Leadership

In 1980, Gates signed a contract with IBM to develop an operating system for their new personal computer. Gates retained the rights to his operating system, MS-DOS, and struck deals with nearly all other manufacturers of personal computers, who felt their computers had to run on a system compatible to IBM’s. In 1987, Gates revolutionized the computer market again with the introduction of the Microsoft Windows graphical user interface, which made the IBM PC and compatibles user-friendly. With $16.7 billion in revenues in 1998, Microsoft is the world’s #1 software company.