Bill Gates Quotes

1003 Bill Gates Quotes

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[Before being married] Kids are a problem. Babies are a subset.
Bill Gates

We have this vision of where we are trying to go, and we’re a long ways from it.
Bill Gates

[On what it felt like to be the chairman of the world’s largest software company] You gotta watch out for the anticlimax.
Bill Gates

We are not on top of the networking heap, or the spreadsheet heap, or the word processing heap. Computers are not very easy to use. We don’t have information at our fingertips. There is one thing that is fun – I look out there and see fun people to work with, who are learning a lot. That’s cool, and that feels good, but we’re not on top. Yes, our revenues are bigger than anybody else’s but if we don’t run fast and do good things…
Bill Gates

Believe me, starting out the window and saying ‘Isn’t this great’ is not the solution to pushing things forward… You’ve got to keep driving hard.
Bill Gates

[On suggestions that take over and become the IBM chairman in 1993] Microsoft faces a lot of challenges itself, and I feel I need to help.
Bill Gates

[To Microsoft Executive Jonathan Lazarus in 1993] You seem to like married life, so that’s a good sign that independent types like you can make it work.
Bill Gates

[After getting married to Melinda Gates in 1993] If anybody thinks being married is going to lessen my intensity, they are in for a surprise!
Bill Gates

[In 1999] Business is going to change more in the next ten years than it has in the last fifty.
Bill Gates

How can technology help you run your business better?
Bill Gates



If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about reengineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity. About how quickly the nature of business will change. About how quickly business itself will be transacted.
Bill Gates

A manufacturer or retailer that responds to changes in sales in hours instead of weeks is no longer at heart a product company, but a service company that has a product offering.
Bill Gates

[In 1999] We’ve been in the Information Age for about thirty years, but because most of the information moving among businesses has remained in paper form, the process of buyers finding sellers remains unchanged.
Bill Gates

[In 1999] Too many senior managers seem to take the absence of timely information as a given.
Bill Gates

The ‘personal’ in personal computer means that individual knowledge workers have a powerful tool for analysing and using the information delivered by these solutions.
Bill Gates

[In 1999] Within a decade most people will regularly use PCs at work and at home, they’ll use e-mail routinely, they’ll be connected to the Internet, they’ll carry digital devices containing their personal and business information.
Bill Gates

[At Microsoft in 1999] Replacing paper processes with collaborative digital processes has cut weeks out of our budgeting and other operational processes.
Bill Gates

[In 1999] The successful companies of the next decade will be the ones that use digital tools to reinvent the way they work.
Bill Gates

Information flow is your lifeblood.
Bill Gates

The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information.
Bill Gates



How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.
Bill Gates

If you do enough things poorly, you’ll go out of business.
Bill Gates

A company that began by opportunistically making welding machines, bowling alley sensors, and weight-reduction machines moved on to oscilloscopes and computers, becoming the Hewlett Packard we know today.
Bill Gates

When you look at your existing business, it’s not always clear where the next growth opportunity is.
Bill Gates

[In 1999] A market analyst recently suggested that McDonald’s flip its business model. Referring to the company’s occasional promotion of movie-inspired toys, the analyst said that McDonald’s should use its low-margin burgers to sell a line of high-margin toys instead of the other way round.
Bill Gates

The critical thing is that a company’s managers have the information to understand their competitive edge and what their next great market could be.
Bill Gates

Information technology gives you access to the data that leads to insights into your business.
Bill Gates

Information technology enables you to act quickly.
Bill Gates

[In 1999 on ‘My Years with General Motors’ by Alfred P. Sloan Jr.] If you read only one book on business, read Sloan’s.
Bill Gates

Positive, rational, information-focused leadership can lead to extraordinary success.
Bill Gates



[On Microsoft in 1999] We made a point of moving into international markets as early as possible…
Bill Gates

If information management and organizational responsiveness made such a fundamental difference in a traditional smokestack industry seventy years ago, how much more difference will they make propelled by technology?
Bill Gates

Today bank information systems have to do more than manage huge amounts of financial data. They have to put more intelligence about customers into the hands of business strategists and loan officers.
Bill Gates

Information systems are no longer only about back-end number-crunching. They’re about enabling information to be put to work on behalf of the consumer.
Bill Gates

[In 1999] They said, ‘We don’t want to pick up the additional cost and complexity of still another interface.’ I told them the solution was simple: They should build a great interface for customers to see data over the Internet, then use the same interface to view data internally.
Bill Gates

It takes brains to understand the physics and develop the underlying calculations for the arcs of artillery projectiles or ballistic missiles; it takes an idiot savant – a computer – to do the calculations in an instant.
Bill Gates

To think, act, react, and adapt.
Bill Gates

To do information work, people in the company have to have ready access to information.
Bill Gates

A company’s middle managers and line employees, not just its high-level executives, need to see business data.
Bill Gates

It’s the middle managers in every company who need to understand where their profits and losses lie, what marketing programs are working or not, and what expenses are in line or out of whack.
Bill Gates



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