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Bill Gates
97 quotes
“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?”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz in 80 Microcomputing (1980) Clips from the interview can be found on "No Money (Lullaby for Bill)" by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz.
“It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz in 80 Microcomputing (1980)
“Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Comment to reporters during the IBM PC launch (1981), interpreted as a jab at Gary Kildall
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Apple company event (October 1983)
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates replied to Steve Jobs about "Windows 1.0 is borrowed from Macintosh 128K" (November 1983)
“The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: BusinessWeek, 26 November 1984
“I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: OS/2 Programmers Guide, November 1987
“There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Electronics magazine (1989)
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1989 speech on the history of the microcomputer industry.
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Challenges and Strategy" (16 May 1991). Note that this quotation has been paired with a misattributed quotation.
“Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates quotes in The Internet tidal wave memo (1995)
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Computer Chronicles. "Special Edition: Gary Kildall." 1995
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Focus Magazine No. 43 (23 October 1995)
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: PBS interview with David Frost (November 1995)
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates Charlie Rose Interview on Charlie Rose (25 November 1996)
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Search of the Real Bill Gates," Time (13 January 1997)
“Any operating system without a browser is going to be fucking out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business?”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Search of the Real Bill Gates," Time (13 January 1997)
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Time magazine Vol. 149, No. 2 (13 January 1997)
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time (1997) by Daniel Gross
“One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's 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 [sic] on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1998 a memo to the Office product group
“Although 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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the University of Washington, as reported in "Gates, Buffett a bit bearish" CNET News (2 July 1998)
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the University of Washington, as reported in "Gates, Buffett a bit bearish" CNET News (2 July 1998)
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Business @ The Speed of Thought (1999)
“Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the Computer History Museum, as quoted in InfoWorld magazine (October 2001)
“Trustworthy Computing has four pillars: reliability, security, privacy and business integrity.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates quotes in Trustworthy Computing (TwC) memo (2002)
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: .NET Briefing Day Speech (24 July 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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why I Hate Spam" in Microsoft PressPass (2003)
“Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: BBC News (24 January 2004)
“Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' — that might be spam.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: BBC News (24 January 2004)
“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.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The PC Era Is Just Beginning" in Business Week (22 March 2005)
“If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: At Live8 (2 July 2005) as reported in BBC News (4 July 2005)
“Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Blu-ray. interview The Daily Princetonian (14 Oct 2005)
“I wish I wasn't ... There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On being the world's richest man, in an online advertising conference in Redmond, Washington, as quoted in The Guardian (5 May 2006)
“Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On his use of YouTube to watch videos. "Bill Gates on ...the Competition" in The Wall Street Journal (19 June 2006); also quoted in "Bill Gates' piracy confession" at ComputerWorld.com
“I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates backs immigration reform on Mexico trip" Reuters (21 March 2007)
“If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. ... Let's be realistic, who came up with "File/Edit/View/Help"? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Steven Levy in Newsweek (31 January 2007) "Finally, Vista Makes Its Debut. Now What?
“It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fortune (17 July 2007)
“[I]t's not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, "Oh my God, Microsoft didn't aim high enough." It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, "Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates Joins the iPad's Army of Critics. Steve Jobs Couldn't Care Less." CBS MoneyWatch (11 February 2010)
“Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Conversation With Bill Gates About the Future of Higher Education in The Chronicle of Higher Education (25 June 2012)
“Microsoft's early mobile strategy was clearly a mistake. There's a lot of things like cellphones where we didn't get out in the lead early. We didn't miss cellphones, but the way that we went about it didn't allow us to get the leadership.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates quotes about Windows Phone (Feb 2013)
“When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war. That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food and water. When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel. Today, the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this. Instead, it looks like this. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The next outbreak? We're not ready | Bill Gates", TED talk (3 April 2015) · Transcript
“The only way you can get to the very positive scenario [in the fight against climate change] is by great innovation. Innovation really does bend the curve.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From "Gates to double investment in renewable energy projects: Microsoft co-founder takes interest in new areas of research like in solar, high wind and new nuclear." Financial Times. Article by Christopher Adams and Jo…
“The greatest mistake ever is the whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is, meaning Android is the standard non-Apple phone form platform.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates quotes about Android (2019)
“Most governments take advantage of their scientists and listen to them. They don't undermine them and attack them.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Bill Gates slams U.S. on Covid: Most governments listen to their scientists, not attack them" (14 October 2020)
“Usually, you'd expect the worst to be the "ground zero" country — in this case, China, then the next wave, which was all in Asia, and then in Europe, and then finally, the U.S. We had all this community spread. With a travel ban, where you actually force people to come back from China, you have to have a way to be able to either just assume they're infected and quarantine them, or test them. And then if they test positive, to have that enforced quarantine. We actually seeded a lot of infection by saying, 'Okay, everybody, residents and citizens come back (and not testing or quarantining).'”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Coronavirus: Bill Gates describes what we did wrong, and how to do better" by Lisa M. Krieger, The Mercury News (21 October 2020)
“We always have to be serious about public health in a global sense and surveillance for "the next one", because we don't know where it will emerge.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Coronavirus: Bill Gates describes what we did wrong, and how to do better" by Lisa M. Krieger, The Mercury News (21 October 2020)
“Well, one thing that everybody may not be aware of is how fantastic the CDC has been historically. They're the best in the world. They train themselves in terms of how to communicate, including getting bad news out and getting people to take measures that protect themselves. And they've been muzzled.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Bill Gates evaluates US COVID response and offers latest vaccine outlook", Yahoo News, (26 October 2020)
“You can make sure wind turbines can deal with the cold”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates says Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's explanation for power outages is 'actually wrong" (February 17, 2021)
“The climate is not the end of the planet. So the planet is going to be fine”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Seth Borenstein, Fatima Hussein and The Associated Press. "Bill Gates sees 'a lot of climate exaggeration' out there: 'The climate is not the end of the planet. So the planet is going to be fine'", fortune.com, 20 Septe…
“The big concern is about the generations yet to come when [AI] gets way smarter than it is right now. And if a person with Mal intent was using that, say, for a cyberattack, or to make a deep fake that makes a politician look like they're doing something awful, or even one of your relatives saying, okay, I've been kidnapped.”
Bill Gates (born 1955) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bill Gates", on What Now? with Trevor Noah, found on DeepCast (21 November 2023)