"Tragedy," as defined by Britannica.com is
a branch of drama that treats in a serious and dignified style the sorrowful or terrible events encountered or caused by a heroic individual. By extension the term may be applied to other literary works, such as the novel (Britannica.com).
By extension, also, we can apply the term to Bill Gates and his company, Microsoft. Although no one has compared the antitrust actions concerning the company to dramatic tragedy, this is an apt method for understanding the situation.
Dramatic tragedy, in the classical sense, involves a great hero, called a "protagonist" who is the main character. Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, Willie Loman are all examples of this type of character. The protagonist invites his own tragic downfall. In the case of classical tragedy, it is also necessary to have a secondary character, an "antagonist" whose function it is to thwart the protagonist at every turn. Likewise, all classical tragedies must have a beginning, a middle, and an end (Harris, 1978). We shall use this structure to discuss Bill Gates.
Bill Gates -- Act One: The Beginning
According to the extensive biography on the Microsoft web site William (Bill) H. Gates was born on October 28, 1955, to an attorney and a school teacher. In Seattle, he attended public and private schools, and developed a love for computers at 13, when he began programming them.
In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman, where he lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, now Microsoft's president and chief executive officer. While at Harvard, Gates developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS Altair (Gates Bio, online).
Gates then formed a company called Microsoft with another college friend, Paul Allen. They created a product called a "Disc Operating System" (or DOS) and they approached IBM, then the leader in the computer manufacturing industry. IBM off...