Bill Gates Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

You know, I'm a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard - in other words a netbook - will be the mainstream on that.

Bill Gates
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
Like a human being, a company has to have an internal communication mechanism, a "nervous system", to coordinate its actions.

Bill Gates
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
In the last 20 years, thanks to your hard work, polio has declined by 99 percent. In 1988, 350,000 people got polio. By 2008, the number was down to just a couple of thousand.

Bill Gates
This leads to the paradox, that because the disease is only in the poor countries, there is not much investment. For example, there is more money put into baldness drugs, than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it is a terrible thing [audience laughter] and rich men are afflicted, so that is why that priority is set.

Bill Gates
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
The moral systems of religion, I think, are superimportant. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.

Bill Gates
If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.

Bill Gates
Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.

Bill Gates
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
Teams should be able to act with the same unity of purpose and focus as a well motivated individual.

Bill Gates
The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.

Bill Gates
Bringing together the right information with the right people will dramatically improve a company's ability to develop and act on strategic business opportunities.

Bill Gates
Robots will play an important role in providing physical assistance and even companionship for the elderly.

Bill Gates
Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company.

Bill Gates
Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.
In 2004

Bill Gates
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
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
People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.

Bill Gates
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.

Bill Gates
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
Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes.

Bill Gates
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
In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will.

Bill Gates
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.

Bill Gates
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.

Bill Gates
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
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.

Bill Gates
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.

Bill Gates