Melinda Gates On Dating The Boss, Being Friends With Bono and Buffett, And Donating All That Money

Fortune:

Years before Melinda French met and married Bill Gates, she had a love affair - with an Apple computer. She was growing up in Dallas in a hard-working middle-class family. Ray French, Melinda's dad, stretched their budget to pay for all four children to go to college. An engineer, he started a family business on the side, operating rental properties. "That meant scrubbing floors and cleaning ovens and mowing the lawns," Melinda recalls. The whole family pitched in every weekend. When Ray brought home an Apple III computer one day when she was 16, she was captivated. "We would help him run the business and keep the books," she says. "We saw money coming in and money going out."

Of all the tricks that life can play, it's hard to imagine any stranger than what befell Melinda French. Today she is living in a gargantuan high-tech mansion on the shores of Lake Washington, married to the richest man in America - and giving billions of dollars away. When she married Bill Gates 14 years ago, she bought into a complex bargain. On the one hand, she became half of what has turned out to be the world's premier philanthropic partnership. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has assets of $37.6 billion, making it the world's largest. In that total is $3.4 billion that Warren Buffett has already given, and still to come are nine million Berkshire Hathaway B shares, currently worth $41 billion, that he has pledged to contribute in coming years. Assuming that Berkshire (BRKA, Fortune 500) shares continue to rise and that the Gateses continue to bestow their own wealth on their foundation, Melinda and Bill will very likely give away more than $100 billion in their lifetimes. Already the foundation has disbursed $14.4 billion - more than the Rockefeller Foundation has distributed since its creation in 1913 (even adjusted for inflation).

Read the whole story: Fortune

Comments

[chirps]

Bill done got himself a damn good woman.

[godlessclif]

there is no reason that a 3-dimensional operating system does not as yet exist.

Sure there is a reason. The same reason Gillette did not invent the stainless steel razor blade.

Or the same reason Curtis-Wright [a company started by the Wright brothers] did not build jet airplanes.

The same reason American Woolen, once a Dow Jones Company, did not make polyester pants suits.

Gillette knew the better blade would hurt profits on it's blue blade business.

Curtis Wright has invested a lot of money in propeller factories.

American Woolen owned a lot of sheep.

It is biblical. Matthew 6-21: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

[Justinpassing]

Gates is certainly no dumby, but It is distinctly possible that some one told him a while back something like: "since you are not only wealthy, but you are obscenely wealthy, it would be advisable for you to hire a PR firm, to help create you an image that will make people less likely to want to envy you harshly."

[Coyote2]

Bill Gates: "For more than 25 years, Windows has unlocked the power of personal computing.­”

.
Merely the admission that the same operating system platform -namely Windows- has been around for 25 years in an industry where a three year old product is deemed obsolete, is an admission of how market monopolies promote EXTREME OBSOLESCENCE.

The idea of Windows with one pane on top of another is horribly dated. With the proliferation of 3D gaming, multitasking and excessive computing horsepower, there is no reason that a 3-dimensional operating system does not as yet exist. When a group of university students can create a 3D OS based on Linux, why, when Microsoft scoops up the best programmers in the world, cannot Microsoft?

Because Microsoft is obsolete, their programmers fat and overpaid.
.
Here is a test for you: Take a high powered computer say, Athlon Dual Core 6000 with 2GB RAM and a 512MB video card based on a high performance top-line motherboard and Windows XP.

Open Windows Task Manager/Performance and note that the CPU Usage graphs and Memory usage indicators will show that the system is merely idling when demanding multitasking of ordinary Windows tasks, yet the OS responses are still too slow. This proves that Windows itself is the source of poor computer response, rather than available power.

Microsoft Windows code itself is OBSOLETE, and a brand new approach is needed.

And this is why Microsoft introduced Windows Vista: to eat up extra power with gimmicks without improving Operating System performance. In fact performance so suffers that most low and mid cost computers sold today with Vista come out of the box as performance duds. In fact the above described computer should be the minimum specifications for a well performing Vista computer..­..........­......AND STILL NO 3D desktop !!!

Microsoft, like Windows is obsolete. Just because no one has yet replaced them is not an indication of Microsoft's strength, but of the power of their monopolist position.

In conclusion, the Gates need to address this shame more fully.