Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III (born 1955)

Co-founder and Chief Software Architect of Microsoft Corporation , and the world's richest man.

Sourced

• "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."
  • Source: Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers (1986), ISBN 0914845713

• "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."
  • Source: Challenges and Strategy Memo (May 16, 1991)

• "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed."
  • Source: Focus Magazine, nr.43, pages 206-212, (October 23, 1995)

• "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."
  • Source: Time magazine, January 13, 1997, vol. 149, no. 2

• "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."
  • Source: Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time, Daniel Gross (1997), ISBN 0471196533

• "As long as they are going to steal it [software ], 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." - Speaking of Chinese computer users
  • Source: Speech at the University of Washington, as reported by News.com, 1998

• "Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that"
  • Source: Speech at Computer History Museum, InfoWorld magazine, October 2001

• "We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence -- presence is the most trivial notion of context, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something."
  • Source: .NET Briefing Day Speech, July 24, 2002

• "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."
  • Source: Why I Hate Spam, Microsoft PressPass (2003)

Attributed

• "The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers ."
  • Source: The Road Ahead , pg. 265

• "What's a network?"
  • Source: Notes from talk by Acorn's Hermann Hauser

• "We will never make a 32-bit operating system, but I'll always love IBM." (at the launch of MSX )

• "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."

• "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."

• "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

• "There's nobody getting rich [by] writing software"

• "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?"
  • Source: From an interview of Bill Gates, taken by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz. Clips from the interview can be found on "No Money (Lullaby for Bill)" song (by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz).
    • Interview Text: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/01/20/1316236&mode=thread
    • At the web site of Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, you can also download the mp3 from his site for free: http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/index.html

• 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.

Wrongly Attributed

• "Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one."
  • Notes: Gates and Microsoft have denied this quote. Gates never gave a speech at a high school that included this quote nor did it appear in his book Business @ The Speed of Thought. Actually Charles J. Sykes. [1]

• "640K ought to be enough for anybody." and "No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer."
  • Notes: Two variants of the same quote. Attributed to him in 1981 when designing DOS's conventional memory limit as ten times the amount in his computer; Gates has denied this quote and mentions that it is always provided without a source. [2][3]