Kinetic Gates

By Jeffrey Prather

Bill Gates-William Henry Gates III was born on Oct. 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, the son of William H. Gates Sr., an attorney, and Mary Maxwell, a businesswoman and bank executive. He had two sisters. But he was different. He did not focus on the conventional approach to life. The fifties was a time of change and Gates epitomized the breakout from the conventional school, diploma to job paradigm by radically revolutionizing his environment.

From early on Gates appreciated and emphasize kinetic action over intellectual pursuit. Gates wrote his first software program at 13 while in high school. With his childhood friend Paul Allen, he computerized their school’s payroll system and developed Traf-O-Data, a traffic-counting system that they sold to local governments.

Action over intellectual block checking was Gates theme from the start. He and Allen wanted to start their own company immediately, but Gates’ parents wanted him to finish high school and go on to college, hoping he eventually would become a lawyer. But intellectualism of the law was not action enough for Gates.

In 1975 Gates, then a sophomore at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, joined Allen, who was working as a programmer for Honeywell near Boston, to write software for the first microcomputers, later called PCs. They started by adapting a popular programming language for large computers. It seems that Gates was almost biding his time checking the required intellectual blocks while actualizing his dreams.

Finally, he could no longer contain his impatience with grades, numbers and a system favoring IQ over KQ, and intellectualism over meaningful, l action. School even Harvard, emphasized school importance over individual accomplishment.

With the success of this project, Gates left Harvard during his junior year and, with Allen, moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, planning to develop software for the newly emerging personal computer market. In 1975 they started what Allen named Micro-Soft by combining “micro” from “microcomputers” and “soft” from “software.” The hyphen later was dropped. In 1979, they moved the company to Bellevue, Washington, just east of Seattle.

Microsoft became famous for its computer operating systems and killer business deals. In 1980 Gates and Allen licensed an operating system called MS-DOS to IBM, at the time the world’s largest computer maker, for its first microcomputer, the IBM PC. They were smart enough to retain the right to license the operating system to other companies, which eventually made them a fortune.

By 1983, the year Allen left the company, Microsoft’s reach had become global with offices in Great Britain and Japan and 30 percent of the world’s computers running on its software.

A few years earlier Gates had developed a partnership with Apple to work on some shared projects. Gates soon realized that Apple’s graphics interface, which displayed text and images on the screen and was driven by a mouse, appealed to the average user more than Microsoft’s text-and-keyboard-driven MS-DOS system.

Then, in 1989, Microsoft launched Microsoft Office, which bundled office applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel into one system.

All the while, Gates was defending Microsoft against lawsuits and Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice investigations of claims charging unfair dealings with computer manufacturers. Yet the innovation continued. Windows 95 was launched in 1995 and in 2001 Microsoft debuted the original Xbox gaming system. Microsoft appeared untouchable.

Gates and his wife founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with the mission of improving the quality of life for people around the world, primarily in the areas of global health and learning. Their initiatives have ranged from funding tuition for 20,000 college students to installing 47,000 computers in 11,000 libraries in all 50 states. In 2005, Bill and Melinda Gates and rock star Bono were named Time magazine persons of the year for their charitable work.

Gates innovations changed the world. And he did so by kinetic focused action as opposed to conventional educational and employment motion.