Bill Gates on Industry Transition

The machine that created Microsoft's market came from Ed Roberts's MITS, founded in an Albuquerque garage in 1969 by Roberts and Forrest Mims to sell model-rocket telemetry kits, which evolved into calculator kits featured on Popular Electronics covers. Texas Instruments' decision to sell finished calculators at less than half the prevailing price devastated the kit business and left Roberts struggling under roughly a quarter-million dollars of debt, forcing the bet on a computer kit: the Altair 8800, built on the Intel 8080 and featured on the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover, sold by mail order with no screen or keyboard, programmed through front-panel switches or a serial terminal. It became the first commercially successful personal computer, its bus became the industry-standard S-100, and, as computing pioneer Harry Garland put it, the product catalyzed the entire microcomputer revolution. Its first programming language was Altair BASIC, Microsoft's founding product.

The Road Ahead, published in November 1995 by Viking and co-written with Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold and journalist Peter Rinearson, summarized the personal-computing revolution and forecast a future transformed by a global information superhighway. Gates received a $2.5 million advance, with his proceeds and subsidiary-rights money donated to encourage educational technology through a foundation created by the National Education Association. The book shipped with a CD-ROM carrying the text and supplemental material, and the publisher's promotional budget of one million dollars ranked among its largest ever, rivaling the campaign for Colin Powell's memoir. The hardback treated the Internet as an important precursor of the coming highway, suggesting one could think of it as the beginning, the way the Oregon Trail prefigured the interstate; within a year the Internet's explosion forced a substantially revised trade paperback from Penguin in October 1996, promising readers a completely updated edition.

The Internet initially caught Microsoft flat-footed, and Gates's response became a corporate legend. Windows 95 shipped on August 24, 1995 without a web browser, and the web's rise surprised the company, which then licensed Spyglass technology to build Internet Explorer rather than give it away for nothing. On May 26, 1995, Gates sent executives the Internet Tidal Wave memorandum, describing Netscape as a new competitor born on the Internet, admitting Microsoft had failed to grasp the Internet's importance, and assigning it the company's highest level of importance from then on. More than a million copies of Windows 95 sold in the first four days, and Microsoft launched MSN the same summer as a direct challenge to AOL. In 1998 Gates appointed Ballmer president while remaining chairman and chief executive himself, dividing leadership at the exact moment the antitrust trial began.

Gates has also built a substantial body of writing. The Road Ahead, published in November 1995 with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, summarized the personal-computing revolution and forecast a world reshaped by a global information superhighway. Business @ the Speed of Thought, written with Collins Hemingway and published in 1999, argued that digital infrastructure and information networks could give companies a competitive edge. Two decades later his subject matter turned planetary: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, published in 2021, distilled more than a decade of studying climate change and investing in energy innovation, and How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, published in 2022, proposed a Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization team of full-time experts under the World Health Organization, with about a billion dollars of annual funding. In February 2025 he published Source Code: My Beginnings, the first of three planned memoirs.