Speech Writing - How Did Bill Gates Prepare His Harvard Commencement Speech?

Speechwriting is a hard-to-master art form. It requires a lot of background knowledge on the part of the writer that cannot be acquired overnight. But that's not enough.

A good speech also requires a clear core message. The writer, the speaker and the audience should all be able to answer the following question right away - "what was this speech all about?"

It is also important to adjust the speech to the audience and the setting, or the occasion. A high school commencement speech should not read like one delivered at a gridiron or political fund raiser event.

To understand the kind of effort and care that goes into a great speech, I'd like to share with you the number of steps Microsoft's Bill Gates went through while preparing his June 7, 2007 Harvard Commencement Speech.

Gates started to prepare his June 2007 speech back in December 2006. He used a Gates Foundation staff member to vent out his initial ideas. Gates and the staffer, who had been a writer for the online magazine Slate, worked on several ideas and drafts through six brainstorming sessions. The result was six drafts of the same speech, writing "some of the longest ones himself," according to the Wall Street Journal.

To fortify himself and focus on a central concept, Gates read historic speeches delivered by Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Enrico Fermi, Robert Koch, Bill Clinton, Bono, and George Marshall.

In January he sent e-mails to his trusted staffers asking for their contributions and ideas.

In May, Gates visited Warren Buffet in Omaha, Nebraska to get his opinion and ideas on the speech as well.

Then he rehearsed the speech by reading it to himself on a podium at his office. He sent another copy to Buffet and the next day "he read the speech aloud to his wife on the private plane ride to Boston," according to WSJ.

And on June 7, 2007 Gates was at long last ready to deliver the speech that he worked on for over 6 months. That is the kind of energy and analytical focus with which Gates prepares for a public communication opportunity.

Is it a wonder that he is one of the most successful businessmen the world has ever known?

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Master Resale Rights: 5 Lessons Bill Gates Could Teach You

Smart Internet marketers know that buying master resale rights is a shortcut to getting products on the market. But did you know that Bill Gates and the Microsoft empire were built from purchasing master resale rights?

That's right - the richest man in the world bought the rights to DOS, the operating system that began the Microsoft empire.

There are 5 important lessons Bill Gates could teach you about master resale rights.

1. Find a hungry market with a burning need and fill it.

Bill Gates read about the Altair 8800 computer in Popular Science in 1975. Realizing Altair needed a simple programming language to make the computer popular, Gates sold a version of BASIC to Altair before it was even written. Then Gates worked night and day with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff to develop it. Microsoft was born.

In 1980, IBM created the desktop PC - but they didn't have an operating system. Gates saw a burning need waiting to be filled, and learned a new lesson:

2. You don't have to create a product to fill a need if you can buy the master resale rights instead.

IBM approached Bill Gates to create an operating system for the PC. Gates initially recommended they contact Digital Research to purchase their CP/M operating system. But those negotiations failed, and IBM came back to Bill Gates.

Gates learned that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products had developed a clone of CP/M called QDOS. Microsoft bought the rights for just $56,000.

Of course you don't have to invest $56,000 to get rights worth selling. Often you can buy master resale rights for $100, $50, even $10 or $20. You can even join resale rights membership sites and get thousands of dollars worth of products for a small monthly fee. Sometimes you can even find master resale rights products for free!

Why so cheap? Sometimes the products aren't very good, but often they're great products that weren't marketed well. Not seeing the opportunity, people sell their work for almost nothing.

Smart marketers know that sometimes you can just rename a product or change the marketing and have a hit. This is where Bill Gates could teach us the third lesson:

3. Repackage or rebrand, change the marketing approach, and build your own brand.

QDOS stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System." IBM might have bought it even with a name like that, but being a savvy marketer, Gates decided to rebrand it. He dubbed it "PC-DOS," for "PC Disk Operating System." He targeted it squarely at IBM - and they bought it, big time.

When PC clones hit the market, Gates saw another hungry market with a burning need. Microsoft quickly rebranded DOS, dubbing it "MS-DOS" for "Microsoft Disk Operating System," thus building the Microsoft brand at the same time. The rest is history.

Resale rights products are often widely available. If you do the same thing as everyone else, why should someone buy the product from you? But if you take the time to repackage or rebrand the resale rights where permitted, you will have a unique product you can market to a hungry audience with a burning need. Because the next lesson we can learn from Bill Gates is:

4. Just because someone else didn't become a billionaire with the master resale rights for a product doesn't mean you can't. Use your brain and figure out how to do things better.

Success in any business is often as dependent on intelligence, motivation, and marketing as it is on the product itself.

Others created the BASIC programming language, but Bill Gates repackaged it and sold it to Altair. Digital Research had a perfect operating system for the PC, but they missed out. Tim Paterson created the DOS operating system that would run every PC in the world. But he sold it to Microsoft for $56,000. Bill Gates is now worth an estimated $51 billion. Forbes magazine says he is the richest man in the world.

Realizing he had a hungry market with a burning need, Gates saw opportunities that others missed, took products that were relative failures, and built a multi-billion dollar empire.

Not everyone is Bill Gates, but don't you think we all have opportunities that we either take or miss? And don't you think we sometimes settle for less than we could have?

That brings us to the final lesson that Bill Gates could teach you about master resale rights:

5. Don't sell your life for almost nothing.

Bill Gates took opportunities that others had and did something with them. Do you think Bill Gates would ever sell the master resale rights to all of the Microsoft products for $10?

Of course not! Yet you will often see people selling master resale rights to great products for less than you'd spend for dinner! They don't realize they are selling their life for almost nothing.

You can't go far on the Internet without someone promising you that you can make a million dollars by selling their product. Do you realize how many $10 products you would have to sell every day to make a million dollars a year? 274! Each and every day, 365 days a year. Wouldn't it be easier to sell 27.4 copies of a product every day for $100 each? Or a $30 monthly membership to a site 8 times a day?

You're not going to see Microsoft selling the next version of Windows for $10 each, and you shouldn't sell yourself short either.

Don't drop your price. Build your marketing skills instead. Find a hungry market with a burning need. Fill it by creating your own repackaged, rebranded product from other people's master resale rights products. Use your brain and figure out how to do it better. Don't sell your life for nothing. Charge a higher price and make it worth it to people. Fulfill their need and you'll have no shortage of business.

Copyright 2006 Mike Adams

Mike Adams has been marketing on the Internet since the early 1990's. His latest project is Gigantic Resale Rights.com. As part of the launch of Gigantic Resale Rights.com, Mike is offering our readers several free resale rights packages. You can get yours at: http://www.gigantic-resale-rights.com/5lessons.html

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The Man Who Could Have Become Bill Gates

The Legend Goes Like This: One fateful day in the summer of 1980, three buttoned-down IBMers called on a band of hippie programmers at Digital Research Inc. (DRI) located in Pacific Grove, Calif. They hoped to discuss licensing DRI's industry-leading operating system, Control Program for Microcomputers (CP/M). Instead, DRI founder Gary Kildall blew off International Business Machine (IBM) to gallivant around in his airplane and the frustrated IBMers turned to Gates for their operating system.

This anecdote has been told so often that techies need only be reminded of "the day Gary Kildall went flying" to recall the rest. Gates offered to provide IBM an operating system too, even though he didn't have one at the time. This required a hasty purchase. While he's revered for his technical innovations, many believe Kildall made one of the biggest mistakes in the history of commerce. The saga of the computing industry is rich with outsize characters and surprising plot turns, but there's one story that has risen over time to mythic proportions. It's the tale of how software pioneer Gary Kildall missed out on the opportunity to supply IBM with the operating system for its first PC-essentially handing the chance of a lifetime and control of tech's future, to rival Bill Gates and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT). In the process, he may have missed out on becoming the world's richest man. The Book: They Made America by Harold Evans, is certain to elicit cries of protest.

That's because it attacks the reputations of some of the key players of the early PC era-Gates, IBM and Tim Paterson (born 1956). "The Father of DOS", an American computer programmer, the Seattle programmer who wrote an operating system, QDOS, based partly on CP/M that became Microsoft's DOS. Paterson squirms, for instance, at the implication that he's fixated on his authorship of DOS. He holds a profile in Forbes, contrived as a first-person account. "I was 24 when I wrote DOS," it begins. "It's an accomplishment that probably can't be repeated by anyone ever." Evans asserts that Paterson copied parts of CP/M and that IBM tricked Kildall, because Gates rather than the more innovative Kildall prevailed, according to the book, the world's PC users endured more than a decade of crashes with incalculable economic cost in lost data and lost opportunities.

David G. Lefer, one of Evans' two collaborators, says: "We're trying to set the record straight. Gates didn't invent the PC operating system and any history that says he did is wrong." There's no doubt that Gary Kildall an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur was one of the pioneers of the industry. He invented the first operating system for microcomputers in the early 1970s, making it possible for hobbyists and companies to build the first personal computers. Legalities aside, Microsoft's original DOS was based in part on Kildall's CP/M. His insight was, that by creating an operating system separate from the hardware, applications could run on computers that were made by different manufacturers. On July 8, 1994, Gary Kildall (May 19,1942-July 1994) fell at a Monterey, CA. biker bar during a biker brawl and hit his head. The exact circumstances of his death and injury remain unclear; Kildall's colleagues recall him as creative, easygoing and adventurous.

Kildall preferred to leave the IBM affair in the past and to be known for his work before and afterward, he continually faced comparisons between himself and Bill Gates as well as fading memories of his contributions. In addition to flying, he loved sports cars, auto racing, boating and he had a lifelong love of the sea. Although his career in computing spanned more than two decades, he is mainly remembered in connection with IBM's unsuccessful attempt in 1980 to license CP/M for the IBM PC. Gates bought Tim Paterson's program, called QDOS, for approx. $75,000, renamed it DOS, improved it and licensed it to IBM for a low per-copy royalty fee. The rest is history. (Bill Gates Net Worth:$53 Billion: 2010).

Paterson passed in and out of Microsoft during the 80's, but returned for good in 1990. Paterson has patents and industry awards to his professional credit (including the Stewart Alsop Hindsight Award in 1991, recognized along with Bill Gates). He's now retired, but the prominent "First Place" trophies and clippings on the wall of his Building 2 office come from the world of off-road racing, in which he bangs a four-wheel drive Mazda around gravel back roads throughout the Northwest. "I'm still having lots of fun," he said.

I hope you enjoyed my article.

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Bill Gates, Microsoft and His Life

Everyone who's ever used a computer knows exactly who Bill Gates is. Credited with "invented the internet," Gates is the world's third richest man, with a net worth of $58-billion. Until a few years ago, Gates' fortune had a chokehold on the number-one position, but other fast movers manage to surpass the Microsoft founder.

Gates is also well known for dropping out of Harvard University and donating millions upon millions to a wide variety of charities around the world. He married wife Melinda Gates in 1994 and has four children. Gates has publicly stated that his children will only receive.01% of his fortune as an inheritance.

William Henry Gates III was born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. Even as a small child, a young Bill showed flashes of extreme intelligence. His father was a successful attorney and Gates enjoyed a well-to-do upbringing, attending the exclusive Lakeside School in the area.

He may have been lucky financially, but he was truly gifted mentally. He attended Harvard University in 1973 and met future partner Paul Allen. They began working on their computer programming language, BASIC, that was to work as the basis for MIT's Altair. Gates left Harvard in his junior year and went on to form the Microsoft Corporation.

The Microsoft Corp. had very humble beginnings. Though both Gates and Allen were geniuses, they needed to revolutionize far beyond the reaches of human imagination. Since computers were already a big part of life, they needed to create something to connect the world. Gates always believed that every home in the world should own a computer.

Eventually, Gates developed ways to make computers work easier, faster, and his technologies gave them substantially longer lives. Once the Information Super Highway (World Wide Web) became realized, Gates' fame exploded and so did the computers - which left his bank account busting at the seams.

Bill Gates was often criticized for being greedy and too aggressive, and he and his lawyers spent much time in the courtroom fighting lawsuits. Apple Computer, Opera, Netscape, WordPerfect and Sun Microsystems were among the companies to file suit against Microsoft, claiming that they had an unfair monopoly on the industry.

These other companies ended up becoming rather wealthy, and it had no affect whatsoever and Microsoft's ability to earn. By the mid 90s, Bill Gates was the world's riches man, a title which he kept until 2008 when he stepped down as the CEO to Microsoft.

In 2005, Gates received an honorary knighthood directly from the Queen of England, and in 2007, he was given an honorary diploma from Harvard. Gates has also created one of the world's largest charitable foundations, which has given away more than $1-billion a year since 2000. Warren Buffett, the man whose riches surpassed Gates in 08, pledged that he would give a substantial portion of his net worth to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Bill Gates now acts as the lead software designer for Microsoft and plans to retire soon.

Visit the CasinoMan Blog for more articles and blogs about the lifestyle of the rich and opulant.

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Find Out Why Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Gorge Soros Are Billionaires and Wealthy?

Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Gorge Soros are billionaires because they apply superior mind formulas. Even if some of them started off with lots of money, they are where they now find themselves as a direct result of the superior mind formulas they've been applying.

You and I may not be in the same league, and may not be interested in playing in that league. If you don't have all the money you need and want, it's because you've been applying inferior mind formulas. Your parents didn't pass any or much mind-expertise on to you. You learned little or no mind-expertise in school.

In contrast, the chances are that Gates, Buffet, and Soros learned important mind power skills early in life and also know how to further improve their mind power.

It's very important to realize that the secret of everything lies in our mind, it is our own mind through which we experience every thing in our life. we can't do anything in our life without the help of mind, so the most important and very powerful part of our life is our mind, Yet we know very little about it and we never pay much attention to understand it. It is through our mind only we experience success love money health life peace almost every thing.

Unfortunately, most people never understand this so they never learn any superior mind formulas because they don't know the secret of their Mind Power which can make them Rich and Successful, regardless of their "back story"!. Mind is the greatest powerful thing on this planet. every big corporation like Microsoft, IBM, Wipro which is created on this planet is start from the idea of a single human brain.

The person who realize the Power of Mind, for him the Path of Life become very clear. He can visualize the future very clearly, He exactly understand what he has to do in his Life. That is the reason within a year, Bill Gates had dropped out of Harvard and Microsoft was formed. Please try to understand your life is nothing but an reflection of your mind. So if you really want to make your Life much better then it is very much necessary to first make your Mind better, as in this world every big thing i.e (from invention of Airplane to the making of computer) has started from the mind.

So Now it is your turn to understand the magical key secrets of the mind and to create your own reality, for more information visit to http://www.master-the-secret-of-mind-power.blogspot.com

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Bill Gates is Not a Man to Be Resented, He is to Be Applauded!

One of the most hated men in America, and in fact the world, is Bill Gates. Do you hate him too?

You shouldn't. Bill Gates is one of the most generous men in the world. His foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, donates over 1.5 billion dollars a year to charitable causes. Take a moment and think about that number, it's astounding!

Bill Gates has recently retired from Microsoft in order to devote more time to running the foundation and to devote his life to philanthropic work, but some people still think he's an asshole. Or, more accurately, unsuccessful people with negative attitudes think so.

Is Microsoft perfect? Hell no. But they are far less evil than a certain search engine with a candy coloured logo.

So all in all I respect Microsoft and respect Bill gates, and applaud his success and what he has done with it. I see him as a shining example of what one can create from nothing.

Here's the cold, hard, honest truth. You have to be a taker before you can be a giver, otherwise you have nothing to give. There is no virtue in remaining small so as not to appear greedy. Bill Gates knew this, and he built himself up into someone truly capable of making a difference in the world. If you are sitting around complaining about how much money he has, what difference are you making in people's lives?

Meanwhile Bill Gates is contributing to AIDS research, reducing world hunger, and all in all being an outstanding citzen of the world.

If you resent the success of others, you will only deprive yourself. If your belief is that successful, rich people are greedy and evil and selfish, and you feel that you are a good person, then how will you ever be able to become wealthy and still feel that you are a good person?

The next time you notice yourself have negative feelings towards someone who is more successful than you (and this can be anyone from Donald Trump to your next door neighbour), why not stop as ask yourself why?

The Limelight is about living life creatively and finding inspiration to do so. It is not restricted to any one narrow focus, and so you will find articles here on topics ranging from money to food to photography, and anything else that contributes to amazing lifestyle design.

Jonathan Timar is a naturally creative person. Creativity is his life's blood. He's an actor and filmmaker, a writer and a photographer. He is also a graduate of broadcasting school. He is and avid reader of both fiction and non-fiction. His favourite novel of all time is Tai-Pan by James Clavell followed closely by Shogun, also by James Clavell. He believes in success.

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The Rise and Rise of Bill Gates

As the co-founder and chairman of the mammoth Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates is the moving force behind a company that has been regarded as "The Most Innovative Company Operating in the U.S." (1993, Forbes magazines). Microsoft introduced several revolutionary technological advancements in the computer industry that made the company the first truly dominant player among home computer operating systems. Microsoft also created the most widely used operating system in the world, Microsoft Windows.

Gates is widely regarded as the brains behind the Microsoft Corporation, primarily responsible for product strategy from the time the company was founded in 1975 until 2006. Among his key contributions are extensively broadening the company's product lines and vigorously defending Microsoft's dominant position in its key areas of operation. And while some of his decisions have led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices, his reputation as one of the most popular and respected entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution remains intact. His fame actually surpasses the realm of computers and business and extends into mainstream society. For instance, in a 2006 list compiled by New Statesman magazine, Gates was voted eighth in the "Heroes of Our Time" category.

In June 2006, Gates announced that he will be handing the reins of Microsoft's day-to-day operations to someone else by July 2008 to concentrate on the philanthropic work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, although he will continue to serve as the company's chairman and as an advisor on special projects. Plans are already afoot to transfer Gates' role as Chief Software Architect of Microsoft to Ray Ozzie, the former head honcho of the Groove company which Microsoft purchased in 2005.

Gates has donated several millions of dollars to various charitable groups and scientific research studies. By some estimates, Gates has contributed over half his fortune to charity. Even if such were the case, he can easily afford it. Recently, the prestigious Forbes magazine named Gates as the world's richest person for the 12th straight year, with a 2006 net worth of $50 billion. Incidentally, he actually became the world's first "centibillionaire" in 1999 when his net worth surpassed the 100 billion mark briefly.

Jonathon Hardcastle writes articles on many topics including Computers [http://computerinformationsource.com/], Science [http://fortheloveofscience.com/], and Cosmetic Surgery [http://1stcosmeticsurgery.com/]

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