Bill Gates' recommended readings

Bill Gates is best known for being the founder of Microsoft, as well as being a serial entrepreneur, programmer, computer scientist, philanthropist. With his software company, Gates has revolutionized the lives of people around the world. The Microsoft Corporation, created in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is one of the largest software producers in the world, with capital of approximately 2,288 billion dollars.

Bill Gates' corporate strategies, defined as monopolistic and anti-competitive, have been widely criticized. Since 1987 he has, nevertheless, maintained his position as one of the richest men in the world. Today, with a fortune of 134.5 billion dollars, he is the fourth richest person in the world.

Bill Gates remained at the helm of Microsoft until January 2000, when he shifted to a part-time role so that he could devote more time to his charitable work with the "Bill & Melinda Gates foundation", established together with his ex-wife, Melinda. The entrepreneur has donated large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and various scientific research projects. Among various global health improvement projects, Gates is working with Rotary International to eradicatepolio.

William Gates was Born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington, the son of a lawyer and a teacher, with a family tree of English, German, Irish, Swiss, Scottish and Jewish roots. From an early age, he was a huge technology and IT enthusiast, so much so that he began developing computer programs at just thirteen years old. With friend and computer enthusiast Paul Allen always by his side, Bill realized that there was a need for personal computers to function with a much simpler language system, to make them accessible even to people with no programming skills. The first step towards simplification was to use icons, meaning mini images to click on with a cursor to start the program.

In 1973, Bill Gates enrolled into law school at Harvard. The plan was for him to pursue a career in law, but he spent most of his time in the computer classroom. After two years he dropped out of college and created Microsoft, aiming to make the computer a household commodity, providing computer access to every single family. The first Microsoft-branded software was sold in the same year and at the same time, certain commercial principles had to be made immediately and perfectly clear: the fight against software piracy, and the transfer of the software license, was on.

In 1979, Microsoft already had a turnover of 2.5 million dollars and continued to grow beyond all expectations until 1981, following the partnership with IBM. The contact came to him through his mother, Mary, and her wide network of acquaintances through her seat on several boards of directors, including that of IBM. Having not yet developed software to run on IBM PCs, Bill Gates bought it outright by making an agreement with the developer that makes Microsoft the exclusive licensed agent and sole owner of the software.

The software, called MS-DOS, is licensed to other PC manufacturers. Furthermore, Microsoft also developed software capable of running on Apple devices. After some serious brain-storming with Steve Jobs, Windows was born in 1985, an operating system with a graphical interface, similar to the Macintosh system launched two years earlier by Apple.

Microsoft Office was launched in 1989, a software that contains applications for managing office activities. In a very short time, Microsoft found itself with a virtual monopoly on PC operating systems. In the 1990s, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into presumed unfair marketing practices carried out by Microsoft. Meanwhile, Bill Gates became the richest man in the world.

Bill Gates left Microsoft Corporation in 2008 to dedicate himself exclusively to humanitarian projects with his wife Melinda. The couple were married in 1994 and have three children, Jennifer Katharine, Rory John and Phoebe Adele. In 2000 Gates created the "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation", a private humanitarian organization that fights disease, especially in the Third World.

Over the last ten years, the entrepreneur and philanthropist has studied the causes and effects of climate change, to the point where he has also proposed potential solutions to help avert environmental disaster.