There are very many outstanding people in the field of information technologies. Lets speak about two of them: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Bill Gates said: "Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down."
Bill Gates created his first computer program at the age of 13. With other pupils, he computerized his school's payroll system and founded a company that sold traffic-data systems to local government. After he dropped out of Harvard, he launched Microsoft with Paul Allen.
Microsoft's first big success was licensing MS-DOS for use on the IBM PC, and compatibles, in 1981. Bill Gates became a paper billionaire within five years. Now worth tens of billions of dollars, he's probably the richest person in the world.
The continuing success of Bill Gates is partly due to his ability to react quickly to innovations produced by other companies. For instance, in the mid-1990s Gates refocused Microsoft on software solutions for the Internet. Microsoft extended the Windows operating system so that networked computers, and non-computer devices, could interact easily and efficiently with each other. He also created the Microsoft Network (MSN) to compete with America Online and other Internet service providers.
In the early days, Microsoft quickly achieved dominance in the markets for office productivity and PC operating systems. Microsoft Word became the bestselling word processor package, and was quickly followed by Microsoft Excel in the spread sheet category. Similar success followed for their database and e-mail packagesMicrosoft Access and Microsoft Outlook. The dominance of these Microsoft Office products has been maintained up to the present day. This dominance has been matched by the success of the Microsoft Windows operating system, which has beaten its main competitorsMacintosh and Linuxinto distant second and third places.
The profits that Bill Gates has made from his core PC software applications, and the quick and accurate judgement that typifies himself and Microsoft, has meant he has moved quickly into up-coming markets when necessary. This has, for instance, allowed him to achieve dominance of the Browser market with Internet Explorer, and to compete with Google and Yahoo in the search engine wars.
Some companies, like Google, now appear to have the power to compete with Microsoft's core products. For instance, Google's support of the Firefox browser is making inroads into Explorer's dominance. Also, Apple's success with the iPod has not been matched, in that area, by Microsoftand this has stimulated more demand for Apple PCs.
In early 2005 Bill Gates was knighted by the Queen of England for his business skills and, especially, for his work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. If he is to be happily remembered on the world stage, then it will probably be through the work of the Foundationif it lives up to its potential.
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Steve Jobs, the American businessman and technology visionary who is best known as the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc, was born on February 24, 1955. His parents were two University of Wisconsin graduate students, Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian-born Abdulfattah Jandali. They were both unmarried at the time. Jandali, who was teaching in Wisconsin when Steve was born, said he had no choice but to put the baby up for adoption because his girlfriend's family objected to their relationship.
The baby was adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs (19221993) and Clara Jobs (19241986). Later, when asked about his "adoptive parents," Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs "were my parents." He stated in his authorized biography that they "were my parents 1,000%." Unknown to him, his biological parents would subsequently marry (December 1955), have a second child, novelist Mona Simpson, in 1957, and divorce in 1962.
The Jobs family moved from San Francisco to Mountain View, California when Steve was five years old. The parents later adopted a daughter, Patti. Paul was a machinist for a company that made lasers, and taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands. The father showed Steve how to work on electronics in the family garage, demonstrating to his son how to take apart and rebuild electronics such as radios and televisions. As a result, Steve became interested in and developed a hobby of technical tinkering. Clara was an accountant who taught him to read before he went to school.
Jobs's youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. At Monta Loma Elementary school in Mountain View, he was a prankster whose fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high schoola proposal his parents declined. Jobs then attended Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. During the following years Jobs met Bill Fernandez and Steve Wozniak, a computer whiz kid.
Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Reed was an expensive college which Paul and Clara could ill afford. They were spending much of their life savings on their son's higher education. Jobs dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes, including a course on calligraphy. He continued auditing classes at Reed while sleeping on the floor in friends' dorm rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.
In 1976, Wozniak invented the Apple I computer. Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, an electronics industry worker, founded Apple computer in the garage of Jobs's parents in order to sell it. They received funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer Mike Markkula.
Through Apple, Jobs was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar.
Jobs died at his California home around 3 p.m. on October 5, 2011, due to complications from a relapse of his previously treated pancreatic cancer.
