Bill Gates: Software

“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

“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

“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.”

Bill Gates

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

Love , Sense

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

Bill Gates

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

“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 
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

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

Bill Gates

BusinessWeek, 26 November 1984
1980s

“"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”

Bill Gates

2000s

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

Bill Gates

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."”

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

“[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

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,
1990s

People , Way , Memory , Time