Bill Gates
Co-founder and Chairman of Microsoft, and founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
[Gates] apparently has made more money than anyone else his age, ever, in any business.
Well, it seems to me that he did have an education to get there. It happened to be mine, not his.
Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it — at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.
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.
Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company.
The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.
There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.
If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act.
He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry.
"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
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.
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,"
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.
I wish I wasn't ... There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it.
The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.
First we've got population. Now, the world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that (forecast) by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3 (per year).
Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' — that might be spam.
The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.
I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within—oh five or six years people were complaining.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.