Bill Gates

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 I fished out listings of their operating systems.

Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Microsoft's only factory asset is the human imagination.

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

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.

Most companies have an inefficient chain of people and paper between customers and the people who can make major improvements. When the customer data finally reaches the product design group, it often isn't easy for the team to digest its significance and prioritieze it accordingly. All of the delays taken together mean that improvements don't happen as fast as they should.

I recomend the following approach to integrating customer complains and whish list into product and service development.

1. Focus on your most unhappy customers.

2. Use the technology to gather rich information on their unhappy experiences with your product and to find out what they want you to put into the product.

3. Use technology to drive the news to the right people in hurry.
If you use these three things, you'll turn those draining, bad news experiences into an exhilarating process of improving your product or service. Unhappy customers are always concern. They're also your greatest opportunity. Adopting a learning posture rather than a negative defensive posture can make customer complaints your best source of significant quality improvements...

640kb ought to be enough for anyone.

We will never make a 32 bit operating system.

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.

Investing in tomorrow's technology today is more critical than ever...

At every juncture, advanced tools have been the key to a new wave of applications, and each wave of applications has been key to driving computing to the next level.

In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.

"The Internet? We are not interested in it."

Every now and then i like to pick up a copy of TIME magazine and read every article from beginning to end, not just the articles that interest me most. That way you can be certain to learn something you didnt know previously.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We're focused on providing innovations in software, driving the continuous improvements for a much better experience, and there's a lot going on here that speaks to this decade and what's going to happen in this decade. We can kind of sum it up in terms of saying, "Yes, you can."

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering. When you finally get done and get to appreciate what you have done it is like a part of yourself that you've put together. I think a lot of the people here feel that way.

There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.

Our vision of what's important is exactly the same today, bringing together the best systems and the best software to empower people with rich information solutions.

The software is where the magic is. If you're going to have all this power be simple enough, appealing enough and cool enough, it's going to be because the software is right.

What will be most fun for me is to see how your generation comes in and takes software to a whole new level.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering. When you finally get done and get to appreciate what you have done it is like a part of yourself that you`ve put together. I think a lot of the people here feel that way.

Analytical software enables you to shift human resources from rote data collection to value-added customer service and support where the human touch makes a profound difference.

We are always saying to ourself...we have to innovate. We've got to come up with that breakthrough.

I have always worried that when these claimed incredible new benefits come, we will lose all the old ones. Then it becomes a kind of trade-off situation where you have to see if you are better off. I like clear wins. I would bet on improving what we have while maintaining all the benefits and eliminating the drawbacks, rather than introducing new games where there are new benefits and new drawbacks

The most important part of writing a program is designing the data structures. The second most important part is breaking the various code pieces down.

Features are kind of crummy in a way, because the more features you have, the bigger the manual is. And features are only beneficial if people take the time to use them, wheras speed — if you can print the pages faster, or show it on the screen faster, or recalc it faster — that’s worth an incredible amount. If you can give the users a few simple commands and make the program efficient enough to do what they want with those few commands, then you’re much better off. One sign of very good programs is that even internally they follow that philosophy of simplicity. If they want to do something complex, they call the code with simple operations internally, rather than doing the complex operation from scratch.

I still think that one of the finest tests of programming ability is to hand the programmer about 30 pages of code and see how quickly he can read through and understand it.