Bill Gates is a one trick pony. He is neither cute nor insightful. Got in on the ground floor of computers; rode that well.
Microsoft has been anything but a well run company since the early years.
Good point. If Cookie Cutter Core had been around when Bill Gates was a planned and wanted child, we’d still be sending men into space using slide rules.
He certainly was in the right place at the right time. I'll give him his due though. He was driven and he was ruthless in his early years. He saw where the industry was heading when IBM decided to get into the PC market and he positioned Microsoft perfectly to take full advantage of it by bullying and pushing other would-be competitors aside.
The defining move of Bill Gates' career was the purchase of 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products in July 1981 for just $75,000 - just a month before IBM went public with the first PC. Renamed MS-DOS for the IBM launch, this one product launched a monolithic empire that is still earning Microsoft billions of dollars a year to this day despite Microsoft missing the boat completely with the Internet, social media, smartphones, tablets, MP3 devices, etc.
A hundred years from now, when the histories of the computer industry are written, people like Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos will be shown to have had a bigger impact overall.