Bill Gates
Co-founder and Chairman of Microsoft, and founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.
One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity...We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world,"
[Gates] apparently has made more money than anyone else his age, ever, in any business.
"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not." -Bill Gates, Fortune Magazine, July 17 2007
He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry.
If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act.
There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.
The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.
Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as great. Also, the opportunity to go back and really rewrite something isn't quite as great, because there's always a new set of features that you're adding on to the same program.
A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.
Bill Gates is a monocle and a Persian cat away from being the villain in a James Bond movie.
Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.
I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing.
If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. … Let’s be realistic, who came up with "File/Edit/View/Help"? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?
I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years.
I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.
Well, it seems to me that he did have an education to get there. It happened to be mine, not his.
Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company.
It's a business I don't know anything about, but I admire Bill Gates enormously. I know him individually, and I think he's incredible in business.