Bill Gates Quotes

As soon as I learned about this miracle of chip making I thought, what is the key missing element? ... I'd been working on software so I decided that maybe that was what was necessary to bring all this power to life. I talked about that with a friend, Paul Allen, and we kept saying, "What can we do? Can we start our own software company?" It seemed impossible at the time because software was not done by independent companies. The companies that built the computers — IBM and DEC — they did all the software. And when we called them up and said, "We would like to do an operating system," they said, "who are you?" to which we said, "we're high-school students." That was s, uh — that was the end of that conversation.

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

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.

What we're saying to people is that every idea about ease-of-use, we can develop in software, for the PC, without asking them to buy new hardware, without asking them to throw away their old applications.

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.

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.

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.

I laid out memory so the bottom 640 K 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 640 K 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.

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.

I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64 K to 640 K felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.

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

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

The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.

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.

Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company.