Bill Gates
Co-founder and Chairman of Microsoft, and founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
This leads to the paradox, that because the disease is only in the poor countries, there is not much investment. For example, there is more money put into baldness drugs, than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it is a terrible thing [audience laughter] and rich men are afflicted, so that is why that priority is set.
Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be.
There never was a chip, it is said, that Bill Gates couldn't slow down with a new batch of features.
One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so irritating.
Any operating system without a browser is going to be fucking out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business?
It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit.
I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.
Probably the most dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age.
You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong...
Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes.
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Robots will play an important role in providing physical assistance and even companionship for the elderly.
It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.… The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can.
Life is not fair. Get used to it... Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
"You know, I'm a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard - in other words a netbook - will be the mainstream on that." quoted in (February 2010)
There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. … I'm saying we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.
Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
Gary Kildall was one of the original pioneers of the PC revolution. He was a very creative computer scientist who did excellent work. Although we were competitors, I always had tremendous respect for his contributions to the PC industry. His untimely death was very unfortunate and he and his work will be missed.