Bill Gates Quotes

1003 Bill Gates Quotes

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[In 1999] By 2011 Intel expects to deliver chips that have one billion transistors. This exponential improvement stems from Moore’s law, which says that the power of microchips doubles every eighteen to twenty-four months. To put Moore’s law in perspective, if products such as cars and cereal followed the same trend as the PC, a mid-size care would cost $27 and a box of cereal would cost a penny.
Bill Gates

Technology-driven shortening of time to market affects more than just manufacturing or high-tech industries. In book publishing, information tools have cut the cycle time from manuscript to publication in half, from eighteen months to nine months.
Bill Gates

Online banking has caught on in Brazil faster than in any other country.
Bill Gates

A better flow of digital information does not simply make things better but, rather, is a requirement for success.
Bill Gates

On the old minicomputer systems it took eight to ten hours to run a planning cycle. Using its own high-end PC systems, Compaq has gotten the time down to twenty-five minutes.
Bill Gates

If it takes eight to ten hours to crank the numbers, and you can’t update or access the database during that time, how can your information systems be as responsive as you need in an era of just-in-time delivery?
Bill Gates

Digital process makes it possible for every business to dramatically shorten its time to market…
Bill Gates

[In 1999] Product companies today need to compare themselves not with the best of their competitors, but with the best of all service companies.
Bill Gates

If you don’t meet customer demand quickly enough, without sacrificing quality, a competitor will.
Bill Gates

I have a natural instinct for hunting down grim news. If it’s out there, I want to know about it.
Bill Gates



Sometimes I get an e-mail that begins, ‘In keeping with the dictum that bad news should travel faster than good news, here’s a gem.’
Bill Gates

A lot goes wrong in any organization, even a good one.
Bill Gates

Losing market share is the kind of bad news that every organization can relate to.
Bill Gates

An effective manager wants to hear about what’s going wrong before he or she hears about what’s going right.
Bill Gates

You can’t react appropriately to disappointing news in any situation if it doesn’t reach you soon enough.
Bill Gates

You focus on bad news in order to get cracking on the solution.
Bill Gates

Digital technology speeds corporate reflexes in any emergency.
Bill Gates

No one company will dominate the Internet…
Bill Gates

We didn’t see that the Internet, a network for academics and techies, would blossom into the global commercial network it is today. We were focused on broadband applications such as videoconferencing and video-on-demand.
Bill Gates

Checking out competitors sites became something you did every morning. I still do.
Bill Gates



[In May 1995] the Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981…
Bill Gates

There’s no doubt that e-mail flattens the hierarchical structure of an organization.
Bill Gates

Ignoring bad news is a formula for decline.
Bill Gates

A change in corporate attitude, encouraging and listening to bad news, has to come from the top.
Bill Gates

The bearer of bad tidings should be rewarded, not punished.
Bill Gates

In commercial aviation, Douglas Aircraft, with its DC series, had a major lead over Boeing immediately after World War II. Douglas was so focused on filling all of its orders for the propeller-powered DC-7 that it failed to move quickly enough to jet engines. Boeing built the jet-powered 707 on speculation, without a single customer order in hand, and never looked back. Douglas is now part of Boeing.
Bill Gates

It doesn’t do any good to be receptive to bad news if you can’t get bad news up through your organization and then do something about it in a hurry.
Bill Gates

How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of it’s corporate reflexes.
Bill Gates

I like good news as much as the next person, but it also puts me in a skeptical frame of mind. I wonder what bad news I’m not hearing.
Bill Gates

Sometimes I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news.
Bill Gates



[In 1999] One day an eager upstart will put Microsoft out of business. I just hope it’s fifty years from now, not two or five.
Bill Gates

The weight of all of our failures could make me too depressed to come in to work. Instead I am excited about the challenges and by how we can use today’s bad news to help solve tomorrow’s problems.
Bill Gates

You have to study what customers say about their problems with your products and stay tuned in to what they want…
Bill Gates

In software, customers always want more.
Bill Gates

Unhappy customers are always a concern. They’re also your greatest opportunity.
Bill Gates

As software becomes increasingly prevalent in business, more and more employees who aren’t necessarily savvy about technical issues are using computers.
Bill Gates

Listen to your customers and take their bad news as an opportunity to turn your failures into the concrete improvements they want.
Bill Gates

You should examine customer complaints more often than company financials.
Bill Gates

‘Know your numbers’ is a fundamental precept of business.
Bill Gates

You should objectively understand every aspect of your business that you can.
Bill Gates



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