I was looking at writing an article about the worlds riches people and noticed that of the “Top 20 Richest” – 10 were in North America!

So looking at a simple probability you are 50% more likely to become seriously rich if you live in the USA. Three of these 10 American billionaires are in the top 4 and between them are worth almost $100 billion (£63 billion), with Bill Gates worth $40 billion (£25 billion) on his own!

Gates is a Harvard University drop out and was born in 1955 to a middle class family with no silver spoon in his mouth and armed only with his intelligence and personal drive.

The Story of Bill Gates – a Rich Man

The second richest man in the world is Warren Buffett born a few years earlier than Bill Gates in 1930 – so a more senior billionaire worth some $37 billion (£23 billion). Becoming a millionaire in the early days back in 1962 is when he first became a millionaire through a number of partnerships, which in January 1962, had in excess of $7,178,500, of which over $1,025,000 belonged to Buffett.

Mr Buffett then discovered a textile manufacturing firm, Berkshire Hathaway which he began to buy via his partnerships at $7.60 per share. In 1965, when Buffett’s partnerships aggressively began purchasing Berkshire, they paid $14.86 per share while the company had working capital (current assets minus current liabilities) of $19 per share – this set the scene with him in how he was to go on and make his fortunes through business investment.

How to Build a Business Warren Buffett Would Buy: The R. C. Willey Story

I thought that this was a good video of looking at how you could think about making your own money and maybe in the future either Warren Buffett or his successor may invest in your newly found business!

I did a bit of looking at what people search on the Internet relating to “How to get rich” and top of this list is “how to get rich quick” and following in quick succession is “how to get married to a rich man” – interesting. People seem to want to get rich fast or by marrying into money without having to do the hard work and on the whole this really does not happen.

There is always a little bit of luck along the way and one could argue that Bill Gates got lucky with some of his first business deals, but I think that he would have made it either way, one way or another. I always like to see luck as when “Opportunity meets preparation” – you might be thinking others are luckier than you, but if you had prepared yourself you might start to notice opportunities all around you!

Last night I was watching a program about how Bill Gates made Microsoft one of the Worlds biggest companies and made him the richest man in the World up until recently.

One aspect that was discussed on this program was the threat that Google poses to Microsoft. Bill Gates seemed to be really nervous about the power of Google and how they are developing their site so that PC users no longer need to buy Microsoft products like Word, Excel and Power Point, etc, as these programs are held on Google’s servers.

Google’s GDrive is a step in the direction that makes Mr Gates Nervous and is an online storage option where Google servers have enough capacity to hold the entire contents of your hard drive. We are all familiar with having a C: drive and a D: drive, so how do you fancy having a G: drive too.

This new service from Google (thought to be launched in 2009) will allow you to access and update your information, including word documents and spreadsheets, your emails, your personal photos etc, just so long as your device has an internet connection. It could also mean that instead of your PC booting up from your hard drive (or your C: drive), it could be booting off the Google operating system.

By shifting pretty much the entire content of a user’s hard drive to Google’s servers, PC’s would become simpler and cheaper. These new devices would simply act as a portal to the web and perhaps we would just need a keyboard that interacts with our television set and nothing more, other than a “local” processor and some RAM memory to work on files locally.

This new form of computing has a new term, which is “cloud computing” on the basis that your information is sitting in “the cloud“.

Of course the benefits of this new system are numerous, one of which is having your data stored in another location or “the cloud”, so if your computer is stolen or if it crashes, then your data is “safe”. The second obvious benefit to businesses is the ability to share information with other users within your business as a large network, using the internet as the network connection.

One thing that you will have to consider is the security of the information held by Google; will you be happy for Google to hold all your data. What about security breaches? Google would have access to all your data files and all the information pertaining to your business! This information could be sitting anywhere in the world too – it might sit in the USA or perhaps in Indian, who knows where?

The only constraint on this service is the bandwidth you have with your Internet Service Provider (ISP), so as long as your service is a fast one then there should be no speed issues. Today the Internet and the connections to it are pretty reliable. However, there are still times when the Internet still goes down, only last week it was reported that Google’s servers in India were down.

In one of my businesses we have been cut-off from Internet connection due to faults on the line, usually a fault with BT. In this event, if all your data is stored remotely, you would not be able to access your files and work would grind to a halt! Is that how you would want your business to run?

Can you also imagine the law suits that would be flying around, should Google lose company data! This could prove to be an interesting dilemma trying to prove that the data was in fact sitting on Google’s servers when it was lost. This could be a lawyers mine field in the future and can you imagine a small business going up against the might of Google, should something go wrong.

As a business owner what do you think about the idea of the Google GDrive? Would you be prepared to trust your hard drive to Google? Please let me have your comments on this below…

The chairman of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates, is stepping down from his job running the world’s largest software company.

Mr Gates, who made his fortune through developing software for the personal computer, plans to devote his time to charity work.

As a teenager Bill Gates had a vision of a personal computer on every desk in every home.

He says he caught sight of the future and based his career on what he saw.

Great responsibility

The son of a successful lawyer from Seattle, Mr Gates programmed his first computer at the age of 13.

During his two years at Harvard University, he spent much of his time finessing his programming skills as well as enjoying the occasional all-night poker session.

He eventually dropped out of college and moved to Albuquerque, in New Mexico, where he set up Microsoft with his childhood friend, Paul Allen.

“Most of our competitors were very poorly run” Bill Gates

Their big break came in 1980 when Microsoft signed an agreement with IBM to build the operating system that became known as MS-DOS.

Microsoft went public in 1986 and within a year Bill Gates, at 31, had become the youngest self-made billionaire.

In an interview with the BBC, Mr Gates explained that Microsoft benefitted because “most of our competitors were very poorly run”.

“They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together. They did not understand how to go around the world.”

New horizons

“He has made a machine that could have been a luxury item only for industrial use, accessible to all.” M. Morgan, Ireland

Now 52, he still has boyish looks, but he is no longer the world’s richest man. He has been overtaken by the investor Warren Buffett and the Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim.

But Mr Gates’ fortune is at the root of his decision to leave his day job and concentrate on his charitable organisation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

He will remain as Microsoft’s chairman and work on special technology projects, but according to Mr Gates, great wealth brings great responsibility and his future work will include finding new vaccines and financing projects in the developing world.

News reported by BBC