14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Chairman and Co-Founder Bill Gates has been waiting for over 30 years, 32 years to be more specific, to finally get his degree from Harvard University. And, yesterday June 7, 2007, William H. Gates III (Bill Gates) was awarded a honorary degree at Commencement's Morning Exercises at Harvard. Gates is now the proud possessor of a Doctor of Laws degree from the American University. Gates quit Harvard in his junior year following the first successful sale of the programming language BASIC he had authored for the MITS Altair. After he left Harvard, Gates dedicated himself to Microsoft, the company he had founded with Paul Allen in 1975.
"I've been waiting more than 30 years to say this: "Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree." I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I'll be changing my job next year ? and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume. I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I'm just happy that the Crimson has called me "Harvard's most successful dropout." I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class ? I did the best of everyone who failed," Bill Gates said, kidding that he also was the one that got Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, to drop out of business school and therefore a bad influence.
Gates may have dropped out of Harvard 32 years ago, but in 2008 he is getting ready to drop out of his-day-to-day role at Microsoft. After the summer of 2008, Gates will focus almost exclusively on the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, now also armed with his new Harvard degree. The last time Gates quit he ended up building the largest software company in the world. This time around he will undoubtedly prove to be a great influence on the philanthropic work around the world. Read the complete remarks from Gates here.
"One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world's first personal computers. I offered to sell them software. I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: "We're not quite ready, come see us in a month," which was a good thing, because we hadn't written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft," Gates added.