more time to focus on activities with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charity foundation he set up with his wife. That year, Buffet also announced he was joining the foundation and handed the foundation 10 million shares in his investment firm, Berkshire Hathaway.

Founded in 2000, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest transparently operated charitable group in the world, with funds totaling approximately $34.6 billion (as of 2006). The activities of the foundation now expand around the globe, with a primary focus on healthcare, education and the fight against poverty.

People in Indonesia have also been touched by the charitable hands of the Gates family, either through the foundation, Microsoft itself or other bodies involved in healthcare and education.

Representing the foundation, Bill Gates is this week scheduled to meet with local officials to discuss how he could contribute to developing and mass-producing bird flu vaccinations for humans.

Indonesia is the country hardest hit by the bird flu virus, which has caused 108 human deaths and an economic blow to the poultry industry after millions of chickens were culled en masse.

In regard to education, Microsoft is said to have supported the government's effort to procure one million computers for junior and high school level students.

At 53, Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have already surpassed the efforts of some of the greatest philanthropists of the past in terms of the amount of real dollars given to those in need, something that Bill Gates' mother had hoped the couple would go on to do.

At a bridal luncheon the day before his wedding to Melinda, Gates' mother Mary read a letter to the couple saying, in effect, "From those who are given great resources, great things are expected".

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