Sunday, May 10, 2009

Similarities between Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates

Almost everyone in the IT world knows Mark Zuckerberg and/or Bill Gates (if you don't know at least B. Gates then maybe you should look for some professional health assistance)

I was reading some articles about the history of Facebook and have found several similarities between Gates and Zuckerberg. And somehow it's a little bit surprising that these two characters have many things in common. Here is a list of things which they share:
  • Bill and Mark are a couple of very proficient software coders.
  • Both are billionaires.
  • Gates built a new platform (actually, two, if you count DOS and Windows) and Zuckerberg aims to create one now.
  • Both have stolen ideas for software applications or developments from others.
  • Mark -like Bill- left Harvard University before finishing their curricula on 'student on leave' modality. And they both made it this way because in case of failure they had the chance to get back on track with their studies.
  • Bill and Mark have nerd profiles.
  • Both are not precisely handsome.
  • Mark and Bill have been facing copyright issues and legal disputes.
  • Both started companies at a very young age.
  • The applications or software they built changed the IT world.
  • They are both identified as jerks in respect to their social life.
  • Both paid large sums of money to end lawsuits.
  • These individuals are of the type "love 'em or hate 'em".
  • The two of them are quite intelligent and finished school with honors.
  • Both skipped classes at the university to work on their personal projects and later, to catch up with the rest of their classmates, had to do some 'intensive burst study' sessions.
  • Bill and Mark are famous amongst public opinion for being egoists, ruthless, opportunists, thiefs and devious. Also are suspect of using shrewdly predatory and unethical tactics against their counterparts.
  • Mark created the initial Facebook application to get laid with woman. Bill delivered himself a MAC application to hook up with a woman (did you read well? a MAC program!!) and at high school created a program to schedule students in classes, after that he modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. -Is it true that old adage that says that everything men do is to hook up woman?-
  • Both were very lucky at some point of their business. A certain number of circumstances played to their favor.
  • Both men come from upper-middle class families.
  • Microsoft invested 240 million of dollars on Facebook, making Zuckerberg and Gates business partners at some point of time.
  • Both of them wrote their first computer programs while attending high school.
  • The two of them scored an almost perfect score on the SAT.
It's too early to jump into conclusions and say that their careers will be the same in 5 or 10 years, these are just some similarities as of today between these two 'techies', nerds, jerks, geeks or whatever you would like to call them...

If you find more things in common between those two people, you can drop me a comment below.

Finally some funny -and maybe not well known- pictures of them...