Bill Gates Quotes

101 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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.

Bill Gates
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
Leaders need to provide strategy and direction and to give employees tools that enable them to gather information and insight from around the world. Leaders shouldn't try to make every decision.

Bill Gates
DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' — that might be spam.

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
Embrace bad news to learn where you need the most improvement.

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

Bill Gates
The harsh mathematics of polio makes it clear:
We cannot maintain a level of one thousand or two thousand cases a year. Either we eradicate polio, or we return to the days of tens of thousands of cases per year. That is no alternative at all. We don't let children die because it is fatiguing to save them. Our commitment as a foundation is to work with partners until no children die from polio.

Bill Gates
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.

Bill Gates
The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

Bill Gates
It'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
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.

Bill Gates
If they want we will give them a sleeping bag, but there is something romantic about sleeping under the desk. They want to do it.
On his young software programmers

Bill Gates