Insan's Blog

In seeing all the Goodbye Bill stories (like the epic email about moviemaker). I can tell you a ton of stories from 1996-97 when the IE3 team was assembling to kill Netscape..boy if the government knew I existed … I definitely would have been in court. Thank God I wasn’t called to testify. I think Microsoft deserved to crush Netscape .. Microsoft’s competitive strategy execution during that time was brilliant (Will Poole, Joe Belfoire, Scott Berkin, Paul Osbourne and tons of others I can’t remember). Anyway back to my favorite Bill Gates story.

At Agenda conference (like 1997 I think) at the Phoenician in AZ, Scott McNealy was giving a talk trashing Microsoft. I slipped up to my room (one floor up) to download my email on my state of the art 14.4 modem and I see on the TV Janet Reno going live on CNN declaring the Gov’t is going after Microsoft. Anyway I jump downstairs right under my room and decided to get a cup of coffee and wait for the crowd in the middle of the ballroom hallway. Well the doors open and Bill Gates is there..circled by John Markoff, Steve Levy, Walt Mossbert, tos of others… and he backs up and stands right next to me (like one foot away). Now we’re completely surrounded by people -Bill has no where to go. So I interrupt thim and whisper in his ear.. ” hey Bill ..Janet Reno was just live on CNN 5 mins ago - the gov’t is suing you for antitrust violation.bla bla bla..good luck …”… Bill Gates just looks at me deadpanned and looks left looks right and just runs. He grabs Craig Mundie and his posse and bolt…Meanwhile the entire press corps looks at me like “what the F&*k did you say to him. I just smiled. I never saw or spoke to Bill since.

My favorite memory was that I was the first one to tell him the gov’t has officially sued him for antitrust. Bill never came back to the Agenda conference again.

Now he only goes to the D conference.

Personal Note: I have no special relationship to Bill except seeing him over the years before Microsoft became popular then at conferences in the 90s. I have come to admire the guy and have huge respect for what he has accomplished as an entrepreneur and business leader - but most of all I will look at his competitive strategy moves as pure genius.

My history with Bill is as follows: In the early 80’s I was a member of SIGCHI at Northeastern University and I used to sneak away from the keg parties to geek out at the Boston Computer Society events where Bill was always at. He as just another CEO of a startup. Today he’d be at Techcrunch 50 or Demo.. just like that he’d chat with you … very approachable. By the way being a geek in the early 80s wasn’t cool like it is today. sneaking away to pirate lotus, dbase, dos, and then going to the Boston Computer Society meetings wasn’t cool ..

Posted by John Furrier in Technology.
Tags: Bill Gates, Boston Computer Society
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Bill Gates came from a family of entrepreneurship and high-spirited liveliness. William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28th, 1955. His father, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. His late mother, Mary Gates, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International.

Bill Gates - Early Life

He had an early interest in software and began programming computers at the age of thirteen. In 1973, Bill Gates became a student at Harvard University, where he meet Steve Ballmer (now Microsoft's chief executive officer). While still a Harvard undergraduate, Bill Gates wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the MITS Altair microcomputer.

Did you know that as young teenagers Bill Gates and Paul Allen ran a small company called Traf-O-Data and sold a computer to the city of Seattle that could count city traffic?

Bill Gates & Microsoft

In 1975, before graduation Gates left Harvard to form Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen. The pair planned to develop software for the newly emerging personal computer market.

Bill Gate's company Microsoft became famous for their computer operating systems and killer business deals. For example, Bill Gates talked IBM into letting Microsoft retain the licensing rights to MS-DOS an operating system, that IBM needed for their new personal computer. Gates proceeded to make a fortune from the licensing of MS-DOS.

On November 10, 1983, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Microsoft Corporation formally announced Microsoft Windows, a next-generation operating system.

On January 1, 1994, Bill Gates married Melinda French Gates. They have three children.

Bill Gates Philanthropist

Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, have endowed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with more than $28.8 billion (as of January 2005) to support philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning.

• MS DOS The Operating System History

  From a Quick and Dirty Operating System a giant walks (ms-dos), in 1980, IBM first approached Bill Gates and Microsoft, to discuss the state of home computers and Microsoft products.

• Windows 1.0 To Windows Beyond 2000

  Windows is the graphical user interface for IBM and IBM compatible machines, this article discusses the origins of Windows and where Windows is heading.

• Top Books on Bill Gates

  Authorized and unauthorized books on Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman and the youngest self-made billionaire in history.

http://inventors.about.com/

Hanna Ashar

National-Louis University

Maureen Lane-Maher

National-Louis University

The article discusses a study we conducted on the concept of success with mid- and senior-level executives in a federal government agency. Contrary to our expectation that the study’s participants define success in materialistic—money, positional power, and status symbols—terms, they used terms such as being connected, balance, and wholeness to define and describe success. Indeed, the participants linked the concept of success to spirituality and stated that to be successful one needs to embrace spirituality as well. The article defines spirituality, discusses the study, its findings and implications, and suggests that spirituality and the notion of success are associated. In addition, it proposes a conceptual model of success that contains four components of both success and spirituality.

Key Words: business paradigm • the human spirit • success at work • balance • wholeness • spirituality at work

Thanks to : http://jmi.sagepub.com/