Bill Gates Quotes

William Henry Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, author, philanthropist, and co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation along with Paul Allen.

In 1975, Gates and Allen launched Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January 2000, but he remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect for himself. In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie. He stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in February 2014 and assumed a new post as technology adviser to support the newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. He has been criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive. This opinion has been upheld by numerous court rulings. Later in his career, Gates pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors. He donated large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was established in 2000.

Since 1987, Gates has been included in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people. As of September 2017, he is the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$84.8 billion. In 2009, Gates and Warren Buffett founded The Giving Pledge, whereby they and other billionaires pledge to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy. The foundation works to save lives and improve global health, and is working with Rotary International to eliminate polio.

✵ 28. October 1955

Bill Gates photo

World Economic Forum from Cologny, Switzerland, Melinda French Gates, Bill Gates - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2009 / CC BY-SA 2.0

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The Road Ahead

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The Road Ahead

The Road Ahead

Bill Gates

Bill Gates: 92 quotes39 likes

Famous Bill Gates Quotes

“Choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

Sometimes quoted with "difficult" instead of "hard".
A similar thought was expressed by automobile executive Clarence Bleicher in 1947 (before Bill Gates was born): "if you get a tough job, one that is hard, and you haven’t got a way to make it easy, put a lazy man on it, and after 10 days he will have an easy way to do it".
Misattributed
Source: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/26/lazy-job/

“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.”

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Business @ The Speed of Thought (1999) http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speedofthought/default.asp <br class="br">1990s

“Don't compare yourself with anyone in this world… if you do so, you are insulting yourself.”

“If you're born poor it's not your fault, but if you die poor it's your fault.”

Quoted in various publications, without any further sourcing. The quote is dubious in view of the Gates Foundation's public mission, "to lift people out of hunger and extreme poverty." Gates was born to an affluent family.
Misattributed

“I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.”

Bill Gates Quotes about people

“If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act.”

At Live8 (2 July 2005) as reported in BBC News (4 July 2005) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/4648003.stm <br class="br">2000s

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

“Succes is a lousy teacher. It makes smart people think they can't lose.”

Bill Gates book The Road Ahead

The Road Ahead (1995)
Variant: Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

“in china when you're one in a million, there are 1300 people just like you”

“If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.”

“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.”

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

Bill Gates Quotes about the trip

“Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo.”

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

Bill Gates book The Road Ahead

Source: The Road Ahead (1995), p. 265 in hardcover edition, corrected in paperback

“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.”

Response when he was asked whether he believed in God, at his interview with the Rolling Stone Magazine http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-rolling-stone-interview-20140313#ixzz367A061i0. March 27, 2014. <br class="br">The Rolling Stone Interview (2014)

“[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 Joins the iPad's Army of Critics. Steve Jobs Couldn't Care Less." CBS MoneyWatch (11 February 2010) http://cbsnews.com/news/bill-gates-joins-the-ipads-army-of-critics-steve-jobs-couldnt-care-less <br class="br">2000s

“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.”

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

“[RAM1993] 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.”

Bill Gates Interview: Winner of the 1993 Price Waterhouse Leadership Award for Lifetime Achievement, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards, https://web.archive.org/web/20080501040344/http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/gates.htm, May 10, 2008, National museum of American history - Smithsonian Institution, 1993, October 8, 2014 http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/gates.htm, <br class="br">1990s

Bill Gates: Trending quotes

“If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.”

“As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.”

“Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.”

Bill Gates Quotes

“I studied every thing but never topped…. But today the toppers of the best universities are my employees”

“We are in the end game, I'm optimistic that we will be successful. I'm personally very committed”

http://www.investing.com/news/financial-news/gates,-others-pledge-$630-million-to-beat-polio-22402 "Gates, others pledge $630 million to beat polio" Investing.com (21 January 2009)
Regarding Bill And Melinda Gates' Polio Efforts (2009)

“I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.”

“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.”

PBS interview with David Frost (November 1995)
1990s

“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.”

TIME magazine Vol. 149, No. 2 (13 January 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000619135050/http://www.time.com/time/gates/gates7.html <br class="br">1990s

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

Bill Gates book The Road Ahead

Source: The Road Ahead

“Life's not fair, get over it!”

Variant: Life is not fair get used to used to it

“Computers are great because when you're working with them you get immediate results that let you know if your program works. It's feedback you don't get from many other things.”

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”

“The vision is really about empowering workers giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.”

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

Comment to reporters during the IBM PC launch (1981), interpreted as a jab at Gary Kildall
1980s

“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?”

Interview with Steven Levy in Newsweek (31 January 2007) "Finally, Vista Makes Its Debut. Now What?" http://archive.is/20130105003445/www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/01/31/finally-vista-makes-its-debut-now-what.html <br class="br">2000s

“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.”

Speech at the University of Washington, as reported in "Gates, Buffett a bit bearish" CNET News (2 July 1998) http://archive.is/20130102062335/http://news.com.com/2100-1023-212942.html <br class="br">1990s

“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 Charlie Rose Interview http://youtube.com/watch?v=M1EsIusQJQM on Charlie Rose (25 November 1996) <br class="br">1990s

“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.”

"The PC Era Is Just Beginning" in Business Week (22 March 2005) http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2005/tc20050322_7219.htm <br class="br">2000s

“The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.”

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

“He [Steve Jobs] showed me the boat he was working on … and talked about how he's looking forward to being on it, even though we both knew there was a good chance that wouldn't happen.”

cbsnews.com http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-gates-on-steve-jobs-we-grew-up-together/ <br class="br">July 2013

“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. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view. I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know.”

Response when he was asked whether he believed in God, at his interview with the Rolling Stone Magazine http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-rolling-stone-interview-20140313#ixzz367A061i0. March 27, 2014. <br class="br">The Rolling Stone Interview (2014)

“[RAM1989]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.”

1989 speech on the history of the microcomputer industry. http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/1989%20Bill%20Gates%20Talk%20on%20Microsoft.html <br class="br">1980s

“It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.”

Interview with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz in 80 Microcomputing (1980)
1980s

“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.”

Speech at the University of Washington, as reported in "Gates, Buffett a bit bearish" CNET News (2 July 1998) http://archive.is/20130102062335/http://news.com.com/2100-1023-212942.html <br class="br">1990s

“[640K] 640 K ought to be enough for anybody.”

Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates considered the IBM PC's 640 KB program memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory#640_KB_barrier a significant breakthrough over 8-bit systems that were typically limited to 64 KB, but he has denied making this remark. Also see the 1989 and 1993 remarks above.<br>: I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time … I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640 K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.<br>:* Gates (19 January 1996), " Career Opportunities in Computing—and More http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folklore.computers/msg/99ce4b0555bf35f4". Bloomberg Business News<br>: Do you realize the pain the industry went through while the IBM PC was limited to 640 K? The machine was going to be 512 K at one point, and we kept pushing it up. I never said that statement — I said the opposite of that.<br>:* Gates talks, https://web.archive.org/web/20110202030010/http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/gatesivu.htm, February 20, 2011, U.S. News & World Report, August 20, 2001, October 8, 2014 http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/gatesivu.htm, <br class="br">Misattributed

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

BBC News (24 January 2004) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3426367.stm <br class="br">2000s

“I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years.”

Remarks at COMDEX (November 1994), attributed in Kommunikation erstatter transport (2009) by Karl Krarup et al.
Attributed

“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, quoted in The Computer Chronicles. "Special Edition: Gary Kildall." (1995)
1990s

“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.”

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Speeches/2009/01/Bill-Gates-Rotary-International "Bill Gates - Rotary International" Bill & Melinda Gates foundation (21 January 2009)
Regarding Bill And Melinda Gates' Polio Efforts (2009)

“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.”

TIME magazine Vol. 149, No. 2 (13 January 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000619011644/http://www.time.com/time/gates/gates2.html <br class="br">1990s

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

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" http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/2803 at ComputerWorld.com <br class="br">2000s

“Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be.”

On Blu-ray. interview The Daily Princetonian (14 Oct 2005) https://archive.is/20130628234752/www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/10/14/news/13474.shtml <br class="br">2000s

“You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong…”

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

“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.”

Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time (1997) by Daniel Gross ISBN 0471196533
1990s

“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.”

Focus Magazine No. 43 (23 October 1995) http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html  <br class="br">1990s

“I wish I wasn't … There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it.”

On being the world's richest man, in an online advertising conference in Redmond, Washington, as quoted in The Guardian (5 May 2006) http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1768129,00.html <br class="br">2000s

“One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity…We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world”

Bill Gates book The Road Ahead

The Road Ahead (1995)

“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.”

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

“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.”

Apple company event (October 1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J3FUOCRXPo <br class="br">1980s

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

Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102008326?q=bill+gates&p=par and i am gay <br class="br">2000s

“First we've got population. Now, the world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that (forecast) by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3”

per year
TED, 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.”

A Conversation With Bill Gates About the Future of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/article/A-Conversation-With-Bill-Gates/132591/ in The Chronicle of Higher Education (25 June 2012) <br class="br">2000s

“I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.”

OS/2 Programmers Guide, November 1987
1980s

“We would like every country to be self-sufficient so that both in terms of running a good primary health care system and funding a good primary health care system, it’s all OK, and they just participate in regional bodies that have standby capacity to deal with these things. Africa, of all the places in the world, is the furthest behind on being able to do that. And through aid, health and health systems in Africa have improved very, very dramatically.”

politico.com http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/transcript-bill-gates-lessons-from-leaders-interview-111470.html <br class="br">Politico.com interview 2014

“"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." quoted in”

February 2010
http://blogs.bnet.com/corporate-strategy/?p=101
2000s

“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.”

"Why I Hate Spam" in Microsoft PressPass (2003) http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ofnote/06-23wsjspam.asp <br class="br">2000s

“The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.”

BusinessWeek, 26 November 1984
1980s

“One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples 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 on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.”

1998 a memo to the Office product group http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02991.pdf <br class="br">1990s

“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.”

Source: Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

“A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.”

Cited to "Challenges and Strategy" (16 May 1991) via Fred Warshofsky (1994), The Patent Wars. This is a misreading of Warshofsky's text; the quotation is actually from League for Programming Freedom (1991), " Against Software Patents http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-prop/lpf-against-software-patents.html." An example of the misattribution appears in Lawrence Lessig (2001), The future of ideas. <br class="br">Misattributed

“"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not." -Bill Gates, Fortune Magazine, July 17 2007”

2000s

“There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.”

Interview with Electronics magazine (1989)
1980s

“As soon as I learned about this miracle of chip making I thought, what is the key missing element? … I'd been working on software so I decided that maybe that was what was necessary to bring all this power to life. I talked about that with a friend, Paul Allen, and we kept saying, "What can we do? Can we start our own software company?" It seemed impossible at the time because software was not done by independent companies. The companies that built the computers — IBM and DEC — they did all the software. And when we called them up and said, "We would like to do an operating system," they said, "who are you?" to which we said, "we're high-school students."”

That was s, uh — that was the end of that conversation. <br class="br">Speech to the Economic Club of Detroit (1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzX6UUJ461s <br class="br">1990s

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