Bill Gates

The first product from Microsoft, MS-DOS, borrowed heavily from the work of Gary Kildall on CP/M. Accusations of heavy "borrowing" and unfair competition would dog Gates for his entire career, but his real genius was keeping the copyright of MS-DOS and Windows so he could license it out cheap to manufacturers. Gates went further and began bundling software with the OS, including Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and so on. It was the bundling of this software that caused many of Microsoft’s legal battles over monopolistic practices. Whether fair or not, Bill Gates deserves a lot of the credit for transforming PCs from a hobbyist pursuit to a device that every household could gain value from. Many volumes, and thousands of articles have been written on Bill Gates, his life, his business acumen and techniques, and his charitable foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation