Bill Gates

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities."

"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, 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."

"Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told me about it and I said, "I don't know how to spell that." I said, "Yeah, I've got that on my list, so I'm okay." But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy."

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

"Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that."

"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."

"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."

"Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time."

"640 kB sollten eigentlich genug für jeden sein."

"„Geistiges Eigentum hat die Haltbarkeitsdauer einer Banane.“"

"„Deine unzufriedensten Kunden sind deine größte Lernquelle.“"

"„Wenn die Leute aus jener Zeit, als die heute wichtigsten Ideen entstanden, schon gewusst hätten, wie ein Patentverfahren funktioniert und ihre Ideen auch patentiert hätten, dann wäre die heutige Industrie bereits zum Stillstand gekommen.“"