Bill Gates
110 quotes
Biography
"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."
"It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."
"Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room."
"Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years."
"I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill."
"Life is not fair get used to used to it"
"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..."
"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."
"DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created."
"When you have money in hand,only you forget who are you .But when you do not have any money in your hand,the whole world forget who you are.It's life."
"If something is 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?"
"It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of."
"Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company."
"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."
"The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC."
"I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."
"There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written."
"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 64 K to 640 K 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."
"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.... The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can."
"I laid out memory so the bottom 640 K 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 640 K 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."
"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."
"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. ... I'm saying we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis."
"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."
"What we're saying to people is that every idea about ease-of-use, we can develop in software, for the PC, without asking them to buy new hardware, without asking them to throw away their old applications."