Activity

Dear Students, please copy the following questions in the paper of your own and write in with the correct answer.

Questions for Discussion and Critical Thinking

1.	The next guru on my list [Bill Gates] is very different from all the others. He doesn't teach at any university - in fact he left without ever completing his first degree. According to an English saying,‘those who can,
2.	I wanted Bill Gates on my list, partly because of his views on the future, which he can talk about with more authority than most, but partly because he’s an outstanding example of another sort of guru, the guru who preaches more by deeds than by words, who lives the theories he comes up with. What are Gates’ views on the future? What theories has he come up with?
3.	Back to his story, however. You probably know some of it already, how he got hooked on primitive computers at an early age, along with his friend Paul Allen, how he and Paul stumbled across an advert for a small kit computer called the Altair 8800, how they started to write a programme for it, how they started to dream about what it would mean if everyone had their own affordable and easy-to-use computer, how Bill left his degree programme at Harvard to try to live that dream and how, between them, Bill Gates and Paul Allen created the world's first microcomputer software company. They called it Microsoft. It was 1975 and the world was about to change. Today, affordable and easy-to-use computers are readily available, at least in industrialised countries. What does it mean? How has the world changed?

Activity

4.	…the second lesson that we can learn from Bill Gates, before we even get on to his ideas, is that it is always possible to dream the impossible and make it happen. Bill Gates achieved something which seemed difficult and unlikely. Does this mean that it is always possible to dream the impossible and make it happen?
5.	The company headquarters at Redmond, near Seattle, has often been compared to a university campus, but if so, it is a very hard-nosed university indeed, with one overriding and very clear purpose - to put a PC on every desk and in every home (using Microsoft software, of course, even though Gates leaves this bit unsaid nowadays). Why does Gates leave this bit unsaid nowadays?

Activity

Key to Questions for Discussion and Critical Thinking

The lecture does not actually say anything about Gates’ views on the future. His six-point business strategy and his ‘five Es’ people policy are closer to ‘theory’ than anything else in the lecture:

1.	Concentrate your effort on a market with large potential but relatively few competitors.
2.	Get in early and big.
3.	Establish a proprietary position.
4.	Protect that position in every way possible.
5.	Aim for high gross margin
6.	Make the customers an offer they can't refuse.

Enrichment, Empowerment, Emphasis on Performance, Egalitarianism and E-Mail.

This is due to, “The US Government's anti trust action against Microsoft that started in 1998.”