Bill Gates

(Born 1955)

Cofounder and Chief Software Architect of , and the world's richest person

• "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 exciting."
  • Source: "Toward a Spam-Free Future" (Executive E-mail) and "Why I Hate Spam" (PressPass), respectively

• "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."

• "What's a network?" (mid 1980s, source:Interview with Acorn's Hermann Hauser)

• "WWW? Nice toy, but what a waste of time." (1995)

• "Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one."
  • Notes: Gates and Microsoft have refuted this quote. Gates never gave a speech at a high school that included this quote nor did it appear in his book Business @ The Speed of Thought.

• "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. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then they have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can. Amazingly we havn't done any patent exchanges tha I am aware of. Amazingly we havn't found a way to use our licensing position to avoid having our own customers cause patent problems for us. I know these aren't simply problems but they deserve more effort by both Legal and other groups. For example we need to do a patent exchange with HP as part of our new relationship. In many application categories straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come up with patentable ideas." (1991).
  • Source: "Challenges and Strategy" memo dated May 16, 1991.

• "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."

• "...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."

• "No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer." (said in the early 1970s)

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

Misattributed to Bill Gates:

• "640kb ought to be enough for anybody."
  • Notes: Attributed to him in 1981 when designing DOS's conventional memory limit as ten times the amount in his computer; Bill Gates has denied saying this and the quote is likely a fabrication as the memory limit was imposed by the hardware architecture not the software. [1]