曾经有个年轻人问老富翁是怎么发家的。这个老头说：“哦孩子，那还是在大萧条最严重的1932年，我身上只剩下五美分了。我用这五美分买了一个苹果。我花了一整天的时间把苹果擦得亮亮的，然后在晚上，我以十美分的价钱卖了这个苹果。我就这样干了一个月。月底的时候，我一共攒了1.37美元。之后，我的岳父去世了，他留给我们200万美元的遗产。”

　　William Henry Gates, Jr. and Mary Maxwell were among Seattle's social and financial elite. William Henry Gates, Jr. was a prominent corporate lawyer while Mary Maxwell was a board member of First Interstate Bank and Pacific Northwest Bell.

　　盖茨的父母均为西雅图的社会名流和金融精英。他父亲是一名杰出的律师，母亲是第一洲际银行和太平洋西北部地区贝尔公司的董事。


　　Lesson 3: Acquire Research Results by Hiring and Buying 通过购买或者雇人获取科研成果

　　Conventional economic wisdom holds that monopolies should spend heavily on research. But if you want to become as rich as Bill Gates, you have to remember that it is cheaper to wait for a small company to come up with something good and then buy them. In the old days, antitrust laws kept monopolies from buying potential competitors. But not anymore. When Microsoft products were threatened by network computers and Wed-based applications, they simply bought WebTV and Hotmail.

　　根据传统经济学的经验，垄断者应不惜重金搞科研。但是如果你想成为和比尔盖茨一般的富人，你就必须记得买小公司研发出来的好东西比自主研发所花的成本要更为低廉。过去，反垄断法禁止垄断大户收购其潜在竞争者。但是今非昔日。当微软的产品受到来自网络计算机和基于网络的软件的威胁时，微软采取的仅仅是购买了互联网传输流媒体技术以及电子邮件系统技术的策略。

　　Another good strategy is to hire the right people. Some of the guys who wrote Microsoft Windows had previous worked on window systems at Xerox PAPC. So Xerox paid for the research; Microsoft paid only for development.

　　另一个成功的策略就是雇佣了正确的一批人。好些替微软视窗卖命的年轻人原先都效命于施乐公司帕洛阿尔托研究中心。所以说，这个研究中心支付了微软系统的研发费用，而微软仅仅支付了这套系统的改良费用。

　　Lesson 4: Let Other People Do the Programming 让其他人去做编程工作

　　If you're a great engineer, it can be frustrating to rely on other people to translate your ideas into reality. However, keep in mind that you're not going to get rich being "just a coder." Bill Gates does code reviews, not coding.

　　如果你是一个出色的编程人员，那么依靠他人来完成你的程序设计构想称得上是件令人沮丧的事情。然而，你需要牢记的是：仅仅当个电脑程序员是不能成为富人的。比尔盖茨所做的是改进代码质量和确认设计方案，而非编写代码。

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　　Lesson 5: Train Your New CEO 培养下一个首席执行官