Bill Gates

1955– · American businessman, investor, and philanthropist (born 1955)

Topics: software engineering, learning, software design, life

• The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.

  — Bill Gates

• If your goal is to make the world a better place, one thing you can do is pick a specific challenge that you really care about. Then, learn as much as you can about it and try to volunteer your time to help an organization that is working in this area.

  — Bill Gates

• So the idea of being able to explain something in a succinct form is such a cool thing, and it requires you to know a field so well.

  — Bill Gates

• 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.

  — Bill Gates

• Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

  — Bill Gates

• If something is expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?

  — Bill Gates

• Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance.

  — Bill Gates

• 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.

  — Bill Gates

• Any operating system without a browser is going to be fucking out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business?

  — Bill Gates

• It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.

  — Bill Gates

• 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.

  — Bill Gates

• 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.

  — Bill Gates

• The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future.

  — Bill Gates

• There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.

  — Bill Gates

• Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

  — Bill Gates

• 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.

  — Bill Gates

• I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.

  — Bill Gates

• I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.

  — Bill Gates

• When it comes to climate change, I know innovation isn’t the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth livable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary.

  — Bill Gates

• A solid working knowledge of productivity software and other IT tools has become a basic foundation for success in virtually any career. Beyond that, however, I don't think you can overemphasise the importance of having a good background in maths and science.

  — Bill Gates