Bill Gates’ charity foundation has been very effective thus far. His charitable foundation focuses specifically on diseases like malaria and polio. Not a single citizen in India has contracted polio in the past year.

Bill Gates persuaded about 70 people including Warren Buffett to give up a large chunk of their wealth. “We’re looking for philanthropists to co-invest, so any advice we can give them [is on offer].”

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were friends at some times and enemies at other times. Bill Gates became friends with Steve Jobs as Microsoft was first launching, but became enemies when Bill Gates stole GUI interface ideas from the Mac. Since Windows launched before the Mac and made deals with top PC manufacturing companies, Bill Gates became the world’s richest man as Jobs was fired from the company he co-founded.

“Steve was an incredible genius who contributed immensely to the field I was in. We had periods, like the early Macintosh, when we had more people working on it than they did. And then we were competitors. The personal computers I worked on had a vastly higher [market] share than Apple until really the last five or six years, where Steve’s very good work on the Mac and on iPhones and iPads did extremely well. It’s quite an achievement, and we enjoyed each [other’s work].”

There were many times that Jobs’ heavily criticized Gates and his company. For example, he said Gates would be a broader guy if he dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram. Jobs also said that Microsoft does not have any taste.

In 2007 when Gates left Microsoft to focus fully on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife, he did an event with Jobs.
“Steve and I did an event together, and he couldn’t have been nicer. I got a fair bit of time with him in his last year.” When he found out that Jobs’ death was imminent, Gates reached out. “I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.”

One day Gates received a phone call from Steve Jobs’ wife Laurene saying “Look, this biography really doesn’t paint a picture of the mutual respect you had. And she said he’d appreciated my letter and kept it by his bed.”

“It took me about one and a half seconds to say, ‘Sure!’” stated Isaacson. “I mean this is one of the greatest design eyes of our time.”

Jobs refused to talk to Isaacson about philanthropy even though the biographer was pressing for information. Jobs had ignored a message from Bill Gates about joining Giving Pledge, a joint philanthropy campaign with Warren Buffet. This initiative urges billionaires to give at least half of their wealth to charity.

“Bill Gates was better at philanthropy because he didn’t care about making great products,” said Jobs at one point.

[Fortune]

Gates said that Novell was unable to create a Windows 95 compatible WordPerfect program in time for launch. Gates said that their own word processing software was better and was ranked number one in the market above WordPerfect. Gates said that it was “an important win.”

Gates added that Microsoft needed to dump a technical feature that would support WordPerfect because the company feared it would crash their operating system. “We were making trade-offs,” stated Gates. However Novell believes that Microsoft engineers were ordered to reject WordPerfect as a Windows 95 word processing service because they feared it was too good.

WordPerfect had about 50% of the market for computer writing software at one point, but their market share quickly dropped to less than 10% after Microsoft’s office programs were launched.

Novell’s lawyer admitted that Microsoft did not have a legal obligation to provide advanced access to the Windows 95 operating system. However Microsoft enticed Novell to work on a version, but withdrew support months before Windows 95 hit the market said Novell’s attorney Jeff Johnson.

The judge in the case indicated that Novell’s case has no merit. U.S. District Judge Frederick Motz said “I don’t see why I have to give a product to a competitor so he can beat me” to Novell attorneys.

[a href="http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-11-21/bill-gates-novell-microsoft-lawsuit/51329388/1">USA Today]

“Over the course of the 30 years we worked together, you know, he said a lot of very nice things about me and he said a lot of tough things,” said Gates. “We got to work together. We spurred each other on, even as competitors. None of that bothers me at all.”

Gates believed that Jobs was frustrated with Gates because Microsoft grew at a rapid pace and Apple struggled for years before dominating in the last decade.

“He faced, several times at Apple, the fact that their products were so premium priced that they literally might not stay in the marketplace,” said Gates. “So the fact that we were succeeding with high volume products, you know, including a range of prices, because of the way we worked with multiple companies, it’s tough.”

“And so the fact that … at various times, he felt beleaguered, he felt like he was the good guy and we were the bad guys, you know, very understandable,” he added. Check out the video below:

“It’ll be fascinating to see how the brilliant ideas out of Microsoft research, coming together with Skype, what they can make of that,” added Gates.

[BBC]

“How could you need more than a gig?” asked Gates. “What’ve you got in there? Movies? Power-Point presentations?”

“How many messages are there?” asked Gates. “Seriously, I’m trying to understand whether it’s the number of messages or the size of messages.”

When asked about whether he tried Gmail back then he said, “Oh sure, I play with everything.” He added: “I play with A-Mail, B-Mail, C-Mail, I play with all of them.”

[Huffington Post]

“While my recollection of many of these events may differ from Paul’s, I value his friendship and the important contributions he made to the world of technology and at Microsoft,” said Bill Gates.

However a majority of Allen’s wealth was created under the leadership of Bill Gates long after Allen had left the company. Microsoft isn’t the only major technology company where a co-founder received a lot of wealth long after leaving the company. Eduardo Saverin’s net worth substantially increased several years after leaving Facebook. Same with Steve Wozniak at Apple.

Two years ago, Allen was recovering from chemotherapy from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Gates was one of Allen’s most frequent visitors. Allen described Gates as being “everything you’d want from a friend, caring and concerned.” However Allen said that he had eavesdropped in a conversation that Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates had about diluting Allen’s equity after he had his first brush with cancer in 1982. Allen said he charged into the room angrily and the dilution never happened after that.

“I had helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off,” stated Allen in the book. “It was mercenary opportunism, plain and simple.”

Eventually Allen retained only a certain amount of equity and spent a large portion on several investments like Charter Communciations, Asymetrix Corp., and Digeo Inc. He also bought the Portland Trailblazers and the Seattle Seahawks. Some of these investments paid off and some have failed.

[WSJ]