1. Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose. 2. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
3. I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.
5. It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
6. 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
7. I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
9. If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
10. If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.
11. As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
13. At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.
14. The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
15. Life is not fair; get used to it.
17. I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
18. 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.
19. Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.
21. Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.
22. If I'd had some set idea of a finish line, don't you think I would have crossed it years ago?
23. Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
24. Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
25. If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.
26. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
28. Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself.
29. The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.
30. DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.
31. This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.
32. Until we're educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.
34. Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.
35. Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.
36. Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it's true.
37. I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical.
38. I spend a lot of time reading.
40. We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
41. Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.
42. In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.
43. I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software.
45. People everywhere love Windows.
46. 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.
47. A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it's less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.
48. Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.
49. Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.
50. Digital reading will completely take over. It's lightweight and it's fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.
51. Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.
53. I have an excellent memory, a most excellent memory.
54. I know there's a farmer out there somewhere who never wants a PC and that's fine with me.
55. I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.
56. I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.
57. I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
59. I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.
60. I remember thinking quite logically that I didn't want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.
61. I'm a geek.
62. I'm going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.
63. If your culture doesn't like geeks, you are in real trouble.
64. If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.
65. In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there's such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.
66. Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.
67. It's really kind of cool to have solar panels on your roof.
69. Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support - a significant problem in the software industry.
70. Me and my dad are the biggest promoters of an estate tax in the US. It's not a popular position.
71. Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness.
72. Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they're not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.
73. The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.
74. Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.
75. The AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about.
76. The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.
77. The kids are a big part of my schedule.
78. The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I'll never be hands-on on anything except software.
80. The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn't always where you want to use it, and it isn't always when you want to use it.
81. The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.
82. There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
83. We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.
84. Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted - all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.
85. We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.
87. We've got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.
88. Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.
89. Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It's basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it's wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.
90. Well, I don't think there's any need for people to focus on my career.
91. When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.
92. When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.
93. Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
94. Who decides what's in Windows? The customers who buy it.
96. I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.
97. Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want that on my business card.
98. I have $100 billion...You realize I could spend $3 million a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't make another dime...
99. Patience is a key element of success.
100. Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we'd want to get involved.
102. I have drifted away from thinking about these philanthropic things. And it was only as the wealth got large enough and Melinda and I had talked about the view that wealth wasn't something that would be good to just pass to the children.
103.I wish I wasn't...There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it. (on being the world's richest man)
104. No one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year - if you check, you'll see that's more than most people make in a lifetime!
105. I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don't just think: "Yes, my country is doing well," but you think about the world at large.
107. You see, antiquated ideas of kindness and generosity are simply bugs that must be programmed out of our world. And these cold, unfeeling machines show us the way.
108. The Internet will help achieve "friction-free capitalism" by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.
109. We are always saying to ourselves: "We have to innovate. We've got to come up with that breakthrough." In fact, the way software works, so long as you are using your existing software, you don't pay us anything at all. So we're only paid for breakthroughs.
110. The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier.
111. 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 imaginations. And the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.
113. Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more user-friendly...Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words user-friendly on the cover.
114. I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job...Because , he will find an easy way to do it. Be lazy: Think crazy .
115. (Smart) is an elusive concept. There's a certain sharpness, an ability to absorb new facts. To ask an insightful question. To relate to domains that may not seem connected at first. A certain creativity that allows people to be effective.
116. If you're asking whether I intentionally mess up my hair, no, I don't. And certain things, like my freckles, they're just there. I don't do anything consciously. I suppose I could get contact lenses. I suppose I could comb my hair more often.
117. I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.
119. A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is and lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will go out of business.
120. Information work is thinking work.
121. Bringing together the right information with the right people will dramatically improve a company's ability to develop and act on strategic business opportunities.
123. It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.
124. Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company.
125. The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.
126. I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.
128. 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.
129. 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.
130. 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.
132. 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.
133. Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.
134. 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.
135. Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.
136. Does the e-mail say it's about "enlargement" - that might be spam.
137. 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.
138. Any operating system without a browser is going to be fucking out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business?
140. It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.
141. Robots will play an important role in providing physical assistance and even companionship for the elderly.
142. I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years.
143. The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.
145. 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.
146. 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...
148. 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.
149. 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.
151. 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.
What do you think of Bill Gates quotes?
