Bill Gates (9 page)

Paul Allen had had his yacht sailed to Hawaii and hosted a champagne brunch aboard it on the wedding day. Guests were driven out to the twelfth tee of the Manele Bay Hotel in golf carts in the late afternoon. There, on a spectacular cliff-side site, the ceremony was performed by Father William Sullivan, the president of Seattle University. French is Catholic, and it has been reported that the couple’s children will be raised as Catholics unless Bill Gates should commit himself fully to some other religion. That seems doubtful since, as he explained to David Frost, he tends to look for scientific explanations for things, much as he says he respects the moral principles of the major religions.

It seems likely that the happiest person at the wedding, aside from the bride and groom, was Mary Gates. She was very seriously ill with cancer, and there had even been concern that she would not be well enough to attend her son’s wedding. Friends of the family have said that her fortitude in being there was a remarkable demonstration of human will and inner strength. Shortly after returning home, she became so ill that the remaining months of her
life were spent largely in seclusion. She was only sixty-four when she died in her sleep in June 1994.

Bill and Melinda Gates took up residence in the home he had bought a few months earlier less than a mile from the $40 million house he had begun building on a bluff over Lake Washington in 1993. This dream house has been much talked and written about, but it was to undergo further changes requested by Melinda Gates. From the start it had been designed with a future family in mind, having a children’s wing and live-in facilities for a nanny. The high-tech aspects of the house have received particular attention. It has been wired beyond most people’s imagination, with the capacity to give Gates and his family, or any guest, an enormous variety of music in the air or art on the walls according to the whim of the moment. There were those who speculated that Melinda French Gates was insisting upon cutting back on the technology, but more recent reports suggest that her main concern was what she saw as an excess of exposed concrete. Gates himself, it turns out, saw the importance of making sure that the house had warmth as well as futuristic technical wonders, and he was extremely conscious of the kind of detailing that would achieve that end. Despite its size, photographs of the unfinished structure have revealed an architectural conception, including recycled Douglas fir beams, that is not at all out of place on Lake Washington. In the spring of 1997, Bill and Melinda Gates hosted the first large-scale dinner at the still unfinished house as part of a Microsoft “C.E.O. Summit” attended by heavy hitters from twenty-five countries, not to mention Vice President Al Gore, Steve Forbes, and the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Reed E. Hundt. The
New York Times
noted that one guest, Paul Hazen of Wells Fargo & Company,
passed the word that the house “is so full of beautiful wood and detail that those touches seemed to upstage high-tech features like the huge video screen that took up a full wall in the dining room.”

Several of Gates’s main rivals in the computer software business expressed hope at the time of his marriage that it would change his workaholic habits and slow him down a bit. But in fact he had already slowed down some, without in any way becoming less aggressive as a businessman. There had been a time, as he told David Frost, when he had gone for nearly three days without sleep when working on an urgent problem, but he hadn’t done that in some time. As he got older, he found that he needed a good seven hours’ sleep in order to be as sharp as he needed to be. In a number of interviews, he made it clear that the advent of e-mail made his life easier to manage—it was now possible, for example, to work intermittently at home over the weekends, dispatching necessary instructions, notes, or ideas electronically. He still puts in what many would consider prodigious working hours, often twelve a day at the office or on his many business trips, and six to eight hours at home on weekends. A telling comment on the subject of religion was his assertion to
Time
that “just in terms of allocation of resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”

But it is clear that even though he is still driven by ambition and a vision of the future that he is determined to make real, he is more capable of taking a break than many would have thought possible a few years ago. His visit to China in September of 1995 is a case in point. In March of 1994, Gates had gone to China on business, a difficult and confrontational visit in which he had been given a rough time by the Chinese Ministry of Electronics
Industry, whose officials had been upset that the Chinese version of Windows 3.1 had been developed on Taiwan instead of in cooperation with the mainland China computer industry. The software also did not use the simplified Chinese pictographs introduced by the Communist government in the 1950s to combat widespread illiteracy; rather they featured the traditional characters still in use on Taiwan and in Hong Kong. China’s president Jiang Zemin, according to James Wallace, bluntly told Gates he had much to learn abut the “five thousand years of Chinese history.” In the next several months, Gates had to restructure his entire approach to China in order to win government endorsement of Windows 95. His return to China in September of 1995 was not a business trip but a vacation, with the added benefit of a chance to learn more about the country. Gates boasted to David Frost that he had not even taken his computer with him or contacted Microsoft during the two-week vacation. He and his wife, along with the Buffetts and several other couples, instead went sightseeing—and played a lot of bridge. With Windows 95 successfully launched the previous month and antitrust actions by the U.S. government beaten back for the time being, he could afford to take some time off. According to many reports, he needed to do so, with several commentators suggesting that he was as close to exhaustion as he had ever come.

Melinda Gates was already pregnant during the trip to China, and on April 26, 1996, she gave birth to their daughter, Jennifer Katherine Gates. Many Gates watchers, and even his friends, wondered what kind of father he would make. That question was answered sooner than expected. He told several interviewers that he hadn’t expected to have that much interest in a child until he or she learned
to talk, but that Jennifer had proved “much more of a thrill than I expected,” as he told the
New York Times
. To
Time
in January 1997 he admitted, “…I’m totally into it now. She’s just started to say ‘ba-ba’ and have a personality.”

Even before Jennifer was born, Bill Gates made it clear that he had thought a lot about how to bring up children. Because of who he is, he recognized that there would be problems about his children being approached differently than other kids, and security problems would always have to be taken into consideration. The security issue was not a new one, however. There had been an attempt to kidnap his mother as far back as 1984, according to James Wallace. But in talking to David Frost, Gates emphasized what he had learned from his own parents about raising kids, praising them for their willingness to listen to their children and to take their opinions seriously from a fairly young age. He noted that his parents had encouraged “sharing problems in a way that made them interesting to think about them, not to worry about them, but to consider all the possibilities.” He also made a point, as he often does, about his parents setting an example by reading a great deal.

Bill Gates has gone on record many times as saying that he does not plan to leave his children vast fortunes, and has even said that $10 million each seemed like more than enough. To most people that sounds like an enormous amount of money, but considering Gates’s $35 billion fortune, it could almost be considered paltry. The great bulk of his fortune, Gates insists, will be given away. There have been some critics who have suggested that he was not moving fast enough on the charitable front, but by early 1996, he had given more then $60 million to several univer
sities, and established a $200 million foundation administered by his father. Several more significant gifts were made in 1997, topped by the $400 million gift to public libraries, particularly in the inner cities, for computers and computer software, with half the money coming from his personal fortune and half from Microsoft in the form of actual software. Gates has said that he intends to focus on running Microsoft for another ten years and then to turn his attention more and more to the process of giving his money away. While some of America’s great philanthropists of the past, such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, seemed to turn to philanthropy in part to clear their names of charges that they had ruthlessly exploited their workers and gouged the public, Gates has for many years talked about the importance of giving back a great deal to the society that fostered his success. For all the accusations of monopolistic practices brought by competitors, Gates’s reputation has never been besmirched in the ways Rockefeller’s and Carnegie’s were. His mother’s many years of devotion to The United Way and other charities appear to have planted a philanthropic seed from the start.

Bill Gates the businessman is often feared and sometimes reviled, most often by other computer industry leaders whom he has bested, but Bill Gates the man seems determined to see to it that he is remembered not just as a computer genius, or the one-time richest man in the world, or even as one of the most important shapers of a new age of electronic information, but also as someone who helped make the world a better place. Only future generations can arrive at a final estimation of the ways in which Bill Gates changed the world for better or worse, but he is clearly aware that his legacy will be judged on
the basis of the entire spectrum of his endeavors. Bill Gates admires other people who have a “wide bandwidth,” and he seems determined to live his life in a way that demonstrates that he has that quality also.

All companies, whether they make games, like Parker Brothers, or cereals, like General Mills, must think about the future, about new products and new ways of marketing them. But in the world of computer hardware and software, thinking about the future is the name of the game. That well-worn phrase “The future is now” isn’t good enough. Unless computer companies constantly press the boundaries of the possible, they will find themselves suddenly looking up to discover that “the future was yesterday,” because some other more innovative company has gotten ahead of them.

Bill Gates, as much as anyone else on the planet, has had his eye firmly fixed on the future since he was barely a teenager. It is precisely because he has always thought about not merely what comes next but what comes after “next” that his company dominates the software market around the world. But while technological development is his business, he has given far more thought to the implications—not only for businesses but also for individuals and for society as a whole—of the changes that new computer technology will bring. As he has noted, computers have changed the world more quickly than any other technology man has ever created. New technologies, from the repeating rifle to the steam engine, from the combustion engine to electricity, have always taken time to really take hold. The atomic bomb, because of its power to destroy the world, had a vast immediate effect on the way both individuals and nations thought about the world, but its power to destroy has kept it from being used, and its peaceful offshoot, atomic energy, has had a very mixed history. Because no other technology has developed so quickly—doubling yearly in capacity even as it came down in cost, according to Moore’s Law—computer technology,
and particularly its manifestation in the PC revolution, has changed the way a greater number of people live more quickly than anything that has gone before.

Computer development continues at such a fast pace that even someone as obsessed with its course as Bill Gates almost missed the importance of the Internet. However, because of the enormous resources of his company and his own ability to shift gears, he was able to succeed at playing catch-up in a way that many major computer companies failed to do. He is fully aware that next time he and Microsoft might not be so fortunate; the experience with the Internet has only redoubled his focus on the future. Over the past few years no one in the computer business, and even few of those academic or think-tank individuals known as “futurists,” have spoken out with more frequency and force about where we are headed. We live in a very complex time, in which technological and social change, each affecting the other both positively and negatively, occur with almost dizzying speed, and it is possible that even Bill Gates will miss seeing a crucial turn in the road (though not for lack of attention). His view of the future is both broad enough and complex enough to be of importance even if he does not have enough power to actually shape its course.

Gates has said innumerable times that he is an optimist and that he believes the future computers help create will be for the general betterment of humankind. But he is not blind to the dislocations that will occur. He has noted that no great change is ever completely for the best. By way of example, he points out that while the telephone made it possible for people to reach out and remain closer to people at a distance, it may also have led to a lessening of closeness within the neighborhood. And the “razzle-daz
zle” of television, he admits, makes it more difficult for teachers to command the attention of students in school. But while computers may seem likely to accentuate both these problems, Gates holds out the hope that the rise of the Internet and the eventual creation of a true information highway, which is only in its early stages, may well succeed in countering—even reversing—these effects.

The ability of the Internet and the World Wide Web to transcend national boundaries, he believes, will promote a far greater understanding between the peoples of different cultures, and that understanding, as he sees it, cannot help but make for a more peaceful and less fractious world. This is an optimistic, even idealistic, view. There are those who would point to the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and the fragments of Yugoslavia and suggest that familiarity seems only to breed contempt. But Gates takes a larger view, suggesting that the nature of the World Wide Web can transcend what are in many cases localized enmities.

He does not believe, however, that the Internet will remain the wild and wooly entity that now exists. Gates treads a fine line on this issue. He notes that because the world has never before had a global medium that makes it possible for anyone to “publish” his or her views, it is sometimes difficult to determine who should be held accountable when material that some deem to be offensive is published on the World Wide Web. Gates recognizes that the issue of accountability is going to be difficult to settle, because different countries have a variety of views on what is libelous or offensive, and differing laws on matters of accountability. His views on the tricky nature of this problem have been borne out by actions taken in Germany, which has made neo-Nazi propaganda illegal on the Internet and takes the view that the companies acting as tech
nological facilitators—say, Compuserve or America Online—are legally responsible for the content that is accessible through their services.

But while recognizing the importance of accountability, Gates is concerned about governments’ restricting what can be on the Internet to the extent that they undermine the free flow of information, which is its most important characteristic. In 1996, he took immediate steps to make clear his opposition to the Communications Decency Act, a part of the Telecommunications Reform Act passed by the U.S. Congress, because it made it a felony to publish on the Internet “detailed information about birth control, AIDS prevention and how to get a legal abortion.” In July of 1997, the Supreme Court made clear that it was on the side of Gates and other Internet advocates in striking down the Communications Decency Act as unconstitutional, firmly stating that the Internet could not be regulated in the way that television and radio are. This was the first major case in which the Supreme Court dealt with what promises to be a long string of laws on Internet communications over the next decade.

On the other hand, Gates does not believe that the Internet can be a wide-open medium in which any kind of material is available to anyone. He is concerned about the possibility of children stumbling onto pornographic material, of course, but he also notes that the Internet is now the repository of misinformation, outright lies, and disturbing propaganda that can also be dangerous to children and adults. He has had considerable personal experience with anonymous Internet users pretending to be him. These “impostors sometimes do incredibly nasty things, such as sending electronic mail in my name that promises people jobs or money or criticizes Apple Macintosh.” And al
though Gates has not brought it up, there are Web sites that can only be described as “Bill Gates hate forums.”

Gates thinks that the problems of offensive material on the Internet can be dealt with through a combination of technology and industry self-government without trying to make the Internet absurdly bland. He suggests that “authorized organizations” should develop a ratings system for Web pages, making it possible for software to block material that people do not want their children to have access to or that they themselves do not want to receive. Microsoft itself, as well as many other companies, began building ratings capabilities into software in 1996, and Internet services have been moving to provide parents with blocking agents.

While granting that no ratings system can attain perfection—people’s ideas of acceptability vary too widely for that—Gates believes that systems will be devised that will satisfy the great majority of people. He even thinks it will be feasible to keep a compartmentalized area of the Internet functioning in the anonymous chat room format that currently appeals to many users. Because that area would be compartmentalized, users would know that they were getting into a fairly anarchic situation; those who desired to do so could, while those who wanted to stay away from such free-form communication would know to avoid it or block it from children.

Although Bill Gates recognizes the necessity of dealing with these problems, understanding that many of them will be difficult to settle, he is obviously far happier touting the extraordinary benefits he is convinced the Internet can bring. While he may have been a little slow in recognizing the importance of the Internet, no one has subsequently been a more enthusiastic promoter of its potential. Gates
has focused especially on the educational aspects of the Internet, and he is clearly certain that it not only can but will help provide greater educational opportunities to more people, both children and adults, than has ever before been possible.

Gates has dealt with the issues of computers and education in numerous forums. He has devoted several of his newspaper columns to it, has answered questions about his views in many television and newspaper interviews, and has even appeared on a Nickelodeon news special with Linda Ellerbee, where he answered questions posed by a group of young children, some familiar with computers and some not. A chapter of
The Road Ahead
, called “Education: The Best Investment,” deals with the subject in detail. Not only has Gates done his homework on this complex issue but he also clearly has a genuine interest in it. His views are far more substantial than the usual politically correct fluff one gets from business leaders trying to score brownie points to demonstrate their civic virtue.

Gates doesn’t try to dodge or cover over the problems that stand in the way of making electronic education work. He admits up front in
The Road Ahead
, for example, that so far educational technology has been “overhyped and has failed to deliver on its promises.” He is fully aware of the conservatism in the educational establishment that, combined with the anxieties of older teachers, creates resistance to new technologies. He recognizes the acute funding problems that beset education, particularly in urban and rural locales.

On the other side of the coin, Gates emphasizes the importance of good teachers and the need that children have for social interaction with other children and adults in a school setting. He points out that pilot programs using
computer technology demonstrate that the students do best and are happiest when there is a teacher readily available to assist, answer questions, and encourage them. He sees the eventual development of an information highway that gives both students and teachers vastly increased access to information that can be used by both to give greater depth and meaning to education. Yes, students will get to interact with their computers, but that experience will serve as a basis for greater interaction between the individual teacher and student on a person-to-person basis. There are those who envision a future in which classrooms barely exist, students doing almost all their learning at home in front of a computer. Some believe this is what ought to happen; others hold up this vision as a warning against a dehumanization of the entire educational process. Bill Gates, on the contrary, sees the information highway and universal access to computer technology as a means of enriching an educational environment in which the interaction between student and teacher still plays a crucial role.