Lawsuit against Bill Gates’ Microsoft

Bill Gates is one of the richest men alive in our modern age. He is responsible for co-founding Microsoft and the Windows OS. Not to mention various other pieces of software like the DirectX API. Gates has made many revolutionary achievements. He received almost a perfect score on the SAT standardized test. He Built the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and was named as the worlds youngest self-made billionaire at age 31. Like all other American big shots, he dropped out of college to begin working on his company and its products. Building a company of this caliber was no walk in the park. Various controversial acts had to be done, deals had to be made, and people had to be tricked. Along with fame always comes those who are jealous and ridicule you, or someone that finds truthful information that doesn’t seem believable. Either way, Bill Gates along with any other famous person in history has an interesting past that may include things that he would rather the public not know. Some of which include stealing code from Apple, taking advantage of his expertise for self-indulgent, and making false claims to lure competitors.

‘In 1988, Apple Inc. filed a landmark lawsuit against Microsoft. The suit claimed that Microsoft Windows used graphical user interface parts too like those of Apple products such as the MacOS.’ (Chandler) At a judge's behalf, Apple eventually named more than 200 GUI operating system components, such as overlapping windows, resizable windows, title bars and other features that Steve Jobs felt expressed a specific "look and feel" protected by copyright. Taking into considering the size and wealth of both companies involved, the case ran on for five years. Apple licensed bits of its GUI to Microsoft for the first Windows version. Despite this, Gates' development teams continued to take full advantage of the GUI elements from Apple for later Windows OS versions too. As the lawsuit continued, newer versions of Windows based off the same GUI elements became popular. Apple lawyers complained saying that their licensing contract with Microsoft was only valid for one version of Windows. Microsoft and Gates’ team disagreed. In an interview with InfoWorld newsweekly; Gates said, "We're saying that these graphic interface techniques, the ideas, are not copyrightable." Gates ended up winning the case however this hasn’t satisfied everyone’s opinion about it. It’s possible there was more to the scandal. Apple most likely wanted to make some easy money they thought they could win. Another idea is if Steve Jobs wanted to ridicule Microsoft to give Apple the upper hand from a public relations perspective. As for whether this ideal is true; their doesn’t seem to be any solid information on the matter. What does remain true is that it is in the business nature to do what it takes to make a sale and attract consumers to their product.

Gates loved playing with the computers at the time so much he created a tic tac toe program that you could play against an artificial intelligence at his school. Later he found exploits in the computers code to allot more time on the computer than what was allowed. Once the school discovered Gates' coding abilities, they let him write the school's computer program for scheduling students in classes. Gates altered the code so that he was placed in classes with a "disproportionate number of interesting girls."(Smith) This is a funny remark regarding Gates teen years and he further explains in an interview with Kirsty young "Paul did the computer scheduling with me. Unfortunately for him he was two years ahead of me and he was off to college by then. So, I was the one who benefited by being able to have the nice girls at least sit near me. It wasn't that I could talk to them or anything - but they were there. I think I was particularly inept at talking to girls, or thinking, 'OK - do you ask them out, do you not?' When I went off to Harvard, I was a little bit more sociable. But I was below average on talking to girls." This claim was made before Gates made the interview so of course it turned out to be true. Although this isn’t necessarily a horrible use of his genius, its still funny seeing Gates very humble and interested yet afraid.

After reading an issue of Popular Electronics in January 1975, he saw a demonstration of the Altair 8800. After seeing this, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, the creators of the new microcomputer, to tell them that he and his friend Allen were working on a BASIC interpreter for the computer. In reality; Gates and his friend did not have an Altair and had not written a single line of code for it. They later claimed their intention was to ‘merely prompt president Ed Roberts of MITS's interest.’ (Santos) Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was successful and resulted in a deal with Roberts to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November of 1975. They named their partnership "Micro­Soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque.

Gates has an interesting way of utilizing his expertise as well as his friends. He utilized his code to sit next to the hottest girls, fought Apple in long term court cases while maintain his business and selling newer Windows versions, and lied to his competitor to acquire a business relationship that benefited him greatly in the long run. Bill Gates may look like a pushover from photos but in reality; if a fight would to come up out of nowhere, he is ready and willing to fight back.

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