Bill Gates Creative Capitalism - Making Capitalism More Creative

MAKING CAPITALISM MORE CREATIVE.

Hello everyone, today we're gonna talk about an article wich is called

MAKING CAPITALISM MORE CREATIVE. The author is the well known Bill GATES and the article was written on the 31st of july 2008.

I) Background:

A) Bill Gates as founder of Microsoft:

Bill Gates was born on the 28th of October 1955 - the same year than Steve Jobs. His real name is William Henry the third, he comes from a wealthy family of Seattle. At Lakeside School, at the age of 13, he discovered computer programming, and soon passed more time in computer rooms than in any other classrooms. His favorite hobby was trying to crash big companies computers, in order to detect their faults, and it was like his first job. Student at Harvard, he spent long nights playing poker with friends ... This is where he met Steve Ballmer, who became Microsoft Chief executive officer.

Quotes

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."

- Bill Gates

Bill was a voracious reader as a child, spending many hours reading reference books such as the encyclopedia. Around the age of 11 or 12, Bill's parents began to have concerns about his behavior.

He was doing well in school, but he seemed bored at times. His parents worried he might become a loner. Though they were strong believers in public education, when Bill turned 13 they enrolled him in Seattle's Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. He blossomed in nearly all his subjects, excelling in math and science, but also doing very well in drama and English.

In 1973, Bill Gates became a student at Harvard University, where he met 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.

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. They planned to develop software for the newly emerging personal computer market.

Bill Gate's company Microsoft became famous for their computer operating systems. For example, Bill Gates convinced IBM to let Microsoft retain the licensing rights of MS-DOS, an operating system, that IBM needed for their new personal computer. Gates succeeded in making 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.

The Gates family atmosphere was warm and close, and all three children were encouraged to be competitive and strive for excellence.

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.

Before talking about the article in itself, I would like to quote Bill GATES who says that: "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."

This sentence shows how much GATES has a sarcastic and ironic point of view about success in general. And it is really interesting if we consider the image that this article gives about the world. That brings me to the next part:

This article is divided into 5 separate parts. If we analyze them in a chronological order, we could say that Gates points out some very interesting points:

-The first one is the main idea: Capitalism is good, and to make it even better, we need more people to involve themselves in order to make it more creative.

-It is also written, and this is GATES's second point that the interest of a company is the profit, so if we want them to care about other people, and especially poorest ones, we have to make sure they have a return on investment.

-The third point would be the importance of bringing technology to the poorest regions of the world and use it to help these last in their development.

-Then, a whole paragraph pushes the reader to think about the different possibilities to motivate