#Bill gates success story android#
#Bill gates success story mac#

I have to remember that setbacks can close a chapter, but they don’t have to end the whole book.įrom Bill Gates I’ve learned three important factors in turning failure into just another step toward success: Whether I’m still making it or barely keeping up, Bill Gates inspires me along the way, motivating me to keep trudging ahead my chosen field of theater and the performing arts. And as 2018 came to a close he reflected on what matters most to him.ĭid I devote enough time to my family? Did I learn enough new things? Did I develop new friendships and deepen old ones? These would have been laughable to me when I was 25, but as I get older, they are much more meaningful. It has since descended to a more worldly $785 billion…just under Microsoft’s current valuation of $788 billion.īut nowadays, Gates doesn’t measure success in dollars or bank statements. Then later, the iPhone and iPad that would go on to decimate the entire personal computer industry, wounding Microsoft’s waning empire.Īpple was worth less than $3 billion when it took Bill Gates’ money, but it soared to the $1 trillion mark in August of 2018, the first and only company to do that on the planet.

#Bill gates success story mac#

That now-infamous investment gave Apple enough money and breathing room to consolidate control of its Mac business and parlay that momentum and cash flow into the iPod and iTunes. In August 1997 Microsoft threw Apple a $150 million lifeline and saved them from bankruptcy. And it’s still kicking butt today.īut as Microsoft was in its heyday, Gates helped another company that would soon become the richest company in the world: Apple.

#Bill gates success story android#

Even Gates admitted this at the World Economic Forum in 2004, saying Google “kicked our butts.” He acknowledged that Microsoft had misjudged just how successful open source software like Google’s Android platform would be.

Microsoft continued to grow and was one of the biggest companies on the planet when Google was founded in 1998, but the open-software startup beat the Gates’s tech giant when it came to creating a clean search engine. All in one year! An investor in the initial public offering would have seen a return of 30,207 percent, which is just crazy to think about! Microsoft went public in 1986, and by the next year its rising share price made 31-year-old Gates the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. Driven by his passion for computer programming, Gates eventually built what would become the world’s largest software company. That would be enough to make me think twice before going out on a limb again.īut fortunately, Bill Gates is not me.

Imagine devoting 6 years of your life, your time and energy to a flawed idea that only end up losing money and dying a slow death. Between 19, Traf-O-Data totaled net losses of $3,494. It hadn’t occurred to us to do any market research, and we had no idea how hard it would be to get capital commitments from municipalities. As Paul Allen relates in a Newsweek piece, “Traf-O-Data was a good idea with a flawed business model. Before launching Microsoft, Bill Gates was a Harvard University dropout and co-owner of a failed business called Traf-O-Data.