Name	Shigeru Miyamoto (宮本 茂)
Caption	Shigeru Miyamoto at the GDC 2007
Birth date	November 16, 1952
Birth place	Sonobe, Kyoto, Japan
Nationality	Japanese
Alma mater	Kanazawa College of Art
Occupation	Game Director, Game Producer, Character Artist, Game designer, Cartoonist, EAD General Manager
Spouse	Yasuko Miyamoto
Children	2
Education	Kanazawa College of Art
Signature	Miyamoto_signature.png
Parents	Iijake Miyamoto (Father)Hinako Aruha (Mother)

(born November 16, 1952 in Sonobe, Kyoto, Japan) is a Japanese video game designer and producer. Miyamoto was born and raised in the Kyoto Prefecture; the natural surroundings of Kyoto inspired much of Miyamoto's later work. He is mainly known for his work at the video game production company Nintendo, where he created some of the most successful video game franchises of all time, including Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, F-Zero and Pikmin. He currently manages the Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development branch, which handles many of Nintendo's top-selling titles. Miyamoto's games have been seen on every Nintendo video game console, with his earliest work appearing on arcade machines. His games have received critical praise from many reviewers, and he has been the recipient of various awards. He has a wife, Yasuko, and two children. Starting in January of 1989, Miyamoto was asked by television managers from the US to animate commercials after they saw his cartoonish video game designs and animations on his video games. He agreed to do so and has been animating American commercials ever since such as the Shoprite Can Can commercials in the Japanese-American association tower, SIB Tower 12 (which many viewers found ironic since Miyamoto sides in Japan).

Early life

Miyamoto was born in the Japanese town of Sonobe, Kyoto on November 16, 1952. Miyamoto's later work was greatly influenced by his childhood experiences in the town. From an early age, he began to explore the forest around his home. On one of these expeditions, Miyamoto came upon a cave, and, after days of hesitation, went inside. Miyamoto's expeditions into the Kyoto countryside inspired his later work, particularly the Nintendo Entertainment System version of The Legend of Zelda. Miyamoto graduated from Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts with no job lined up. Also in his early life he had a love for cartooning.

Career

1979–1984

When the Nintendo company began branching out, Miyamoto helped design the company's first original coin-operated arcade game, Sheriff. He first helped the company develop a game with the release Radar Scope. The game achieved moderate success in Japan, but by , Nintendo's efforts to break it into the North American video game market had been a complete failure, leaving the company with a large number of unsold units and on the verge of financial collapse. In an effort to keep the company afloat, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to convert unsold Radar Scope units into a new arcade game. He tasked Miyamoto with the conversion, with Nintendo's head engineer, Gunpei Yokoi supervising the project. worked with Miyamoto for many years in the company and became his mentor.]] Miyamoto imagined many characters and plot concepts, but eventually settled on a love triangle between a gorilla, a carpenter, and a girl. He meant to mirror the rivalry between comic characters Bluto and Popeye for the woman Olive Oyl. Bluto evolved into an ape, a form Miyamoto claimed was "nothing too evil or repulsive". This ape would be the pet of the main character, "a funny, hang-loose kind of guy." Miyamoto also named "Beauty and the Beast" and the 1933 film King Kong as influences. Donkey Kong marked the first time that the formulation of a video game's storyline preceded the actual programming, rather than simply being appended as an afterthought. Miyamoto had high hopes for his new project, but lacked the technical skills to program it himself; instead, he conceived the game's concepts, then consulted technicians on whether they were possible. He wanted to make the characters different sizes, move in different manners, and react in various ways. However, Yokoi viewed Miyamoto's original design as too complex. Yokoi suggested using see-saws to catapult the hero across the screen; however, this proved too difficult to program. Miyamoto next thought of using sloped platforms and ladders for travel, with barrels for obstacles. When he asked that the game have multiple stages, the four-man programming team complained that he was essentially asking them to make the game repeat, but the team eventually successfully programmed the game. When the game was sent to Nintendo of America for testing, the sales manager hated it for being too different from the maze and shooter games common at the time. When American staffers began naming the characters, they settled on "Pauline" for the woman, after Polly James, wife of Nintendo's Redmond, Washington, warehouse manager, Don James. The playable character, initially "Jumpman", was eventually named for Mario Segale, the warehouse landlord. These character names were printed on the American cabinet art and used in promotional materials. The staff also pushed for an English name, and thus it received the title Donkey Kong.

Donkey Kong was a success, leading Miyamoto to work on sequels Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong 3. His success earned him work on other Nintendo titles like Excitebike and Devil World. His next game was based on the character from Donkey Kong. He reworked the character Jumpman into Mario, and gave him a brother: Luigi. He named the new game Mario Bros.. Yokoi convinced Miyamoto to give Mario some super human abilities, namely the ability to fall from any height unharmed. Mario's appearance in Donkey Kong – overalls, a hat, and a thick mustache – led Miyamoto to change aspects of the game to make Mario look like a plumber rather than a carpenter. Miyamoto felt that New York City provided the best setting for the game, with its "labyrinthine subterranean network of sewage pipes". The two-player mode and other aspects of gameplay were partially inspired by an earlier video game entitled Joust. To date, Mario Bros. has been released for more than a dozen platforms.

1985–1989

After Mario Bros., Miyamoto worked on several different games, including Ice Climber and Kid Icarus alongside Yokoi. He soon made another Mario game titled Super Mario Bros.. Miyamoto began work on a new game, The Legend of Zelda. In both the Mario and Zelda series, Miyamoto decided to focus more on gameplay than on high scores, unlike many games of the time. Miyamoto took a new direction with The Legend of Zelda, using nonlinear gameplay that forced the player to think their way through riddles and puzzles. With The Legend of Zelda, Miyamoto sought to make an in-game world that players would identify, a "miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer." He recreated his memories of becoming lost amid the maze of sliding doors in his family home in Zeldas labyrinthine dungeons. In February 1986, Nintendo released the game as the launch title for the Nintendo Entertainment System's new Disk System peripheral. The Legend of Zelda was joined by a re-release of Super Mario Bros. and Tennis, Baseball, Golf, Soccer, and Mahjong in the introduction. This peripheral had 128 kilobytes of space, a vast increase over the cartridge format's capacity.

Miyamoto worked on the sequel for Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda. Super Mario Bros. 2 (known as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels outside Japan) reuses gameplay elements from Super Mario Bros., though the game is considered much more difficult than its predecessor. Because of the perceived difficulty, the game did not see a North American release until much later. Instead, the game was redone and labeled Super Mario Bros. 2 in this market. bears little resemblance to the first game in the series. The Adventure of Link features side-scrolling areas within a larger world map rather than the bird's eye view of the previous title. The game incorporates a strategic combat system and more RPG elements, including an experience points (EXP) system, magic spells, and more interaction with non-player characters (NPCs). Link has extra lives; no other game in the series includes this feature. The Adventure of Link plays out in a two-mode dynamic. The overworld, the area where the majority of the action occurs in other The Legend of Zelda games, is still from a top-down perspective, but it now serves as a hub to the other areas. Whenever Link enters a new area such as a town, the game switches to a side-scrolling view. This mode is where most of the action takes place, and it is the only mode in which Link can take damage and be killed. An early idea changed Mario into a centaur, but was dropped in favor of a raccoon tail that allows limited flying ability. New enemies were included to add diversity to the game, along with variants of previous enemies, like Goombas, Hammer Bros., and Koopa Troopas.

1990–2000

A merger between Nintendo's various internal research and development teams led to the creation of Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development (Nintendo EAD), which was headed by Miyamoto. F-Zero was one of the launch titles for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System; Nintendo EAD had approximately fifteen months to develop the game. Miyamoto worked through various games on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, one of them Star Fox. For the game, programmer Jez San convinced Nintendo to develop an upgrade for the Super Nintendo, allowing it to handle three-dimensions better, the Super FX chip. Using this new hardware, Miyamoto and Katsuya Eguchi designed the Star Fox game with a degree of 3D. Argonaut Games recommended using space ships in the new game, but Nintendo wanted a "arcade-style shooting" video game. Yoichi Yamada, a level designer for many Nintendo games, laid out and edited the Star Fox maps. The story takes place in a newly rendered Mushroom Kingdom based on the Super Mario Bros. series. Square reported the game was about 70% complete in October 1995. They created all the interior elements such as columns and stairways and exterior elements using Advanced Computer Modelling (ACM) techniques. Special lighting effects create the shadows and reflections that were meant to improve the 3D elements.

When the Nintendo 64 console was released, Miyamoto began making games for the new system, mostly from his previous franchises. His first game on the new system was Super Mario 64; he began with character design and the camera system. Miyamoto and the other designers were initially unsure of which direction the game should take, and months were spent selecting an appropriate camera view and layout. The original concept involved a fixed path much like an isometric type game, before the choice was made to settle on a free-roaming 3D design. Individual parts of Ocarina of Time were handled by multiple directors – a new strategy for Nintendo EAD. However, when things progressed slower than expected, Miyamoto returned to the development team with a more central role. The team was new to 3D games, but assistant director Makoto Miyanaga recalls a sense of "passion for creating something new and unprecedented". Miyamoto initially intended Ocarina of Time to be played in a first-person perspective, so as to enable the players to take in the vast terrain of Hyrule Field better, as well as being able to focus more on developing enemies and environments. However, the development team did not go through with it once the idea of having a child Link was introduced, as Miyamoto felt it necessary for this Link incarnation to be visible on screen. Other ideas were not used due to time constraints. He also produced Star Fox 64.

2000–2006

When the Nintendo GameCube was released Miyamoto made various games, including the launch title Luigi's Mansion. The game was first revealed at Nintendo Space World 2000 as a technical demo designed to show off the graphical capabilities of the GameCube. Miyamoto made an original short demo of the game concepts, and Nintendo decided to turn it into a full game. Luigi's Mansion was later shown at the E3 in 2001 with the Nintendo GameCube console. Miyamoto continued to make additional Mario spinoffs in these years. He also produced the 3D game series Metroid Prime, after the original designer Yokoi, a friend and mentor of Miyamoto's, died. In this time he developed Pikmin and its sequel Pikmin 2. He also worked on new games for the Star Fox, Donkey Kong, F-Zero and Legend of Zelda series on the both the Gamecube, the Gameboy Advance and the Nintendo DS systems. He helped in many games on the DS, including the remake of Super Mario 64, Super Mario 64 DS, and the new game Nintendogs.

2006–Present

At E3 2005, Nintendo released a small number of Nintendo DS game cards containing a preview trailer for Twilight Princess. They also announced that Zelda would appear on the Wii, then codenamed the "Revolution", and was later revealed to be The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The team, including Miyamoto, worked on a Wii control scheme, adapting camera control and the fighting mechanics to the new interface. A prototype was created that used a swinging gesture to control the sword from a first-person viewpoint, but was unable to show the variety of Link's movements. When the third-person view was restored, Aonuma thought it felt strange to swing the Wii Remote with the right hand to control the sword in Link's left hand, so the sword control was transferred to a button. Miyamoto confirmed the Revolution controller-functionality in an interview with Nintendo of Europe and Time reported the same soon after. At E3 2006, Nintendo announced that both versions would be available at the Wii launch, and had a playable version of Twilight Princess for the Wii. He helped on the development of Wii Sports, Wii Fit and he created Wii Music. Another Wii game he made was Super Mario Galaxy. The concept for Super Mario Galaxys game play originated from ideas taken from Super Mario 128, a tech demo shown at Nintendo Space World in 2000 to exemplify the processing power of the Nintendo GameCube. The demo's director (and director of Super Mario Galaxy), Yoshiaki Koizumi, desired that one of the demo's distinguishing features, spherical-based platforms, would be used in a future game, but was held back in belief that such a feat would be "impossible for technical reasons". Miyamoto decided to work on the next large-scale Mario game after Nintendo EAD Tokyo finished development on in late 2004, pushing for the spherical platform concept to be realized. And, in 2006, he created New Super Mario Bros. He has a Shetland Sheepdog named Pikku that provided the inspiration for Nintendogs. He is also a semi-professional dog breeder. He has been quoted as stating, "Video-games are bad for you? That's what they said about Rock 'N' Roll." Miyamoto also has stated that he has a hobby of guessing the measurements of objects, then checking to see if he was correct, and apparently carries a tape measure with him everywhere.

Impact

Many of Miyamoto's games have received critical praise. Super Mario Bros. 3 was a commercial success. Levi Buchanan of IGN considered Super Mario Bros. 3s appearance in the film The Wizard as a show-stealing element, and referred to the movie as a "90-minute commercial" for the game. Super Mario 64 was the best-selling Nintendo 64 game, and as of May 21, 2003, the game had sold eleven million copies. At the end of 2007, Guinness World Records reported sales of 11.8 million copies. As of September 25, 2007, it was the seventh best-selling video game in the United States with six million copies sold. By June 2007, Super Mario 64 had become the second most popular title on Wii's Virtual Console, behind Super Mario Bros. Ocarina of Time also received universal acclaim by critics. Edge magazine referred to it as the Nintendo 64's "key launch title". The game placed second in Official Nintendo Magazines "100 greatest Nintendo games of all time". Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess were also critically acclaimed by critics for the graphics and the gameplay. Twilight Princess was released to universal critical acclaim and commercial success. It received perfect scores from major publications such as CVG, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Informer, GamesRadar, and GameSpy. On TopTenReviews, it has received an average score of 3.86 out of 4, the highest among all games in the Zelda franchise. In the PAL region, which covers most of Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Western Europe, Twilight Princess is the best-selling Zelda game ever. During its first week, the game was sold with three out of every four Wii purchases. The game had sold 4.52 million copies on the Wii as of March 1, 2008, and 1.32 million on the GameCube as of March 31, 2007.

Miyamoto's other franchises, such as Star Fox, were also well received. At the time of the game's release, the use of filled, three-dimensional polygons in a console game was very unusual, apart from a handful of earlier titles, including Sega Mega Drive/Genesis ports of Atari's arcade driving game, Hard Drivin', and their helicopter shooter, Steel Talons. Due to its success, Star Fox has become a Nintendo franchise, with five more games and numerous appearances by its characters in other Nintendo games such as Super Smash Bros. series. Star Fox was awarded Best Shooter of 1993 by Electronic Gaming Monthly.

Awards and recognition

The name of the main character of the PC game Daikatana, Hiro Miyamoto, is an homage to Miyamoto. The character Gary Oak from the Pokémon anime series is named Shigeru in Japan and is the rival of Ash Ketchum (called Satoshi in Japan). Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri was mentored by Miyamoto. In 1998, Miyamoto was honored as the first person inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame. In 2006, Miyamoto was made a Chevalier (knight) of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres.

On November 28, 2006, Miyamoto was featured in TIME Asia's "60 Years of Asian Heroes," alongside Hayao Miyazaki, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Bruce Lee and the Dalai Lama. He was later chosen as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of the Year in both 2007 and also in 2008, in which he topped the list with a total vote of 1,766,424. At the Game Developers Choice Awards, on March 7, 2007, Miyamoto received the Lifetime Achievement Award "for a career that spans the creation of Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda to the company's recent revolutionary systems, Nintendo DS and Wii." Both GameTrailers and IGN placed Miyamoto first on their lists for the "Top Ten Game Creators" and the "Top 100 Game Creators of All Time" respectively.

In a survey of game developers by industry publication Develop, 30% of the developers chose Miyamoto as their "Ultimate Development Hero". Miyamoto has been interviewed by companies and organizations such as CNN's Talk Asia and NextLevel.com. He was made a Fellow of BAFTA at the British Academy Video Games Awards on March 19, 2010. Miyamoto is also the first interactive creator nominated for the highest recognition in the Spanish-speaking world, the Prince of Asturias Award.

See also

List of Nintendo games created by Shigeru Miyamoto

Satoshi Tajiri

Eiji Aonuma

References

External links

N-Sider – Shigeru Miyamoto profile

Shigeru Miyamoto profile on MobyGames

New York Times profile, May 25, 2008

Video profile of Shigeru Miyamoto from the digital TV series *Play Value produced by ON Networks

Category:Japanese cartoonists Category:Japanese video game designers Category:Video game composers Category:Video game producers Category:Video game directors Category:Video game designers Category:Nintendo people Category:People from Kyoto Prefecture Category:1952 births Category:Living people Category:Shintoists Category:Chevaliers of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

Name	Ken Kutaragi
Net worth	▲¥500 billion Japanese Yen
Birth date	August 08, 1950
Birth place	Tokyo, Japan
Occupation	Founder of PlayStation

(born August 8, 1950) is the former Chairman and chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCEI), the video game division of Sony Corporation. He is known as "The Father of the PlayStation", and its successors and spinoffs, including the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and the PlayStation 3.

Kutaragi was closely watched by financial analysts who trace profiles of the losses and profits of the Sony Corporation. This has been attributed to the PlayStation franchise's high profit returns for Sony; it has been the key source of profit for the company.

Ken Kutaragi is currently CEO of Cellius. He also founded a new internet company.

In 2009, he became a guest professor of Ritsumeikan University.

2006/2007 SCEI management shuffle

On November 30, 2006, Kutaragi was replaced as President of Sony Computer Entertainment by Kaz Hirai, the President of SCE America. In addition to other management changes, Kutaragi was promoted to chairman of SCEI, and retained his position as chief executive officer of the group.

On April 26, 2007 It was announced that Kutaragi would retire and instead take up the role of Honorary Chairman. Taking over his position will be current SCEI president and CEO Kaz Hirai, who had been promoted to president and CEO.

See also

History of video games (16-bit era)

List of computer and video game industry people

SPC700

Tokyo Game Show

Kaz Hirai

Howard Stringer

Phil Harrison

References

External links

KenKutaragi.com - Unofficial Ken Kutaragi Forum

Playing His Way to the Next Level – By Jim Frederick, TIME (with reporting by Toko Sekiguchi), 2003

Sony E3 Public Convention 2005, featuring Ken Kutaragi (starting at 05:15)

Farewell, Father - By Rob Fahey, a retrospective on Kutaragi's career.

Category:1950 births Category:Living people Category:Japanese chief executives Category:Japanese electrical engineers Category:Sony Computer Entertainment Category:Sony people Category:Ritsumeikan University faculty

Name	Bill Gates
Caption	Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 2007
Birth date	October 28, 1955
Birth place	Seattle, Washington, United States
Nationality	American
Occupation	Chairman of MicrosoftChairman of CorbisCo-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates FoundationDirector of Berkshire HathawayCEO of Cascade Investment
Net worth	US$54 billion (2010)
Spouse
Children	3
Residence	Medina, WA
Alma mater	Harvard University (dropped out in 1975)
Website	Bill Gates
Signature	BillGates Signature.svg
Parents	William H. Gates, Sr.Mary Maxwell Gates

William Henry "Bill" Gates III, (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, philanthropist, author and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. He is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2009, excluding 2008, when he was ranked third. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8 percent of the common stock. He has also authored or co-authored several books.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is admired by many, a number of industry insiders criticize his business tactics, which they consider anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

Bill Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect. In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie, chief software architect and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. Gates' last full-time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as non-executive chairman.

Early life

Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates, of English, German, and Scotch-Irish descent. His family was upper middle class; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way, and her father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had dropped his own "III" suffix. Early on in his life, Gates' parents had a law career in mind for him.

At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he commented on it and said, "There was just something neat about the machine." After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.

At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success." In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973. While at Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer, who later succeeded Gates as CEO of Microsoft. In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems, presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates' solution, which was later formalized in a published paper in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou, held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent. and spent a lot of time using the school's computers. He remained in contact with Paul Allen, joining him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974. The following year saw the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company. He had talked this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a company. In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November 1975. They named their partnership "Micro-Soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque. This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems.

During Microsoft's early years, all employees had broad responsibility for the company's business. Gates oversaw the business details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, he personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote parts of it as he saw fit.

IBM partnership

In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to write the BASIC interpreter for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC. When IBM's representatives mentioned that they needed an operating system, Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the widely used CP/M operating system. IBM's discussions with Digital Research went poorly, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Gates and told him to get an acceptable operating system. A few weeks later Gates proposed using 86-DOS (QDOS), an operating system similar to CP/M that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had made for hardware similar to the PC. Microsoft made a deal with SCP to become the exclusive licensing agent, and later the full owner, of 86-DOS. After adapting the operating system for the PC, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS in exchange for a one-time fee of $50,000. Gates did not offer to transfer the copyright on the operating system, because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM's system. They did, and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry.

Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the company in Washington state and made Gates President of Microsoft and the Chairman of the Board.

Management style

From Microsoft's founding in 1975 until 2006, Gates had primary responsibility for the company's product strategy. He aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft achieved a dominant position he vigorously defended it.

As an executive, Gates met regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. Firsthand accounts of these meetings describe him as verbally combative, berating managers for perceived holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's long-term interests at risk. He often interrupted presentations with such comments 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?" The target of his outburst then had to defend the proposal in detail until, hopefully, Gates was fully convinced.

Gates's role at Microsoft for most of its history was 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 wrote code as late as 1989 that shipped in the company's products.

Antitrust litigation

Many decisions that 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 with examiner David Boies over the contextual meaning of words like "compete", "concerned" and "we". BusinessWeek reported:

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Gates later said that he had simply resisted attempts by Boies to mischaracterize his words and actions. As to his demeanor during the deposition, he said, "Did I fence with Boies? ... I plead guilty. Whatever that penalty is should be levied against me: rudeness to Boies in the first degree." Despite Gates's denials, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization and tying, and blocking competition, both in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. As they are walking out of the mall, Seinfeld asks Gates if he has melded his mind to other developers, after getting a yes, he then asks if they are working on a way to make computers edible, again getting a yes. Some say that this is an homage to Seinfeld's own show about "nothing" (Seinfeld). In a second commercial in the series, Gates and Seinfeld are at the home of an average family trying to fit in with normal people.

Post-Microsoft

Since leaving Microsoft, Gates continues his philanthropy and, among other projects, purchased the video rights to the Messenger Lectures series called The Character of Physical Law, given at Cornell University by Richard Feynman in 1964 and recorded by the BBC. The videos are available online to the public at Microsoft's Project Tuva.

In April 2010, Gates was invited to visit and speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he asked the students to take on the hard problems of the world in their futures.

Personal life

, June 2009.]] Gates married Melinda French from Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. They have three children: daughters Jennifer Katharine Gates (born 1996) and Phoebe Adele Gates (born 2002), and son Rory John Gates (born 1999). The Gates' home is an earth-sheltered house in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina. 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 $991,000.

His estate has a swimming pool with an underwater music system, as well as a gym and a dining room.

Also among Gates's private acquisitions is the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci, which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994. Gates is also known as an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby. He also enjoys playing bridge, tennis, and golf.

Gates was number one on the "Forbes 400" list from 1993 through to 2007 and number one on Forbes list of "The World's Richest People" from 1995 to 2007 and 2009. In 1999, Gates's wealth briefly surpassed $101 billion, causing the media to call him a "centibillionaire". Since 2000, the nominal value of his Microsoft holdings has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's stock price after the dot-com bubble burst and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. In a May 2006 interview, Gates commented that he wished that he were not the richest man in the world because he disliked the attention it brought. Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of $616,667, and $350,000 bonus totalling $966,667. He founded Corbis, a digital imaging company, in 1989. In 2004 he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by long-time friend Warren Buffett. In March 2010 Bill Gates was bumped down to the 2nd wealthiest man behind Carlos Slim.

Philanthropy

, Queen Rania of Jordan, Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, President Yar Adua of Nigeria and other participants in a 'Call to Action on the Millennium Development Goals' during the Annual Meeting 2008 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.]]

Gates began to realize the expectations others had of him when public opinion mounted that he could give more of his wealth to charity. Gates studied the work of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and in 1994 sold some of his Microsoft stock to create the William H. Gates Foundation. In 2000, Gates and his wife combined three family foundations into one to create the charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the largest transparently operated charitable foundation in the world. The foundation is set up to allow benefactors access to how its money is being spent, unlike other major charitable organizations such as the Wellcome Trust. The generosity and extensive philanthropy of David Rockefeller has been credited as a major influence. Gates and his father have met with Rockefeller several times and have modeled their giving in part on the Rockefeller family's philanthropic focus, namely those global problems that are ignored by governments and other organizations. As of 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates were the second most generous philanthropists in America, having given over $28 billion to charity.

The foundation has also received criticism because it invests the assets that it has not yet distributed with the exclusive goal of maximizing the return on investment. As a result, its investments include companies that have been criticized for worsening poverty in the same developing countries where the Foundation is attempting to relieve poverty. These include companies that pollute heavily and pharmaceutical companies that do not sell into the developing world. In response to press criticism, the foundation announced in 2007 a review of its investments to assess social responsibility. It subsequently cancelled the review and stood by its policy of investing for maximum return, while using voting rights to influence company practices. Gates has made The Giving Pledge to donate over half of his wealth to charity.

Recognition

In 1987 Gates was officially declared a billionaire in the pages of Forbes' 400 Richest People in America issue, just days before his 32nd birthday. As the world's youngest self-made billionaire, he was worth $1.25 billion, over $900 million more than he'd been worth the year before, when he'd debuted on the list.

Time magazine named Gates , as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005, and 2006. Time also collectively named Gates, his wife Melinda and U2's lead singer Bono as the 2005 Persons of the Year for their humanitarian efforts. In 2006, he was voted eighth in the list of "Heroes of our time". Gates was listed in the Sunday Times power list in 1999, named CEO of the year by Chief Executive Officers magazine in 1994, ranked number one in the "Top 50 Cyber Elite" by Time in 1998, ranked number two in the Upside Elite 100 in 1999 and was included in The Guardian as one of the "Top 100 influential people in media" in 2001.

In 1994, he was honoured as the twentieth Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society. Gates has received honorary doctorates from Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands, in 2000; the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2002; Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 2005; Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in April 2007; Harvard University in June 2007; the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, in January 2008, and Cambridge University in June 2009. He was also made an honorary trustee of Peking University in 2007. Gates was also made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005, in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.

In November 2006, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education, particularly in Mexico, and specifically in the program "Un país de lectores". In October 2009, it was announced that Gates will be awarded the 2010 Bower Award for Business Leadership of The Franklin Institute for his achievements in business and for his philanthropic work. In 2010 he was honored with the Silver Buffalo Award by the Boy Scouts of America, its highest award for adults, for his service to youth.

Investments

Cascade Investments LLC, a private investment and holding company, incorporated in United States, is controlled by Bill Gates, and is headquartered in the city of Kirkland, WA.

bgC3, a new think-tank company founded by Bill Gates.

Corbis, a digital image licensing and rights services company.

TerraPower, a nuclear reactor design company.

Bibliography

Gates has authored two books:

The Road Ahead (1995)

Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999)

Filmography

Gates has appeared in at least one film: Waiting For Superman

See also

List of billionaires (also see List of college dropout billionaires and List of wealthiest non-inflated historical figures)

Paul Allen – Microsoft's co-founder, friend, and fellow billionaire

Books

References

Further reading

"The Meaning of Bill Gates: As his reign at Microsoft comes to an end, so does the era he dominated", The Economist, June 28, 2008.

External links

The Official Site of Bill Gates – The Gates Notes

Biography of Bill Gates at Microsoft.com

Forbes profile page on Bill Gates

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

How I Work: Bill Gates

TED Talks: Bill Gates trying to change the world now at TED in 2009

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