3.Ferocious Tenacity
Gates always helped his partners succeed on their terms, not his own. With MS-DOS, timing was IBM's paramount concern. Missed deadlines might cause IBM higher-ups to pull the plug on the PC project, but Microsoft had only a few months to produce the software. So Microsoft took a quick-and-dirty shortcut. It bought the rights to a PC operating system made by another Seattle software company, and built MS-DOS on top of it. Gates later admitted it would have taken a year for Microsoft to create MS-DOS from scratch.