Friends since childhood in Seattle, Gates and Allen founded Microsoft in 1975 with a stated goal of putting a computer in every office and home.
- Gates -
Born William Henry Gates III in 1955 in Seattle, he began writing software programs while a 13-year-old schoolboy.
Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior year to start Microsoft with Allen.
The childhood friends created MS-DOS operating system, since renamed Windows, which went on to dominate office work.
Gates built a reputation as a formidable and sometimes ruthless leader.
Critics argue he unfairly wielded Microsoft's clout in the market, and the US pressed a winning antitrust case against the company in the late 1990s.
In 2000, Gates ceded the CEO job to Ballmer, whom he befriended while the two were students at Harvard.
Gates chose to devote himself to a charitable foundation he established with his then-wife, Melinda.
He resigned from Microsoft's board of directors in 2020 -- shortly after the firm acknowledged the existence of an "intimate" relationship with an employee in the past.
The following year, the couple divorced. Melinda Gates faulted him for his relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was found guilty of sexually exploiting under-age girls.
His support of Covid-19 vaccine campaigns and agriculture programs that focus on climate change and women made Gates a favorite target of conspiracy theorists.
Baseless accusations aimed at Gates include him putting tracking chips in vaccines.
- Allen -
Paul Allen, born in 1953 in Seattle, was a schoolmate of Gates.
Allen was 10 when he started a science club at home, and would later bond with young Gates over computers.
"Microsoft would never have happened without Paul," Gates wrote in tribute to Allen, who died of cancer complications in 2018.
Gates told of Allen showing him a magazine featuring a computer running on a new chip, and warning that a tech revolution was happening without them.
Allen is credited with combining "microcomputer" and "software" to come up with "Micro-Soft".
He left Microsoft in 1983, but remained a board member until 2000. He went on to accuse Gates and Ballmer of scheming to "rip him off" by getting hold of his shares while he battled cancer.
- Ballmer -
Ballmer was seen as a devoted salesman who ramped up Microsoft revenue while neglecting innovation.
A Michigan native with a talent for mathematics, he graduated from Harvard.
Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 and was best man at the 1994 wedding of Bill and Melinda Gates.
Ballmer, now 69, succeeded Gates as chief executive in 2000.
His enthusiastic gestures, awkward dance moves, and voice-straining shouts made him the stuff of internet memes and company lore.
Ballmer oversaw the launch of Xbox video game consoles, Surface tablets, and Bing online search engine. Microsoft bought Skype and Nokia's mobile phone division on Ballmer's watch.
During his tenure, Microsoft was seen as clinging to PCs while lifestyles raced toward mobile devices and cloud-based software.
His product failures include Zune digital music players, Kin mobile phones, and a Vista version of Windows.
- Nadella -
Nadella took over as chief executive in early 2014 and says he learned leadership skills playing cricket as a boy growing up in India.
Nadella, who will turn 58 in August, was hired in 1992 while studying at the University of Chicago.
Early in his academic career, a drive to build things led him to pursue computer science, a focus not available during his engineering studies at Mangalore University.
Nadella's Microsoft bio shows stints in research, business, server and online services units.
For relaxation, he turns to poetry, which he likened to complex data compressed to express rich ideas in few words.
Nadella held firm that for Microsoft to succeed, it needed to adapt to a "cloud-first, mobile-first world".
Soon after becoming chief, he ordered the biggest reorganization in Microsoft's history.
He is credited with guiding Microsoft from a fading packaged software business to the booming market for cloud services.
Microsoft has been pumping billions of dollars into AI, investing in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and infusing the technology across its products.
In a rare stumble, Nadella triggered an uproar his first year as chief by suggesting during an on-stage discussion that working women should trust "karma" when it comes to securing pay raises.
Microsoft's acquisitions under Nadella include Sweden-based Mojang, maker of the popular video game Minecraft; social network LinkedIn, and the GitHub online platform catering to software developers.
Five memorable Microsoft legacies in computer culture
Paris (AFP) Mar 31, 2025 -
Providing ubiquitous desktop software for decades, Microsoft has come in for jibes, mockery and even loathing even as it has helped millions of people get things done.
Every design decision is felt around the world for better or worse -- often staying with people for years as a fond memory or a meme.
Here are a few of the ways Microsoft has marked computing culture:
- Blue Screen of Death -
A fixture since the very first versions of Windows -- if mercifully much rarer these days -- the Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD, is displayed when Microsoft's operating system encounters a fatal error in a programme, or the application becomes unresponsive.
It has most commonly been a full blue screen with white text -- originally composed by Steve Ballmer, who later went on to head the company -- warning of the problem.
Some versions of the screen include error codes to help power users figure out what has gone wrong.
More recent editions of Windows have added a sad-face smiley in an apparent bid to sympathise.
While it has often offered the option to continue working by closing the programme or restarting the computer, many users have found the only way to escape it is by manually turning the machine off and on again.
- Blissful background -
In a breath of fresh air from previous versions of Windows, users booting up the 2001 "XP" edition were presented with a vision of lush, sun-dappled hills under a vivid blue sky.
For many who grew up using computers in the 1990s and 2000s, the idyllic desktop background now recalls a simpler time of after-school gaming or using still-novel online chat programmes to talk with friends.
Wine industry photographer Chuck O'Rear took what has been called "the world's most-viewed picture" in 1996, after driving by a spot in California's Sonoma County where vines had been torn up to fight the phylloxera pest.
Dubbed "Bliss", the background can still be spotted in the wild today on systems that have not been updated in a while, and has spawned endless memes, parodies and now AI imaginings of what the rest of the scene might look like.
- Inviting melodies -
2001 was far from the beginning of Microsoft's attempts to craft a soothing environment for PC users.
The 1995 edition of the operating system played ethereal startup chimes as the machine laboured into life.
Windows 95's enchanting startup sound was crafted by electronic music legend Brian Eno, who told news site SFGate in 1996 that the piece was like "a tiny little jewel".
Commissioned to make it "inspiring, universal, blah-bah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," Eno composed 84 clips before selecting the best -- which was twice as long as the original three-and-a-quarter-second brief.
- 'Helpful' Clippy -
Long before ChatGPT was helping to write essays or generate emails, Microsoft tried to back up users of its Office productivity suite with smart software.
From the late 1990s, an "Office Assistant" interactive animated character would pop up to offer help with the task it believed was at hand.
The best-remembered is chirpy paperclip "Clippy", whose often mistaken assumption that Word users needed help writing letters spawned a million memes.
Assistant emerged from research suggesting that users experienced interactions with a computer like working with human colleagues.
It was a "truly tragic misunderstanding" of the study, interaction designer Alan Cooper later said.
"If people are going to react to computers as though they're humans, the one thing you don't have to do is anthropomorphise them," he told broadcaster G4TV.
Nevertheless, nostalgics can find Clippy as the face of a ChatGPT-powered assistant for Windows 11 built by developers FireCube.
- Secret flight simulator -
Microsoft produces a highly detailed and well-loved series of games simply called "Flight Simulator" with recreations of real locations and aircraft.
Office workers without a joystick or high-end graphics card, though, could escape into a bizarre neon-tinged hilly landscape that they could fly around using only the mouse via a series of hidden inputs in Excel 97.
The scene, which also included the credits for the spreadsheet programme, is just one of dozens of hidden "Easter eggs" scattered through the company's software over the decades.
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