Hot Topics » Radovan Karadzic • Zimbabwe • Iraq • Environment • America votes • Olympics • more topics »
As Bill Gates retires from Microsoft, Josh Quittner examines the legacy of the man who made Windows, but missed the Web
Billionaire Bill Gates, until recently the richest man in the world, is about to pass another landmark.
Let me tell you about Bill Gates. He is different from you and me. First off, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft has always been something of a utopian. In his mind, even the world's knottiest problems can be solved if you apply enough IQ. Accordingly, Gates, who has been spotted on Seattle freeways reading a book while driving himself to the office, covets knowledge. It's as if he's still trying to make up for dropping out of Harvard, as he spends just about any spare waking minute reading, studying science texts, or watching university courses on DVD.
Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, traveling through Asia, met Tuesday with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and championed his vision of the future of high tech and the Internet
Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates announced a new direction Friday as he pledged $306 million in grants to develop farming in poor countries, leading the charge for corporate responsibility at a major meeting of business chiefs.
This week, Bill Gates made his annual pilgrimage to Swiss skiing resort of Davos for the World Economic Forum.
"In many crucial areas, the world is getting better...but it's not getting better fast enough, and it's not getting better for everyone," Bill Gates said in Davos on Thursday as he called for a more concerted global drive toward what he calls "Creative Capitalism." He said that companies, especially the biggest ones, can improve the lot of the world's least privileged by better aligning their self-interest with the good of society.
Could Bill Gates become the Sexiest Geek Alive? With a little help from Matthew McConaughey, it may just be possible! The Microsoft chairman and CEO got a little workout help from the onetime PEOPLE Sexiest Man Alive in a video showing Gates's "last day at the office" before retiring to focus on his humanitarian efforts with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In mid-October, Bill Gates unveiled Microsoft's own unified communications products aimed at corporate customers. He contends this technology will revolutionize the office as profoundly as the PC itself, and he may be right.
Mr. Bill Gates! Mr. Bill Gates!" a young woman shrieks as the black car pulls up. A pallid student in a nylon windbreaker pushes his way through the security line and hands the world's richest man a small envelope with a floral design. "It's very important," he pants.
As Bill Gates retires from Microsoft, Josh Quittner examines the legacy of the man who made Windows, but missed the Web
Billionaire Bill Gates, until recently the richest man in the world, is about to pass another landmark.
Let me tell you about Bill Gates. He is different from you and me. First off, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft has always been something of a utopian. In his mind, even the world's knottiest problems can be solved if you apply enough IQ. Accordingly, Gates, who has been spotted on Seattle freeways reading a book while driving himself to the office, covets knowledge. It's as if he's still trying to make up for dropping out of Harvard, as he spends just about any spare waking minute reading, studying science texts, or watching university courses on DVD.
Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, traveling through Asia, met Tuesday with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and championed his vision of the future of high tech and the Internet
Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates announced a new direction Friday as he pledged $306 million in grants to develop farming in poor countries, leading the charge for corporate responsibility at a major meeting of business chiefs.
This week, Bill Gates made his annual pilgrimage to Swiss skiing resort of Davos for the World Economic Forum.
"In many crucial areas, the world is getting better...but it's not getting better fast enough, and it's not getting better for everyone," Bill Gates said in Davos on Thursday as he called for a more concerted global drive toward what he calls "Creative Capitalism." He said that companies, especially the biggest ones, can improve the lot of the world's least privileged by better aligning their self-interest with the good of society.
Could Bill Gates become the Sexiest Geek Alive? With a little help from Matthew McConaughey, it may just be possible! The Microsoft chairman and CEO got a little workout help from the onetime PEOPLE Sexiest Man Alive in a video showing Gates's "last day at the office" before retiring to focus on his humanitarian efforts with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In mid-October, Bill Gates unveiled Microsoft's own unified communications products aimed at corporate customers. He contends this technology will revolutionize the office as profoundly as the PC itself, and he may be right.
Mr. Bill Gates! Mr. Bill Gates!" a young woman shrieks as the black car pulls up. A pallid student in a nylon windbreaker pushes his way through the security line and hands the world's richest man a small envelope with a floral design. "It's very important," he pants.
Harvard's most famous dropout returns for his diploma, 30 years late. His final exam: Can he save the world?
It was a match made in geek heaven: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates together on the same stage for the first time in twenty years. And the audience, 500 of them, had paid $4,000 for the privilege of seeing it all.
Bill Gates and Eli Broad two of the most generous philanthropists in the world are joining forces in a multi-million dollar project aimed at improving America's public schools and pushing education higher on the agenda of the 2008 presidential race.
Imagine if the baseball season had begun this week without such foreign-born stars as Albert Pujols, David Ortiz, Justin Morneau and the latest Japanese import, pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka and his mysterious "gyroball."
Microsoft chairman and co-founder Bill Gates boasted to CNN that Vista, Microsoft's widely anticipated new version of its Windows operating system, will make the personal computer the "place where it all comes together" for multimedia applications such as photos, music and videos.
So you're not Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. There's no reason you still can't give like a billionaire. Donor-advised funds - investment accounts that let you deposit assets for an upfront tax deduc...
Bill Gates' investment vehicle Cascade Investment LLC is expected to announce a joint venture with utility and energy company PNM Resources Inc. on Friday, increasing its investment in the energy sector, according to a report published Friday.
When an academic computer researcher announced plans last year to create a "$100 laptop" to be distributed as an educational resource to schoolchildren across the world many in the computer world dismissed him as one bit short of a byte.
$1 billion: The minimum amount now needed in the bank to qualify for Forbes magazine's exclusive list of the 400 richest Americans.
Part of the deal at the Clinton Global Initiative currently taking place in midtown Manhattan is that when someone agrees to commit money to a project, they get to come up on stage with President Clinton, sign a document, and get a picture.
During the 25 years of the AIDS epidemic, much of the focus has been on developing a vaccine or treatment, and prevention has sometimes seemed to take a back seat. But this week at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto, the tables are turning.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, leaders in worldwide anti-AIDS efforts, had praise Monday for President Bush's initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, on the first full day of the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto.
Everywhere you look these days, tech and business world luminaries - like Richard Branson, Paul Allen, Steve Case, Vinod Khosla, John Doerr, and Bill Gates - are laying down big bets on ethanol, a substitute for gasoline that's already finding its way into pumps.
Bill Gates is leaving his day-to-day role at Microsoft, ending an epoch in American business. And now people think CEO Steve Ballmer should go, too?
Now that Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has started his two-year goodbye from a day-to-day role at the company, it's time for CEO Steve Ballmer to set a resignation date, too.
Microsoft announced Thursday that chairman and co-founder Bill Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role at the company, effective July 2008, to spend more time working on his charitable foundation.
Last week at Davos, Bill Gates suggested giving the world's poor cellphones--not PCs--to connect them to the Internet. But why limit the plan to the poor?
Eric Pooley reports: If a session at Davos isn't absolutely great I start to wish I was up on the mountain instead of down in the Congress Center. Right now all thoughts of skiing have been banished: Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, John Chambers and Niklas Zennstrom are talking about the next phase in the tech revolution, and how they're making it pay.
An old tech rivalry, predictable car stats and more about the coal mine tragedy has my attention this morning ...
Bill Gates aims to take over your living room and late Wednesday he unveiled a new music service and new software to do it.
Bill Gates may be the richest man in the world, but the Microsoft co-founder is no longer considered America's top giver, according to an annual ranking of the top U.S. philanthropists.
Bill Gates may be the richest man in the world, but the Microsoft co-founder is no longer considered America's top giver, according to an annual ranking of the top U.S. philanthropists published Thursday.
The chairman of Microsoft is predicting a "sea change" for his industry and is urging his managers to act decisively to stay ahead of the competition, according to a leaked company e-mail.
It's the Friday before the University of Nebraska's Big 12 Conference opener in football-mad Lincoln, but the Cornhuskers game isn't the only hot ticket in town. On a beautiful late September after...
On a shelf in Bill Gates' austere office at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., sits a crystal ball. It was an apt accouterment for the conversation FORTUNE's David Kirkpatrick had there last month with G...
CNN anchor Richard Quest in London spoke to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates in Los Angeles on Tuesday, following the release of a new version of Windows Mobile software. Following is a transcript of part of their conversation.
When the first President Bush addressed an annual meeting of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers some years back, he answered questions posed directly by members in the audience. So did all the other high-ranking government officials and corporate executives who have spoken to the group over the 41 years of its existence. But Microsoft chairman Bill Gates refused to do so here this week.
MICROSOFT WAS ALREADY MONTHS INTO A MASSIVE project aimed at taking down Google when the truth began to dawn on Bill Gates. It was December 2003. He was poking around on the Google company website ...
When it comes to talking business, Americans said they would want Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as a seatmate during a cross-country flight, according to the results of a recent survey of people flying during the holiday travel season.
IN THE EARLY 1990s, WANG ZHIDONG JUMPED INTO THE SEA, as the saying goes. The Beijing University graduate left a secure job to set up his own firm in an abandoned school near a street so crowded wi...
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, the world's richest man, got a modest pay raise over the last year, according to a company filing.
It may just be pocket change for the richest man in the world, but Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has been fined $800,000 by the federal government for violating an antitrust rule.
How do you measure Bill Gates' success?
Is Bill Gates still the world's wealthiest person?
Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates will be awarded an honorary knighthood by Britain's Queen Elizabeth for an outstanding contribution to enterprise, officials said Monday.
Britain will give an honorary knighthood to Microsoft Corp. co-founder and chairman Bill Gates in recognition of his contribution to enterprise in Britain, the government says.
The first Comdex since last year's bankruptcy will be a test of the tech expo's repositioning as a smaller but more focused business-to-business IT showcase (see "Worst in Show," What Works, Septem...
While Microsoft's chairman and co-founder is no longer CEO, he remains the world's richest man (estimated net worth: well over $30 billion)--and as chief software architect, he wields enormous powe...
Microsoft's CEO has faced down more villains than Austin Powers. That antitrust suit? Looks as if it might go Gates' way after all. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison? His wealth disappeared faster than an e...
As far as the information technology industry was concerned, the 1990s were "The Bill and Andy Show." The kingpins of Wintel not only dictated the bits, bytes, and business models of computing but ...
You won't find many beakers and Bunsen burners in J. Craig Venter's labs, where 50 scientists recently sequenced 3.12 billion letters of the human genetic code. Instead, Celera Genomics, with its S...
The Justice Department scored a resounding victory earlier this month when U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered that Microsoft be split into two companies. Still, questions rem...
I came across an Internet service the other day that played down the fact that it was on the Internet. This wasn't because the Internet has lost some cachet with Nasdaq's gyrations. The company was...
Listen up, Bill Gates. Goldman Sachs is about to unveil a special online trading site for Net-savvy billionaires just like you. While the investment bank's front-office types are being rather secre...
So you're way past the minimum wage and probably haven't even thought about calculating your hourly wage for a while. But have you ever figured out what you earn in a second? If you look at the inc...
Even if we weren't all half-convinced that the world's computers will lock up on Jan. 1, we would have to regard the coming turn of the calendar with a certain awe. It's the close of a boom year at...
To select one man to be the Businessman of the Century is to look back upon almost unimaginable change. The world of Henry Ford (the earliest of the final four contending for the honor) and the wor...
Bill Gates has a lot on his plate. As Microsoft's chairman and CEO, he's managing a galloping company that sees no bounds to its growth. There's also the pesky distraction of the company's ongoing ...
Bill Gates has decided to open up his wallet. As FORTUNE went to press, we learned that Microsoft's CEO had just given his two charitable foundations a combined gift of some $3.35 billion. Whoa! Th...
Sometimes a meaningless statistic can call attention to an important problem. What is an economist to do? Point out the statistic's emptiness or be grateful that the problem is getting some attenti...
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16: "Did you write [this E-mail], Mr. Gates, on or about January 5, 1996?"
Here in the hinterlands of Oregon, in the middle of a wind-swept wheat field, twirls a crazed dervish of a man in cutoff jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. It's Steve Jobs, ecstatically "conducting" the...
We know that he can't cash out of his $51 billion in Microsoft stock all at once, but let's say that it were possible. Gates could then:
Finding examples of Microsoft executives sounding warlike has to be one of the easiest tasks a government antitrust lawyer could hope for. Here's a choice specimen, uttered by Paul Maritz, Microsof...
By sheer coincidence, National Book Award winner Ron Chernow's biography of the leading industrialist of the Gilded Age, John D. Rockefeller, was published on the eve of the Justice Department's Ma...
I said to my lawyers, "Just, just...is there anything we can do to get past this stupid thing?" --Bill Gates
Betting with Bill Gates seems like a clever investing strategy. The richest man in America put $1 billion into Comcast, the fourth largest cable-television firm, in June 1997. Since that vote of co...
John Malone shows up for a 10 A.M. interview 15 minutes late. The CEO of cable giant TCI just got off the phone with Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. Actually he just got off the phone six times, because ...
For a fellow with a net worth of $42 billion, Bill Gates stays awfully hungry. Every year he makes a point of visiting China at least once. He makes grueling, whistle-stop tours, like the one in In...
Has the world's largest personal fortune become so large as to be incomprehensible, hence invisible? When billions reach a certain point, do they become jillions, beyond the comprehension of anyone...
Leave it to the Web to remind you exactly how much richer Bill Gates is than you are at any given moment. Microsoft stock just ticked up a buck? The Uber-nerd is $141 million richer! Check at the B...
Unless Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch are dead wrong--but would you bet against them?--prospects for the once-embattled cable TV industry are bright again. The second week in June was an amazing one...
In building a lakefront estate estimated to cost $50 million just outside Seattle, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is violating a classic real estate rule of thumb: Never own the biggest house on the...
There he is again, Bill Gates, on the cover of our magazine. Truth is, the man is simply too important, too smart, too aggressive, and--yes--too rich to stay off the cover of FORTUNE for very long ...
In his new book, The Road Ahead (Viking, $29.95), Bill Gates is in fine form at what he does best--looking out a couple of years to see what's coming for technology and society. The view of Microso...
LIKE MANY OF TODAY'S MOGULS, Bill Gates is betting that content is king. What separates Microsoft's CEO from the crowd is his will to dominate--first in operating and application software and now, ...
They're just a couple of slightly geeky middle-aged guys sitting on a patio overlooking Seattle's Lake Washington on a balmy Sunday afternoon. Jet skis and speedboats drone like cicadas as the old ...
PUBLISHING
In hindsight, the most astonishing aspect of Microsoft's recent purchase of Intuit, the upstart maker of the popular Quicken line of personal finance PC software, isn't the rich, $1.5 billion price...
Armed with his billion-dollar checkbook and a keen vision of the oncoming digital age, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates began courting the world's major museums in 1989. But when he asked for the digi...
BILL GATES, billionaire chairman of Microsoft and semipro visionary, leans forward to describe the future of shopping: ''You're watching Seinfeld on TV, and you like the jacket he's wearing. You cl...
CONQUERORS built El Camino Real (Spanish for ''the royal way'') in the 18th century as a dirt road connecting the missions of California. Its northern end is now a congested highway, lined with str...
Renowned computer whiz Bill Gates, 37, has made Microsoft the world's leading producer of software for personal computers, with estimated revenues of nearly $3.8 billion for the fiscal year that en...
Let's face it: A billion dollars is not a lot of money. It is A LOT OF MONEY. So much so that the owners can enjoy the finer things of life in multiples. They can experience the exotic not once but...
36 THE WORLD'S 101 RICHEST PEOPLE Unlike the rest of us in these difficult times, the most prosperous have more money this year than they had last. by Alison Rogers
Engendering dismay among his libertarian friends, your servant has occasionally entertained the case for increased cigarette taxes. Now risking additional fuming (mainly metaphorical) at the Cato I...
So you think Bill Gates's Microsoft stumbled into the extraordinary good fortune of being chosen by IBM to provide the operating system software for its first PC because it had the right technology...
The two college dropouts most responsible for unleashing the PC revolution rarely see each other anymore, though they say that they're still friends. At FORTUNE's invitation, Bill Gates and Steve J...
SIT DOWN TO visit with some of the old-timers at Microsoft Corp., and it doesn't take long to observe the imprint Bill Gates has made on the company he dropped out of Harvard to create 15 years ago...
As businesses focus more on service and on quality tracking, and get by with fewer layers of management, there's a lot of recognition that data can be a competitive tool. The goal for the 1990s is ...
ARE YOU sure you want a billion? Before you answer, consider H. Ross Perot. He has nearly three of them. He also has an original of the Magna Carta, some Remington and Charlie Russell bronzes, and ...
Even at age 31, skinny, befreckled Bill Gates looks like a bookish high- schooler doomed to be bullied all over the playground. But no one is kicking sand in the face of Microsoft's chairman these ...
SUPERLATIVES are always hard to prove, but apparently no one ever made more money at an earlier age than William H. Gates III. Chief executive and a co- founder of Microsoft, a suburban Seattle sof...
SUPERLATIVES are always hard to prove, but apparently no one ever made more money at an earlier age than William H. Gates III. Chief executive and a co- founder of Microsoft, a suburban Seattle sof...
| Most Viewed | Most Emailed | Top Searches |
| Most Viewed | Most Emailed | Top Searches |
Video
