Bill Gates Quotes

1003 Bill Gates Quotes

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Customers want high-quality products at low prices, and they want them now.
Bill Gates

Ultimately the most important ‘speed’ issue for companies is cultural.
Bill Gates

An essential quality of a good manager is a determination to deal with any kind of bad news head on, to seek it out rather than deny it.
Bill Gates

You have to be able to make risky assumptions to undertake a new venture. To a certain extent, you have to suspend your disbelief and say ‘Hey, we’re going to go for this new business.’
Bill Gates

To get into a new business, you have to believe – at least for a while.
Bill Gates

We’ve always got to do better.
Bill Gates

Once you embrace unpleasant news not as a negative but as evidence of a need for change, you aren’t defeated by it. You’re learning from it. It’s all in how you approach failures.
Bill Gates

Learning from mistakes and constantly improving products is a key in all successful companies.
Bill Gates

Information creates accountability. Information eliminates excuses.
Bill Gates

To win big, sometimes you have to take big risks. Big bets mean big failures as well as successes.
Bill Gates



What is the value to a business of problems that never occur?
Bill Gates

Complexity is the death of all reengineering projects, especially those that involve technology.
Bill Gates

I’m an optimist. I believe in progress.
Bill Gates

Software applications stay around seemingly forever…
Bill Gates

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Is this fair?… One thing you do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?… I would appreciate letters from anyone who wants to pay up.
Bill Gates

[At Apple on the day the IBM PC was launched] They didn’t seem to care. It took them a year to realize what had happened.
Bill Gates

To create a new standard takes not just making something that’s a little bit different, it takes something that’s really new and 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

I remember the first time we went down, Steve [Jobs] had this app where it was just things bouncing around on the screen. That was the only app that ran.
Bill Gates

It was kind of a weird seduction visit, where Steve [Jobs] was saying, ‘We don’t really need you and we’re doing this great thing, and it’s under the cover.’ He’s in his Steve Jobs sales made, but kind of the sales mode that also says, ‘I don’t need you, but I might let you be involved.’
Bill Gates

[Asking about the Macintosh cursor] What kind of hardware do you use to draw the cursor? [‘We don’t have any special hardware for it!’ - Andy Hertzfeld]



We had more people working on the Mac than he [Steve Jobs] did. He had about fourteen or fifteen people. We had like twenty people. We really bet our life on it.
Bill Gates

Everybody was acting like the IBM PC was everything, which was nice, but Steve [Jobs] and I were kind of smiling that, hey, we’ve got something. And he’s kind of leaking, but nobody actually caught on.
Bill Gates

I went to every [Apple] luau. I was part of the crew.
Bill Gates

Steve was in his ultimate pied piper mode, proclaiming how the Mac will change the world and overworking people like mad, with incredible tensions and complex personal relationships.
Bill Gates

We’d go down Friday night, have dinner, and Steve [Jobs] would just be promoting that everything is great. Then the second day, without fail, he’d be kind of, ‘Oh shit, is this thing going to sell, oh God, I have to raise the price, I’m sorry I did that to you, and my team is a bunch of idiots.
Bill Gates

[On incorrectly saying 300 instead of 600] So his whole team starts looking at me like, ‘Are you going to tell him that he’s full of shit?’ And in that case I didn’t take the bait.
Bill Gates

It was like anybody who ever thought that there would be a manual for any Mac application was the greatest idiot. And we were like, ‘Does he [Steve Jobs] really mean it? Should we not tell him that we have people who are actually working on manuals?’
Bill Gates

We were going to get $10 per app, per machine. [Steve Jobs could] play fast and loose. We could make more money selling our software separately. It works better that way if you’re willing to think you’re going to have reasonable market share.
Bill Gates

We sort of say, ‘Hey we believe in graphics interfaces, we saw the Xerox Alto too.’
Bill Gates

[On Microsoft launching windows] He [Steve Jobs] called me down to get pissed off at me. I went down to Cupertino, like a command performance. I told him, ‘We’re doing Windows.’ I said to him, ‘We’re betting our company on graphical interfaces.
Bill Gates



[On Microsoft launching windows] Well, Steve [Jobs], I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.
Bill Gates

Steve [Jobs] didn’t know what to say. He could either say, ‘Oh, this is a violation of something,’ but he didn’t. He chose to say, ‘Oh, it’s actually really a piece of sh*t.’ I said, ‘Yes, it’s a nice little piece of sh*t. During the course of this meeting, he’d just ruder than sh*t. And then there’s a part where he’s almost crying, like, ‘Oh, just give me a chance to get this thing off.’ I’m good when people are emotional, I’m kind of less emotional.
Bill Gates

We [Steve Jobs] had to take a walk, which is not one of management techniques. That was when he began saying things like, ‘Okay, okay, but don’t make it too much like what we’re doing.’
Bill Gates

[On Microsoft ripping Apple off] If he [Steve Jobs] believes that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields.
Bill Gates

[About NeXT] The Macintosh was truly unique, but I personally don’t understand what is so unique about Steve’s [Jobs] new computer.
Bill Gates

I’d gone down to NeXT and I had the Odwalla, the most expensive carrot juice, and I’d never seen tech offices so lavish. And Steve comes a half hour late to the meeting.
Bill Gates

[To Steve Jobs about NeXT] This machine is crap. The optical disk has too low latency, the f*cking case is too expensive. This thing is ridiculous.
Bill Gates

[On developing software for NeXT] Develop for it? I’ll piss on it.
Bill Gates

[To Steve Jobs about developing for NeXT] When you get a market, I will consider it.
Bill Gates

[On Steve Job’s NeXT computer] His product comes with an interesting feature called incompatibility. It doesn’t run any of the existing software. It’s a super-nice computer. I don’t think if I went out to design an incompatible computer I would have done as well as he did.
Bill Gates



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