Bill Gates: Sultan of Software

He is the richest man in the world, an Andrew Carnegie for the end of the twentieth century. Bill Gates started Microsoft when he was just nineteen years old. The slight, baby-faced teenager possessed the shrewdness, talent and drive to make his company the mainstay of the software business and his name a household word. Today, Bill Gates’s Microsoft is the giant of software and together they face some of the most turbulent legal disputes of his empire’s history. Bill Gates: Sultan of Software would be useful for classes on American History, American Culture, Economics, Science and Technology. It is appropriate for middle school and high school.

• adversary
• agenda
• clientele
• collaborate
• contemplative
• injunction
• nerd
• ostentatious
• perennially
• philanthropic
• precocious
• predatory
• quintessential
• renegade
• shrewd
• titans

1. How did Bill Gates get the nickname “Tre?”

2. Everyone’s parents have some type of influence on their lives. How did Bill Gates’s parents nurture and encourage his intellect and curiosity? How did this influence his life and career?

3. Bill Gates first encountered computers when he was in school. How did Gates’s exposure to computers at the Lakeside School help reveal his destiny?

4. Gates dropped out of Harvard University to run his business, Microsoft. Why were his parents upset that he left school?

5. Discuss the role of Bill Gates’s mother, Mary Gates, in the early success of Microsoft.

6. What price has Bill Gates paid for Microsoft’s success?

7. How did Gates withstand the onslaught by IBM in the early 1990s?

8. Microsoft is no stranger to legal battles. Why did the Justice Department charge Microsoft with unfair business practices?

9. Discuss some of the critiques leveled at Bill Gates and Microsoft.

10. Discuss the impact of Bill Gates and Microsoft on the twentieth century.

1. Create a timeline of computer technology in the twentieth century.

2. Interview your parents or older friends and relatives about the impact of computers in their lives. How were their lives different before the proliferation of computer technology?

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