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At 19, Bill Gates was a kid without a clear direction who had left his studies at Harvard University and his work at a large Canadian hydroelectric company. He would spend the following years immersed in a spiral of addiction to work, alcohol and joints, a situation with bad prospects of not being because, at the same time, he would found one of the most important technological companies in history and make it possible for you to be reading About this on your computer.
An 'nini' does not end up changing the course of history. Gates had a privileged coconut, a great friend and mathematician at his side and a tremendous facility to impose hellish days on his employees.
Ironically, his biggest obsession in the early years of Microsoft was to have enough millions in the bank not to start an aerospace company or to indulge, as the new leaders of technology giants like Amazon or Tesla can do.
No, Gates did it out of pure fear of not being able to pay payrolls if they ran out of an important contract. "I wanted to have enough money in the bank so that if nobody paid us in a year, I could assume the salaries." This was the case in the Eighties, before the best years of Microsoft arrived and his company surpassed and left goliats like IBM or Apple with its operating system, Windows, far behind. "
Netflix premiered last Friday a documentary focused on the father of Windows and Microsoft , delving into many current and past aspects of Bill Gates, from his relationship with his mother, his obsession with work, his way of thinking and, above all, what He has been doing in recent years.
Bill and Melinda Gates co-direct the foundation that bears their names and whose goal, like each of the three chapters that make up the documentary, is to help in different humanitarian crises of difficult solution , from bringing clean water to curing polio, also passing through
The goals that the marriage of philanthropists set for their foundation are very intelligently related to the birth of Microsoft, and beyond publicizing the works that Bill Gates has carried out in the last years of his life, it also offers a perspective interesting about this man, his way of working and the company he founded .
This is how for example we discovered that Gates, great as it was individually, is a calculating and cold man who works best is only , although he needs key allies to get ahead and has no problem in, after many years and having lost Almost all of them recognize that this is so.
It is a portrait that takes him a little away from other well-known figures in the world of technology, such as the genius child Mark Zuckerberg, founder and current CEO of Facebook; or the late Steve Jobs , a key figure in the history of Apple, Gates's lifelong rival, with whom he reconciled and strengthened ties in his last years and who is totally absent and does not appear at any time in this documentary .
That does not mean that young Gates was a dictator at times and a very tough boss . "If suddenly something was going to take another week to be finished, it came and said: 'I can do it in one day, why don't you work as much as I do?'"
A fundamental friend
This attitude would cost him a lot personally, but it is what raised Microsoft above the rest of competitors. In the middle of this crossroads, a name always appears: Paul Allen .
The confundador of Microsoft was a fundamental ally of Gates in the first years because it was he who, already in the institute, where they were friends despite the difference of years, there was a great mental synchrony and a sickly passion for mathematics.
The loss of his childhood friend, Kent Evans, brought Allen much closer and it was with him that he achieved his first success in the computer world . The director of his institute asked them to match the schedules of their more than 400 students for the following school year and, far from falling asleep, they got something so effective that it would end up being copied throughout the area.
What used to take a very large group of people all summer, Gates and Allen did it with an old computer over the course of two weeks.
And after this litmus test, the following came: regulate part of the tasks of the Seattle traffic department or, more importantly, assist in the automation tasks of a hydroelectric company in Vancouver .
At that time, Allen functioned as a somewhat corrupting fraternal figure. "Paul always wanted me to get drunk," says Gates. " There was Drunk Bill. Or Bill placed on joints ." However, in their summer working in Vancouver, they became best friends and accumulated experiences that Gates remembers as key in their relationship. "The night I got drunk on whiskey for the first time, I didn't want to go home, so I ended up sleeping in the school chapel."
The beginning of something big and difficult
That same year, the Altair computer company launched a fundamental product in Microsoft's history: the Altair 8800, very powerful for the time and with impressive potential. Gates and Allen were responsible for developing their programming language, the so-called Altair BASIC.
"We had the feeling that the revolution had begun without us," says Gates. So they got down to work, day and night, and managed to adapt the BASIC programming language to the Altair 8800 and dump it all into a perforated tape to show its creators its usefulness.
On the outbound flight, however, they realized a problem: a boot program was necessary to launch their language and for the machine to understand. Allen wrote the necessary code for this software in that little time they had, with no option to review it. The pressure was enormous: if it was not all right, if there was only one fault, it would not work and they would lose their great opportunity .
But everything worked the first time. And there was born Microsoft. It was the first time someone had installed a commercial program on a personal computer.
Allen and Gates soon left their studies and moved to Albuquerque . "We barely slept, ate junk food and worked hours and hours."
The pace of Microsoft's work at the time was frantic. "I loved going to work and that job was my whole life," Gates confesses, but in turn, he acknowledges his work addiction and how unfair it could be to employees who didn't work like him. " I didn't believe in weekends, I didn't believe in vacations . For many people, it wasn't a good place to work. We were frantic and very demanding."
Phrases like "the best thing about Microsoft is that you can work part-time. You decide what twelve hours of the day you spend in the office" illustrate in the documentary the climate of Microsoft's early years. And Gates recognizes his perversion very calmly. "I knew all the license plates of my employees, so I could know who was here and who was not . "
His obsession with work and with his employees reached such a point that he became famous for a phrase that he released again and again in his work meetings: "This is the stupidest idea I've heard in my life."
All this made a dent in Allen , not because he suffered abuse as such, but because his goals in life had changed. In 1981, while Gates finished the code for an order that had made them IBM, Allen went to see the launch of the first space shuttle from NASA. Gates could not deliver the order on time and Allen had been absent without notifying him ("I would have said no," says Gates).
That program was MS-DOS, which launched Microsoft to glory and made it a fundamental software company in the computer world even before they launched Windows, the operating system still used today by the vast majority of computers of the world.
Allen resigned his position at Microsoft in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, which he overcame after months of radiation therapy and an SDF bone marrow transplant. Despite the constant attempts to approach, Gates and Allen never recovered a good relationship and the latter accused him in his biography of trying to eliminate him from the business with the help of Steve Ballmer.
Son of his mother
Despite his current philanthropic work, it seems that the youngest Bill Gates was a cold and calculating man. And his family does not deny that this was the case, even if they do it from love.
His own wife says he would not like to live "inside his brain", because he is a "complex" man who is always the one who knows best about the room. "He retains 90% of what he reads and knows how to synthesize it quickly, as if it were a computer processor," says one of his sisters.
This does not mean that it did not have a human side, but it seems that it was always something apart from work and business. Nevertheless, Gates recognizes that his mother was the key figure in his life . "Our mother wanted us to succeed. She wanted our family to be a force to consider."
This does not mean that the relationship with her was easy. "The authority of my parents was arbitrary. I didn't want to follow the rules." " I made it happen to my mother . It is embarrassing to think about it now." Despite this, his parents were a key influence for Gates to get involved with other people and be less individualistic.
The day his mother died was the worst day in Gates' life. Sick of cancer, she died a few months after her wedding with Melinda Gates. "I drove at full speed to the house where I was born and on the way a policeman stopped me because he was going so fast." When he asked me where I was going, I replied crying: 'my mother has died and I'm going home.' "
At old age, cure against polio
The rest of Microsoft's history is well known: Windows, Office, Encarta and an almost total domain of the personal computer world. Rivals like Apple or IBM were nothing next to the company of Bill Gates until the 2000s. Gates would leave his company in 2008, and not precisely in the best situation .
By then, Apple had not only resurfaced as a manufacturer of computers and software , but was about to become a world leader with the help of the iPhone. Google was a fearsome force already, and that Android, YouTube and other services had not taken off. And new players like Facebook or Amazon were going to start harming a company with a major identity crisis.
Microsoft would make one of its biggest mistakes as a company with the launch of its own mobile operating system, Windows Phone, which never became a great rival for Google or Apple; and chained this with a very poor version of Windows that generated many doubts about his future. How would a computer company survive in the mobile world?
Almost 12 years later, Microsoft is in a good moment, because it has redirected its business very well towards digital services and the cloud. And in turn, he has learned to collaborate with other agents and competitors in order to enhance these services, be they Apple or Amazon or Google.
But while Microsoft thrives, Gates has dedicated all its efforts to the fight against polio , almost reducing it with international help and a significant investment of his personal fortune. Jeff Bezos may be the richest man in the world, but Gates has donated more than 34.6 billion of his personal fortune to charities, something that Bezos cannot compete with at the moment.
Despite having a questionable past and in which he has been able to harm many people and colleagues along the way, he seems to have found a way to give something back to the world using all that money in his account that seems impossible to spend in a single life.
Look at that with good or bad eyes, the truth is that the path that Gates traveled from being a young man who left his university studies to undertake with a friend to become a tycoon able to remain the second richest man in the world despite To spend a good part in social works has been, at least, intense and interesting.
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