Bill Gates Quotes
1003 Bill Gates Quotes
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[In 1998] When your own government sues you, it’s not a pleasant experience. I wasn’t sitting there going, ‘ha, ha, ha, I’ll do what I want.’ I was thinking this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
Bill Gates
[In 2007] Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for.
Bill Gates
[In 1999 on Jennifer his three year old daughter] Is a little redhead with brown eyes, the happiest person I’ve ever met. Everything she does is just so fascinating. Just getting up in the morning… ‘Dah-dee, can I get up now?’ So I go in and pick her up. I like carrying her around a lot and she likes to be carried around. She’s just the perfect size for it, so she rides on my head.
Bill Gates
[In 2011 on his children] The more you force them by picking your choice, the more they will go away from it.
Bill Gates
[In 2005 on his kids playing an Xbox] Absolutely… as opposed to sitting and passively watching TV, particularly as we bring in the social element. Now I wouldn’t hold that up against, say, doing your homework or reading books. I think parents have to budget their kids’ time, but interactive gaming fits in the mix, and it’s getting a lot better.
Bill Gates
[In 2004] Our decision making process was very clear. There would be meetings I would be in and we would make those decisions. And so there was no confusion, there was no politicking, there was no overly long memo trying to explain something or posturing. That’s how we would make those decisions… You don’t need a whole bunch of P&L owners or structure.
Bill Gates
[In 1997] Don’t make the same decision twice. Spend time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you don’t revisit the issue unnecessarily… After all, why bother deciding an issue if it isn’t really decided?
Bill Gates
[In 2003] There were a lot of missteps in the early days; because we got in early, we got to make more mistakes than other people.
Bill Gates
[In 1997] There’s no one path at Microsoft. We have a very flat organization. Sometimes ideas flow down, sometimes they flow up, or horizontally. Usually someone will get an idea or identify a problem and send an e-mail to someone else. This may kick off a SWAT team to deal with it. At some point the decision gets made face to face or over e-mail. On strategic decisions, it may go to a senior VP or to me. By and large, we empower people to make decisions themselves.
Bill Gates
[In June 2008] Well, hey, we can’t do everything – we don’t expect to do everything. But we do a lot and we have a longer time horizon than anyone else.
Bill Gates
[In 1995] We had ideas that the giants of the time missed. We’re always thinking about what we have missed that could keep us on top.
Bill Gates
[In 2005] The nice thing about being a parent is it gives you a long-term perspective. You start thinking about, ‘Ok, you know, when my kids are my age, what will the United States be like?’ I also think about my kids showing interest in different things – you know, I won’t push them, but I’d love to have them be in some part of the sciences where they can make a contribution that really improves the world.
Bill Gates
[In 1999 on his parents] In my parents I saw a model where they were really always communicating, doing things together… They were really kind of a team. I wanted some of that magic myself.
Bill Gates
[In 2003 on Paul Allen] Paul was my friend from the early days. And we are very close friends today and I’m sure we always will be. He is very idea-oriented. He and I would brainstorm things. So even though I was running the business, it was a partnership. His role was very, very critical to so many of the transitions that we made. But there was always some strain because I was pushing people to work hard, including Paul.
Bill Gates
[In 1995] Sometimes I envy people who still get to program. After I stopped programming for Microsoft, I used to say half-jokingly in meetings: ‘Maybe I’ll come in this weekend and write it myself.’ I don’t say that anymore but I think about it.
Bill Gates
[In 1988] The way our ladder works, you can keep getting promoted to new levels just by being better at creating the product. It’s important to set examples. When something works out, you take the guys involved in that project and you make them heroes. You let everyone know that people should strive to be like them.
Bill Gates
[In October 2011 on Steve Jobs] The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.
Bill Gates
[In November 2009 on Steve Jobs] He, of all the leaders in the industry that I have worked with, showed more inspiration and he saved the company.
Bill Gates
We didn’t need a lot of formal process because, believe me, it’s better to have three guys who really know what’s going on than to have all of the processes that allow twelve to all sort of think they are part of that decision process.
Bill Gates
[In 2008] With technology we’ve always got that people tend to overestimate what can change in a year or two, and they underestimate the cumulative effort of change that can take place in a 10 or 15 year period.
Bill Gates
[In 1999] There’s not a single line of source code here today that will have value in, say, four or five years’ time. Today’s operating systems will be obsolete in five years.
Bill Gates
[In 2008] This period in the late ‘90s when people thought startups could do everything, people didn’t care about research and the long-term effort required to do speech recognition, visual recognition. It got a little frustrating. All this capital was being thrown at those people, and they weren’t really doing multi-product, long-term things, they were just kind of doing this one thing, but that was messing up the way that our work was looked at.
Bill Gates
I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.
Bill Gates
We were in the right place at the right time. We got there first.
Bill Gates
[In 1995 on flying economy] Costs less money. You get there just as fast as flying first class. And my body fits. If I was really wide or really tall, I might view the issue differently.
Bill Gates
[In 2009] I was a huge beneficiary of this country’s unique willingness to take a risk on a young person.
Bill Gates
[In 2005] Our university system is the best. We fund our universities to do a lot of research and that is an amazing thing. We reward risk taking… It is a chaotic system, but it is a great engine of innovation in the world, and with federal tax money and philanthropy on top of that…
Bill Gates
[In 1996] We focus on what companies do well as opposed to what they do poorly. We don’t dismiss a company as unimportant just because a lot of things about it may be less than perfect. The company may be doing something important; it may not even know that it is important.
Bill Gates
[In 2007 at Harvard] I came to be the leader of the antisocial group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.
Bill Gates
[On Andy Grove in 1998] Andy Grove is an incredible CEO. He’s big on picking objectives, and driving the company towards that objective. He’s big on clarity. He is an engineering manager, par excellence.
Bill Gates
[In 2011 on vaccines] It’s an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn’t have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccines, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts, they kill children. It’s a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.
Bill Gates
[In 1984] To create a new standard, it take 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 seen – is the only one that meets that standard.
Bill Gates
[In 1998] There is a tendency in companies to let good news travel fast. Oh, we just won this account. Oh, things went so well. But, the thing about good news is, it’s generally not actionable… Bad news, on the other hand, is actionable. This customer is not very happy. This competitor is doing something very well. This project is behind… The sooner you get the bad news, the better off you’re going to be, in order to kind of absorb it, to change your product plan, to go back and talk to the people, really dig into it. So when somebody sense me mail saying, you know, we won XYZ account for Exchange, I send mail back and say, does that mean we lost every other account, because you only send me mail on one account? Tell me about the ones we lost, and why? And so that’s really gotten into our culture.
Bill Gates
[In 2000] Steve Ballmer said… that the responsibility of being CEO was more burdensome than he had expected. Well, I told him before he took the job that it was an inhuman job. It makes infinite demands on you, and I feel very lucky that I have Steve. I think he’s stepping into the shoes exactly the way I hoped he would.
Bill Gates
[When in high school he said] Look, if you want me to come back you have to let me be in charge. But this is a dangerous thing, because if you put me in charge this time, I’m going to want to be in charge forever after.
Bill Gates
[In 1997] Externally people tend to identify the company with one person. It’s a natural thing so I’ve had mostly the minuses, but also the pluses of that.
Bill Gates
[In 1996] People’s perception of the importance of my role is certainly greater than the reality.
Bill Gates
[In 2008] If you give people a change to associate themselves with a cause they care about, they will pay more, and that premium can make an impact.
Bill Gates
[In 2005] I tend to be a little more realistic.
Bill Gates
Once you embrace unpleasant news, not as a negative but as evidence of a need for change, you aren’t defeated by it. You’re learning from it.
Bill Gates
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