Bill Gates saw the future of the virtual world. Now he is focusing his attention on his charitable foundation, will he prove equally visionary as a philanthropist?
WHO, EXACTLY, does Bill Gates think he is? Even in 1975, at the beginning of his long career in the computer industry, they were asking that. One of the most infamous, and early, documents in the history of the rise of the richest man in computing first came into being when Bill Gates, aged 20, "general partner, Micro-Soft", penned an "Open Letter to Hobbyists". In it, he lectured his fellow geeks on their tendency to copy programs without paying. "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware," he wrote, "most of you steal your software."
The rest of the geek community were amazed. Who did this kid think he was, lecturing them on the ethics of their freewheeling, free-sharing tribe? They ask the same thing now, as Gates, aged 52, prepares to retire from his job as chairman of Microsoft Corporation to concentrate on his charitable foundation.
His avowed intent, declared more than 20 years ago, is to spend the rest of his life redistributing his collected billions on good works. As an individual with a net wealth of $58 billion (€36.8 billion), that's not going to be easy. As the head of a charity whose efficient operation impressed the richest man in the world, Warren Buffett, so much that he handed over his charitable billions, Gates has quite the challenge ahead of him.
For some of us, dealing with that much money would be ridiculous; to be that rich is to have money become a kind of game, with few consequences. Who can touch you, who can stop you doing what you want, when you can insulate yourself from the world with bodyguards, exclusive mansions and yes-men?
But Gates always took the games of the world with the utmost seriousness. And when one looks back on 40 years of the game of Gates-versus-the-world, you realise that Bill never believed anyone can be insulated from the consequences of any game.
His rise to riches spelled out that unique paranoia. Perhaps his foundation will finally turn that belief into something that benefits us all.
There's a photograph of the Microsoft employees taken some time after the above letter. It regularly makes its rounds as a forwarded file on the internet, usually titled something like: "Who are these weirdos? And who are they now?"
While the 1970s tended to make everyone look like they were victims of care in the community, Gates and Co in this photo look particularly horrific. Standing awkwardly in front of a shopping-mall photo-booth backdrop, Bill looks like a teenager surrounded by his boondock hippy family, with the sprawling beards, poor dentition and bad hair of his employees splayed around him.
Back then, Microsoft was run out of New Mexico, funded by investments from friends of the Gates family, dentists, and other part-time investors. There were no smooth-talking Silicon Valley venture capitalists, no Dell, no Compaq. Back then, the idea of IBM making something as dainty and low-volume as a personal computer was laughable. Gates's apparent target customer base, home computer owners, seemed as freakish as trainspotters or real ale enthusiasts. Microsoft's niche would in some ways be comparable to a company pitching miniature model-making kits to Dungeons Dragons enthusiasts.
But even then, Gates knew there was more to it than that. His frustration with his fellow hobbyists that they did not realise or understand the importance of their work emerges in his letter. He, more than anyone, recognised that they were witnesses at the birth of an industry.
Forget the hype about the revolution of the microchip and the death of books and the end of work. Gates's genius lay in realising that the clunky, home-wired, build-it-yourself "home computer" could be sold as a "business computer". His success came from his unstinting dedication to profiting from that transition.
While the Gates story usually starts with him dropping out of Harvard, his "dropping out" was nothing like those of some of the other members of the computing hall of fame. At the same time, Mitch Kapor, the inventor of the spreadsheet, was investigating transcendental meditation. Steve Jobs had a few years earlier toured India and taken LSD. In Gates's own college, Richard M Stallman, the pioneer of "free software" (the political movement of sharing and openness which represented everything that Gates's letter to hobbyists opposed) was "dropping out" by "staying in", practically living in Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI lab and monkishly devoting himself to academic pursuits.
Gates's early leave-taking from college with his friend, Steve Ballmer, was not the result of idealism, disillusion, dissolution or lack of direction in life - it was due to an impatience to make money.
IT'S NOT SURPRISING that Gates was in a hurry. He'd been selling software since he was 16 years old. Washington state officials, sold on a proposal to automate the counting of cars in traffic studies, visited the company who had pitched the multi-thousand-dollar deal.
They were a little disturbed to find a high-school kid at his family's house; and moreover one that burst into tears when the program (called "Traf-o-data") failed to work correctly. Gates begged his mother to reassure his potential government client that the software had worked previously.
William Henry Gates III came from a settled upper middle-class family from Seattle. His father, Bill Gates senior, was an attorney. His mother was well known in the charitable social circles of the city. He didn't want for money as a kid, and would have been well-off as a teenager even without his new sources of income.
But big bucks always spelled security to Gates. While his fellow computing fanatics blew off making money as a distraction from the real fun of all-night coding and cool graphics and tricks, Gates realised it was a means to preserve that cocoon of splendid and addictive meddling with computers.
Long after the time when it was a major multinational, Gates argued that Microsoft should have enough cash in hand to pay all its employees for a year even without a single sale being made. Money was safety. Better still, money could be as much fun and as challenging as pinning down an annoying bug or finding a quicker and faster way to draw a bouncing circle on a screen. Indeed, it could be the same kind of game, if you treated it right. If Gates beat down and transcended almost every other figure from his generation of computing entrepreneurs, it was because he took the game of business very seriously indeed.
Entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan's fascinating autobiography, Startup, describes his experience of having his young company undermined and destroyed by Gates's Microsoft in the 1980s.
Kaplan describes attending Comdex in Vegas, the computer show where Microsoft and its rivals would prepare stalls and pitch new products to businessmen. One day, Kaplan was on his way to the same destination as Gates and his colleague, Steve Ballmer - hardly surprising, as they were both locked in bitter competition for sales to the same companies. More surprising is that Gates and Ballmer offered Kaplan a lift in their cab.
As they were driven down the Vegas strip, with Gates and Ballmer crammed either side of Kaplan, the two heads of Microsoft continued their conversation over him, as though one of their major competitors was not even in the car.
Ballmer had been spying on the booths of other software companies, and proceeded to give Gates a point-by-point analysis of the other companies' software, its flaws and potential vulnerabilities. The young Gates sat there quietly, appraising the information like a young war general. At the end, Gates turned to Kaplan and noted genially that he'd heard Kaplan's software had a few problems too. The cab arrived at its destination, and Kaplan got out, already feeling like a marked man.
In his business life, Gates never stopped thinking about his rivals; in fact, Microsoft and its products are almost entirely defined by its rivals. Unkind critics have called Microsoft products cheap knock-offs of competing products. But after a few iterations, Microsoft rip-offs have a habit of excelling and outselling their original inspirations.
Microsoft Windows 1.0 was an almost painfully parodic clone of the Macintosh windows interface (to avoid a lawsuit, the first Windows refused to overlap its windows, instead arranging them like a tile puzzle). By Microsoft 3.1, it was arguably on a par with the Mac; by Windows 95, its feature set had outstripped the languishing Apple platform. Gates would learn from the mistakes of others when he copied their work.
He was also dedicated to learning from his own company's mistakes faster than his rivals. As Microsoft's chief executive and chief programmer, he was institutionally paranoid and unforgiving about his employees' weaknesses. Internally, Microsoft coders dreaded the Gates inquisition. No matter how lowly your programming role at Microsoft, you could be called in at any moment by Gates and quizzed on the minutiae of your software.
In the end, smart employees recognised that Gates's interrogation was something of a parlour trick. Before each meeting he'd randomly pick out and research one aspect of the employee's program, ignoring the rest as he focused in on one small coding challenge. Like a spiritualist medium, Gates faked omniscience by careful selection and guiding the topics of conversation. In the game of winning points over his employees and asserting his intellectual superiority, he was not above bending the rules.
THE RULE OF the first hobbyist pioneers was that all information was shared and open. Gates followed that rule when it suited him. The topic of that open letter to hobbyists was Gates's Microsoft Basic; he wanted to prevent hobbyists from stealing his code, but he'd lifted the design of Basic from a University of Dartmouth academic project.
Gates demands honesty from his co-workers in their appraisals, but gambled with the company's future by inventing stories of non-existent software. He told the original purchaser of Microsoft Basic that it was already written and working, then spent two months frantically coding before a planned demonstration (Gates did not even have access to the computer Basic was supposed to run on).
It was bending the rules that finally got Gates into serious trouble. The US Department of Justice had been tracking Microsoft's behaviour for years, and had investigated the company's habit of deliberately blocking competitors' products from running on Microsoft software, and of bundling free Microsoft versions of competitors' software when users bought Windows. When Microsoft included Internet Explorer with Windows, the Clinton presidency's Department of Justice launched a full prosecution.
Nowadays, it's hard to believe that prosecution was successful and that Gates remains a convicted monopolist. But the Bush administration declined to punish the company, and even under the shadow of this conviction and an EU prosecution, Microsoft continues to grow. But in the last few years, it seems that both Gates and Microsoft have lost their harder edge. The company suffered slipped schedules and seems unsure how to combat new competition such as Google and a revitalised Apple. And since 2000 Gates himself has spent more time on his charitable foundation, which he runs with his wife.
The Gates Foundation is a strange but positive echo of Microsoft values. It demands transparency from those it gives money to. It concentrates on getting results, this time in global health issues. It acts like the big player in the market - which it is, with a budget bigger than the World Health Organisation.
The Gates Foundation has ambitious aims: to eliminate Aids, to green Africa, to deliver the world from poverty. For others, retirement and charitable works are an entertainment, a chance to relax after all the seriousness of a career. For Bill Gates, as ever, nothing is ever just a game - except that he still wants to win.