• "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."
• Business week

• "The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system."
• Source: Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers (1986), ISBN 0914845713

• "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."
  • Source: Challenges and Strategy Memo (May 16, 1991)

• "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed."
  • Source: Focus Magazine, nr.43, pages 206-212, (October 23, 1995)

• "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."
  • Source: Time magazine, January 13, 1997, vol. 149, no. 2

• "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."
  • Source: Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time, Daniel Gross (1997), ISBN 0471196533

• "As long as they are going to steal it [software], we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." - Speaking of Chinese computer users
  • Source: Speech at the University of Washington, as reported by News.com, 1998

• "Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that"
  • Source: Speech at Computer History Museum, InfoWorld magazine, October 2001

• "We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence -- presence is the most trivial notion of context, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something."
  • Source: .NET Briefing Day Speech, July 24, 2002

• "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."
  • Source: Why I Hate Spam, Microsoft PressPass (2003)

• "If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act."
  • At Live8

• "To create a new standard it takes something that's not just a little bit different. It takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination. And the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard."
  • At a Mac conference in the eighties

• "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."
  • Source: Business @ The Speed of Thought
• "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."
  • Source: The Road Ahead [1]

• "Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time"
  • Source: BBC News (January 24 2004)
• "Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' - that might be spam."
  • Source: BBC News (January 24 2004)

• "When we have the information highway, I'll put it out there. Everybody who wants to pay, I don't know, one cent, can see what movies I'm watching and what books I'm reading and certain other information. If I'm still interesting, I'll rack up dollars as people access that part of the highway."
  • Source Playboy Magazine Interview, 1994

Quotes Attributed to Bill Gates

• "The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers."
  • Source: The Road Ahead, pg. 265

• "What's a network?"
  • Source: Notes from talk by Acorn's Hermann Hauser

• "We will never make a 32-bit operating system, but I'll always love IBM." (at the launch of MSX)

• "There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft."

• "Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more user-friendly... Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures, and stamp the words user-friendly on the cover."

• "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

• "There's nobody getting rich [by] writing software"

• "If something's 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?"
  • Source: From an interview of Bill Gates, taken by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz. Clips from the interview can be found on "No Money (Lullaby for Bill)" song (by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz).
    • Notes: interview text here; at the web site of Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, you can also download the mp3 from his site for free here

• "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."

• "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." — PBS interview with David Frost, November 1995

• "These games are getting really realistic."
  • "We think the PC really is the entertainment playform for the future; we're gonna have the best performance, the way to reach out and do multiplayer games, lots of new peripherals and the improvements just keep coming." - Talking about DOOM and other games to be supported on Windows 95 using DirectX, 30 October 1995
    • Source: Reel Splatter Productions

• "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operation system, and possible program, of all time."
  • Nov. 1987