ered Gates $350,000 for the rights to DOS but he held out, insisting that IBM license the product instead. They did, and Microsoft was on its way.
Theories of classical tragedy call for several elements: A) the protagonist must be "bigger than life" (King, Emperor etc.); B) Must have a tragic flaw in his personality; and C) Must be a victim of fate. Bill Gates, in the period from 1974 to 1997, had all of these elements. Gates and his company could do no wrong. In the mid 1980s, Gates moved the company back to his hometown in Redmond Washington where he set up his own version of a "think tank."
Seeing the flexibility of Apple Computers graphic interface, Gates and his crew set out to create a similar program for the IBM PC. They called this program Windows and in 1988, sales had reached more than $100 million. Gates insisted on reinvesting most of that money back into the business, and hired hundreds of programmers, and launched overseas sales. By 1992, sales had reached half a billion with no end in sight. And when Microsoft stock went public, Gates and his partner Allen became billionaires in about a week.
The first requirement, "bigger than life" was now achieved, and instead of a King, he was known as the richest man in the world. But does Gates have the traditional "tragic flaw" that is so essential to the fall of a tragic hero? Perhaps Gates' famous competitive nature is his tragic flaw?
This conjecture is supported by Sandberg (2000) who was writing about Microsoft's six fatal flaws in Newsweek.
The most likely culprit is the same defiant corporate culture that made Microsoft so successful in the first place. In the marketplace, rough-and-tumble tactics can be a virtue, but in the legal arena, Microsoft's blood sport backfired (Sandberg 23).
If ambition was Gates' fatal flaw, then all we have left to consider is the role that fate played in this drama. This is the point in classical tragedy when the...