Bill Gates American Hero

Bill Gates is the current Chairman and former CEO of Microsoft, a software company. He is an entrepreneur and very important to the world of business. He has influenced business by his entrepreneurship with Microsoft, his passion, and his philanthropic work. His single most major achievement was being at the top of the business world as the richest man, from 1995 to 2009 because of his entrepreneur skills. Bill Gates from a young age had always been into computers since a young age. He attended school in Harvard, but later dropped out to start his own software company, showing his entrepreneur spirit. During the first five years of Microsoft, although he helped write codes with the software he also oversaw the business side of the company. Bill Gates was already running a successful company, with a successful product even with limited business experience. In 1979 hired Steve Smith to be his first business manager of the company. Smith said “I was amazed at how successful they were without what appeared to be any real business management” (Erickson and Wallace 148). That is a testament to how Bill Gates changed business by focusing more on the performance of the product, instead of how to market it. Microsoft started off as a product known as BASIC, which was programming language for early computers. With Bill’s entrepreneurial and innovative spirit he didn’t stop there however, in 1985 Microsoft released its first ever operating system, known as Microsoft Windows 1.0. After the small success of Windows 1.0, Gates was able to form a partnership with a bigger technology company at the time, IBM, to help make an operating system for their computers known as O/S 2. Not long after this product, Microsoft decided to expand and made office productivity products known as Microsoft Office, which was also very well selling and a testament to Bill Gates entrepreneurship. He continued working on the Microsoft Windows operating system, and in 1990 Microsoft Windows 3.0