Bill Gates: Doing

Bill Gates is American business magnate and philanthropist. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Bill Gates: 184   quotes 37   likes

“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.”

Bill Gates
Life , Money , World , Forgetting

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

Bill Gates

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/

For Team , Funny , Back To Work , Personality

“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

PBS interview with David Frost (November 1995)
1990s

God , Thinking

“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

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

Religion , Time

“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.”

Bill Gates
Past

“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

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
2000s

Truth , World , Education , Thinking

“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

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
1990s

“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…”

Bill Gates

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

People , World , Reading

“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

Focus Magazine No. 43 (23 October 1995) http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html <!-- pages 206-212 -->
1990s

People , Personality

“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

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

People

“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”

Bill Gates

per year
TED, February 2010

People , Health , World

“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.”

Bill Gates

politico.com http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/transcript-bill-gates-lessons-from-leaders-interview-111470.html
Politico.com interview 2014

Health , World , Country

“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.”

Bill Gates

1998 a memo to the Office product group http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02991.pdf
1990s

People , Effort , Change , Dependency

“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

Source: Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

Future

“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."”

Bill Gates

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

Life , School , Learning , Time

“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

Interview with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz in 80 Microcomputing (1980) http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/01/20/1316236&mode=thread Clips from the interview can be found on "No Money (Lullaby for Bill)" http://maltedmedia.com/books/papers/sf-gates.html by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz. http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/index.html
1980s

“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

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

People , Heart