Bill Gates Quotes

1003 Bill Gates Quotes

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[On his parents ordering him to give up computers, at least for a while when he was in grade 9] It was a combination of things, where people thought, hey, maybe we are out of control, and people thought we weren’t paying attention to anything else, and that it was a kind of abnormal situation. So my parents said, ‘Why don’t you give this stuff up.’ So I did. I just went off and did some other stuff… science, math. There was an infinite amount to read. There was at least nine months there when I did nothing with computers.
Bill Gates

We hacked around on all of those machines. We hung around the university to find any computer we could get free time on. Once C-Cubed went out of business, it was just finding time on anything.
Bill Gates

We learned about peripheral processors on the CDC at the university. But I was not involved in crashing the Cybernet… although I know some people who say they did.
Bill Gates

[On being asked to bow out of the ISI project] Paul [Allen] and Rick [Weiland] decided there wasn’t enough work to go around so they told us ‘We don’t need you guys.’ But then they got sidetracked. They weren’t even writing the payroll program. So they asked me to come back in and I said to them, ‘Okay, you want me to come back in, then I’ll be in charge of this thing… Kent and I ended up writing most of the payroll program, a COBOL program. We got free computer time to do the work, and as compensation we got free computer time. It ended up being a good deal for everybody.
Bill Gates

[On the payroll project being fairly boring] You had to understand state taxes, payroll deductions… that kind of stuff.
Bill Gates

[As a student on his Traf-O-Data machine that crashed when demonstrating it to a city official who was losing interest] Tell him mom, tell him it really works!
Bill Gates

[On offering school class-scheduling] We use a unique scheduling service developed by Lakeside. We would like to provide scheduling for your school as well. A good job at a reasonable cost - $2 to $2.50 per student. We would appreciate opportunities to discuss this with you.
Bill Gates

[On TRW wanting both him and Paul Allen to come down for job interviews when he was still in high school] Paul, it’s our chance to finally make some real money! We gotta do it. [They were offered $165/week]
Bill Gates

I was always vague about what I was going to do, but my parents wanted me to go to undergraduate school. They didn’t want me to go start a company or just go do graduate work. They didn’t have a specific plan in mind, but they thought I should live with other undergraduates, take normal undergraduate courses… which is exactly what I did.
Bill Gates

[On receiving permission from Harvard to take both graduate and undergraduate courses.] About two-thirds of my courses were toward my undergraduate degree and about a third were set aside for my graduate degree, although it doesn’t matter now since I didn’t complete either one.
Bill Gates



I met several people in the math department who were quite a bit better than I was at math. It changed my view about going into math. You can persevere in the field of math and make incredible breakthroughs, but it probably discouraged me. It made the odds much longer that I could do some world-class thing. I had to really think about it: Hey, I’m going to sit in a room, staring at a wall for five years, and even if I come up with something, who knows. So it made me think about whether math was something I wanted to do or not. But there were so many choices. My mind was pretty much open. I thought law would be fun… I thought physiological psychology – the study of the brain – would be fun… I thought working in artificial intelligence would be fun… I thought theoretical computer science would be fun… I really had not zeroed in on something…
Bill Gates

[On using Harvard computers for commercial use in his university days.] There was no formal reprimand, just an admonishment for bringing Paul [Allen] in on a regular basis.
Bill Gates

[In 1976] Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving, and adding features to BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000… [Whilst there has been strong feedback from enthusiasts he noticed] 1) Most of these ‘users’ never bought BASIC (less than 10 percent of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour… Is this fair?
Bill Gates

[In 1976] One thing you don’t do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn’t make money selling software. The royalties paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even-operation. One thing you can do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?… The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software… but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists.
Bill Gates

[In 1976] Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers, and deluge the market with good software.
Bill Gates

[On investing money in developing software in 1976] How do you get your investment back?
Bill Gates

[In 1976] Perhaps the present dilemma has resulted from a failure by many to realize that neither Microsoft nor anyone else can develop extensive software without a reasonable return on the huge investment in time that is necessary.
Bill Gates

[On the MITS guys] These guys think they’ve got me over a barrel, but I’m holding my own.
Bill Gates

In the first four years of the company, there was no Microsoft program that I wasn’t involved in actually writing and designing. In all those initial products, whether it was BASIC, FORTRAN, BASIC 6800 or BASIC 6502, not a line of code went out that I didn’t look over.
Bill Gates

It’s kind of painful sometimes if you have somebody else working on the project. They never code stuff exactly the same way you like to see it coded. I remember when we were working on BASIC, I’d go back and recode other people’s section of code, without making any dramatic improvements. That bothers people when you go in and do that, but sometimes you just feel like you have to do it.
Bill Gates



I went into Japan only two years after I started Microsoft knowing that in terms of working with hardware companies, that was a great place to be.
Bill Gates

[On Microsoft initially going into Japan] A lot of great research goes on there. And also, it was the most likely source of competition other than the U.S. itself. I didn’t want to leave that market and then come and be that much stronger to compete with us on a worldwide basis.
Bill Gates

[On often getting to the airport never more than ten minutes before his departure time often catching the plane just as the flight attendant was closing the door] That’s where you most often find high performance. I don’t like to waste time. I have a very full schedule, and I travel enough that I think I am very efficient at getting to the airport and understanding how much time to set aside. I’m not the kind of guy who goes an hour before the flight leaves, let’s put it that way. That would seem like a waste of time.
Bill Gates

[On a programmer doing something they thought was very clever] Why didn’t you do this, or why didn’t you do that two days ago?
Bill Gates

When you lost a deal, you lost it twice – you didn’t get the money, and the other company did. If the deal were worth $50,000, then you essentially lost $100,000 because that was the difference between what you could have had and what someone else walked away with.
Bill Gates

We feel real bad about what’s late and what hasn’t been done, and here’s what we can do for you.
Bill Gates

We’re sorry we haven’t come through on this smaller delivery, but look, we’ll get you in on this huge part of our vision, and that will put you in an even better position.
Bill Gates

When we got up to 30 [employees], it was still just me, a secretary, and 28 programmers. I wrote all the checks, answered the mail, took the phone calls – it was a great research and development group, nothing more. Then I brought in Steve Ballmer, who knew a lot about business and not much about computers.
Bill Gates

[On what IBM asked him] A lot of crazy questions.
Bill Gates

[On Microsoft] We set the standard.
Bill Gates



[On Kay Nishi] Kay’s kind of a flamboyant guy, and when he believes in something, he believes in it very strongly. He stood up, made his case and we just said ‘Yeah!’
Bill Gates

This IBM project was a super-exciting, fun project. We were given, even for a small company, an incredible amount of latitude in changing how things got done as the project progressed… And we had a really great interface with the people from the customer (IBM), even though they were as far away as they could be… We loved to kid them about all the security – how we had to have locks, and sign things in, and use code names and stuff like that… I was very, very impressed with the team they put together… We were the only vendor that understood what the project was about. Even up to the announcement, most vendors were kept in the dark about the general scope and the general push of things. So we enjoyed a really unique relationship.
Bill Gates

[In 1981] We’re going to put Digital Research out of business.
Bill Gates

[In 1982] What’s a business plan?
Bill Gates

[In November 1982] Technology is out of control. There are tons of software out there. Much of it pathetic. I’ve bought programs that don’t work, and with some I can’t even get past the manual.
Bill Gates

[In November 1982] Over the next two years, we’ll come up with software that will actually meet people’s needs all the way… Right now much of the software is either bad or too hard to use. But these barriers are coming down.
Bill Gates

[On a negotiation with Andy Hertzfeld] You’re a really great programmer right? [‘Yeah… I don’t know. Sure, I guess so.’ –Andy Hertzfeld] Well, a really great programmer should be able to write this program pretty quick, right? [‘Yeah, I guess so… I don’t know, sure.’] So how long do you think it should take you? [‘Gee, I don’t really know.’] Well if you are really good , and you are really good, then it shouldn’t take you too long. [Then asking him how much money he made a week and Hertzfeld said $5,000/week] Well, you can’t expect to make more than that, right? So eight times $5,000 – that’s $40,000. [Andy Hertzfeld rejected the offer and then sold the switcher program to Apple for $150,000.]
Bill Gates

[On receiving a prototype of Andy Hertzfeld’s program] I have been demoing it to everyone who walks in my office. You are really the only person who knows all the system insides well enough to get it done. Keep up the good work.
Bill Gates

[On an interesting but troublesome photoshoot] Why don’t you people go make a better living and leave me to make mine.
Bill Gates

OK I’ll take this weekend, and I’ll code it, and I’ll show you how it’s done!
Bill Gates



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