Bill Gates: Quotes about people

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

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

Bill Gates

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

People , Problem

“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.”

Bill Gates
People , Way , Nature

“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.

People , Thinking , Teachers

“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

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

People , Thinking

“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

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

People

“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

Bill Gates Charlie Rose Interview http://youtube.com/watch?v=M1EsIusQJQM on Charlie Rose (25 November 1996)
1990s

People , Idea

“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

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

People , Personality

“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.”

Bill Gates

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.
The Rolling Stone Interview (2014)

Life , God , People , World

“[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.”

Bill Gates

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

People , Problem , Decision , Freedom

“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

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)

People

“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

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

People , Way , Fish , Study

“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

“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

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

People , Imagination

“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

“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

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)
2000s

People , Communication , Teachers , Change

“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