Bill Gates Quotes

1003 Bill Gates Quotes

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The hardware market and the software market are separate.
Bill Gates

[When asked about the great design that comes from Steve Job’s approach] If you want black, I’ll get you a can of paint.
Bill Gates

[On IBM using Steve Job’s operating system] NeXTSTEP isn’t compatible with anything.
Bill Gates

[On NeXT] Frankly, I’m disappointed. Back in 1981, we were truly excited by the Macintosh when Steve [Jobs] showed it to us, because when you put it side-by-side with another computer, it was unlike anything anybody had ever seen before. In the grand scope of things, most of these features are truly trivial.
Bill Gates

All realty has been completely suspended.
Bill Gates

[To Gil Amelio] Do you really think Steve Jobs has anything there? I know his technology, it’s nothing but a warmed-over UNIX, and you’ll never be able to make it work on your machines. Don’t you understand that Steve [Jobs] doesn’t know anything about technology? He’s just a super salesman. I can’t believe you’re making such a stupid decision … He doesn’t know anything about engineering, and 99% of what he says and thinks is wrong. What the hell are you buying garbage for?
Bill Gates

[Gil] Amelio paid a lot for NeXT, and let’s be frank, the NeXT OS was never really used. But that was a twist of fate. What they ended up buying was a guy [Steve Jobs] who most people would not have predicted would be a great CEO, because he didn’t have much experience at it, but he was a brilliant guy with great design taste and great engineering taste. He suppressed his craziness enough to get himself appointed interim CEO.
Bill Gates

[To Steve Jobs] Hey, what the f*ck, am I supposed to put my applications on the NeXT OS?
Bill Gates

We had a group of people who liked working on the Mac stuff, and we liked the Mac. So Steve comes in and says, ‘Hey, that deal is too complicated. What I want is a simple deal. I want the commitment and I want an investment.’ And so we put that together in just four weeks.
Bill Gates

Some of the most exciting work that I’ve done in my career has been the work that I’ve done with Steve [Jobs] on the Macintosh. [New Mac versions of Word and Excel would be] in many ways more advanced than what we’ve done on the Windows platform.
Bill Gates



I didn’t know that my face was going to be blown up to looming proportions.
Bill Gates

[On getting Apple to licence their operating system] I was trying to do everything to get them to be a strong licensor. The industry has reached the point where it is now impossible for Apple to create a standard out of their innovative technology without support from, and the resulting credibility of, other personal computer manufacturers.
Bill Gates

Apple should licence Macintosh technology to 3-5 significant manufacturers for the development of ‘Mac Compatibles.’
Bill Gates

I want to help in any way I can with the licensing. Please give me a call.
Bill Gates

[On the iMac] The one thing Apple’s providing now is leadership in colors. It won’t take long for us to catch up with that, I don’t think.
Bill Gates

[On being shown an iPod for the first time] It looks like a great product. It’s only for Macintosh?
Bill Gates

Apple’s Jobs again. Steve Job’s ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things. This is very strange to me. The music companies’ own operations offer a service that is truly unfriendly to the user. Somehow they decide to give Apple the ability to do something pretty good.
Bill Gates

I am not saying this strangeness means we messed up – at least if we did, so did Real and Pressplay and MusicNet and basically everyone else. Now that Jobs has done it we need to move fast and get something were the user interface and Rights are as good… I think we need some plan to prove that, even though Jobs has us a bit flat footed again, we can move quick and both match and do stuff better.
Bill Gates

[On Apple making a Windows app] They’re pursuing the same strategy that they pursued in the PC business, controlling both the hardware and software. We’ve always done things a little bit differently than Apple in terms of giving people choice.
Bill Gates

There’s nothing unique about music. This story has played out on the PC.
Bill Gates



[In 1998] We’ve done a number of acquisitions in our history… A lot of the time, the reason we do the acquisition is, when we see a market developing very rapidly… we want to reduce the amount of time it takes us to get there, get working with customers, get the feedback that’s valuable.
Bill Gates

[In 1986] If a kid is addicted to a personal computer, I think that’s far better than watching TV, because at least his mind is making choices.
Bill Gates

[In 2011] It’s a great irony that Brown v. Board of Education is viewed as a milestone in civil rights, and yet the different in the quality of what the average Black student was getting in 1954 versus what the average student is getting today is not that great… Some of the more outrageous [segregation laws were] easier to… solve than this school thing.
Bill Gates

[On the disparity in the education system in 2011] Why isn’t there outrage, absolute outrage over this issue? Why aren’t there protests every day, I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t this activate people the way that it did during the Civil Rights Movement?
Bill Gates

It’s not about making himself look good [Bono] really reads this stuff; he cares about the complexity. Look, Bono is really, really having an impact. Things would be very different without him.
Bill Gates

People can know what we stand for as a company in terms of antidiscrimination. They can also know that we won’t necessarily take a position on every social issue that comes up.
Bill Gates

It’s amazing how strong a message is hidden in words like ‘diversity’ or the broad term ‘corporate social responsibility.’ A company needs to have core values of who they are and what they do [which] makes employees feel they have a purpose and guides their action.
Bill Gates

[On his early years] We didn’t even obey a 24 hour clock, we’d come in and program for a couple of days straight… four or five of us, when it was time to eat we’d all get in our cars, kind of race over to the restaurant and sit and talk about what we were doing. Sometimes I’d get excited talking about things, I’d forget to eat, but then you know, we’d just go back and program some more. It was us and our friends – those were fun days.
Bill Gates

Life for us was working and maybe going to a movie and then working some more. Sometimes customers would come in, and we were so tired we’d fall asleep in front of them. Or at an internal meeting I’d lie down on the floor, because I like to do that to brainstorm. And then I’d just fall asleep.
Bill Gates

We had contests to see who could stay in the building like three or four days straight. Some of the more prudish people would say, ‘Go home and take a bath.’
Bill Gates



[In 2011] I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book. But the electronic devices are good as well. Digital reading will completely take over. It’s lightweight and it’s fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.
Bill Gates

[In November 2009] The case studies of this crisis will be taught for decades to come. At least we’ll get that benefit out of the pain we went through. Leverage is a very dangerous thing. Warren [Buffett] has talked about derivatives as weapons of mass destruction. That wasn’t much heeded… And the mass destruction followed as predicted.
Bill Gates

[In 2010] When you choose to get married and have kids, if you’re going to do it well, you are going to give up some of the fanaticism.
Bill Gates

[In July 1994] There was one point in my life when my mother was trying to explain to me about what color shirt to wear with what ties… And I think people listen to their mother’s advice when it relates to fashion. It’s not an area in which I claim to know more than she does… I don’t look down at the color I’m wearing during the day. So if it pleases other people that I know a little bit more about which shirt to pick with which tie, that’s fine… I think I know a little bit about it now, but below average.
Bill Gates

[In July 1994] I eat at McDonald’s more than most people, but that’s because I don’t cook… In terms of fast food and deep understanding of the culture of fast food, I’m your man.
Bill Gates

[In 2008] My dad has set an example by what he does… whether it was at the university, speaking out on tough political issues, or going to war, or being a great lawyer… he’s the one who really got the foundation going, encouraged me to give early, got us involved in some very key causes and helped us build what is now a strong group of people that I get to work with full-time. So my dad is somebody I aspire to live up to what he’s done.
Bill Gates

[In 1994] Fear should guide you, but it should be latent. I have some latent fear. I consider failure on a regular basis.
Bill Gates

[In 2009] One way that running a foundation is not like running a business is that you don’t have customers who beat you up when you get things wrong, or competitors who work to take those customers away from you. You don’t have a stock price that goes up and down to tell you how you’re doing. This lack of a natural feedback loop means that we as a foundation have to be even more careful in picking our goals and being honest with ourselves when we are not achieving them.
Bill Gates

[In 2008] We do family planning. We fund research on crops. Some people think that you shouldn’t take science to help the poor people. This whole thing about which operating system somebody uses is a pretty silly thing versus issues involving starvation or death.
Bill Gates

[In 1998] There’s no doubt that we wouldn’t have a DOJ dispute here if some of our competitors hadn’t decided that battling it out in the marketplace was – that their product wasn’t going to do well enough on its own that way, that they were going to try and use the government to cripple us. And I use that word very carefully, because the idea of trying to tell us to ship products with features deleted, those are crippled products.
Bill Gates



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