Bill Gates Quotes
Bill Gates offers a blunt look at how profit drives tech decisions, perfect for anyone curious about software and business.
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If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
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It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.
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To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination - and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.
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The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.
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I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.
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I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
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If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.
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I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within-oh five or six years people were complaining.
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Gary Kildall was one of the original pioneers of the PC revolution. He was a very creative computer scientist who did excellent work. Although we were competitors, I always had tremendous respect for his contributions to the PC industry. His untimely death was very unfortunate and he and his work will be missed.
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Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
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The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.
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There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
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In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.
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Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
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It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit.
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We've done some good work, but all of these products become obsolete so fast... It will be some finite number of years, and I don't know the number - before our doom comes.
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About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
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Microsoft looks at new ideas, they don't evaluate whether the idea will move the industry forward, they ask, 'how will it help us sell more copies of Windows?'
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Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told me about it and I said, 'I don't know how to spell that.' I said, 'Yeah, I've got that on my list, so I'm okay.' But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy.
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Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
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Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.
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We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence - presence is the most trivial notion, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something.
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Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so irritating.
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Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.
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Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' - that might be spam.
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Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it - at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.
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If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act.
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Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be.
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I wish I wasn't ... There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it.
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Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes.
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I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.
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One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
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There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft.[3]
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We will never make a 32-bit operating system.
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I reboot [my Windows PC] every night.
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Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.
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The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.
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You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong...
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The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.
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We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing.
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Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as great. Also, the opportunity to go back and really rewrite something isn't quite as great, because there's always a new set of features that you're adding on to the same program.
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The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future.
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Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down.
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Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better
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Life is not fair. Get used to it... Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
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640K ought to be enough for anybody.
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Bloomberg Business News (19 January 1996); also WIRED (16 January 1997)
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U.S. News & World Report (20 August 2001)
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The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.
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Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.
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Bill Gates is a very rich man today ... and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.
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It's a business I don't know anything about, but I admire Bill Gates enormously. I know him individually, and I think he's incredible in business.
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There never was a chip, it is said, that Bill Gates couldn't slow down with a new batch of features.
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Probably the most dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age.
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Bill Gates is a monocle and a Persian cat away from being the villain in a James Bond movie.
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[Gates] apparently has made more money than anyone else his age, ever, in any business.
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Well, it seems to me that he did have an education to get there. It happened to be mine, not his.
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He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry.
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Steve Ballmer
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Speeches of Bill Gates at Microsoft.com
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quotes about voice recognition
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If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG.
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If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.
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The only definition by which Americas best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.
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The only definition by which America's best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.
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Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.
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Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.
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Software will get to be somewhat more mature, ah, but it will never be as predictable as most areas of engineering.
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Students deserve great teachers. And teachers deserve the support they need to become great.
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Like many others, I have deep misgivings about the state of education in the United States. Too many of our students fail to graduate from high school with the basic skills they will need to succeed in the 21st Century economy, much less prepared for the rigors of college and career. Although our top universities continue to rank among the best in the world, too few American students are pursuing degrees in science and technology. Compounding this problem is our failure to provide sufficient training for those already in the workforce.
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Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don't approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.
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Competition is always a fantastic thing, and the computer industry is intensely competitive.
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I don't think there's anything unique about human intellience. All the nuerons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion.
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At every juncture, advanced tools have been the key to a new wave of applications, and each wave of applications has been key to driving computing to the next level.
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Software is more important than hardware.
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Talking to mothers, always brings it home because they're so anxious to do everything they can for their kids and so tragic for them.
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You have the refugee crisis triggered by Syria. That's got a lot of costs associated with it. Domestically, budgets are incredibly tight because the economy's not generating the growth that makes for easy trade-offs.
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If somebody is considering being willing to go out and work in the field in global health, those are a particular class of heroes because it's hard to work in those places. Our foundation gets so many of our learnings from people who've been out there and seen, "this tool is not going to work there, there's more of a problem here than you know." You should really get involved in that.
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The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.
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The flatter the corporate hierarchy, the more likely it is that employees will communicate bad news and act upon it.
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The message that personal computers can do neat things, that software is great stuff, that there's an exciting opportunity here and Microsoft is involved in it, that's a worthwhile message for Microsoft to get out.