Bill Gates
Co-founder and Chairman of Microsoft, and founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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.
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.
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.
We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence presence is the most trivial notion, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something.
We've done some good work, but all of these products become obsolete so fast... It will be some finite number of years, and I don't know the number before our doom comes.
Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.
Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.
Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better.
There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates. Gates is a good man.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. Its a good thing we have museums to document that.