Gems from Bill

["Dude VanWinkle" <dudevanwinkle () gmail com>]

Ahh, how time makes fools of us all, time and time again (some more than others)

From:http://news.com.com/2100-1014_3-6084505.html?part=rss&tag=6084505&subj=news

Bill Gates is the richest and arguably most powerful man in the tech
sector. Historically reserved with regard to his private life, he
has--over the last few decades--said a lot about business, global
health and the evolution of the computer industry. Here are some of
the more memorable quotes from Microsoft's co-founder and tech titan:

• "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." (Challenges and Strategy,
May 16, 1991)

• "If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to
get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software
to be written, or not?" (Interview with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz in 80
Microcomputing, 1980)

• "IBM to this day is the biggest company in the computer industry.
People misunderstand that. We managed our relationship with IBM
because we managed to surprise them again and again with how quickly
we were able to do new things." (U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 20,
2001)

• (Asked if Microsoft is headed toward being a post-Windows company)
"No. Windows is our most important product. We're broadening the
platform out so that pieces of it can run on the Internet itself and
pieces can run on different devices. The magical platform now is .NET.
But the actual piece of it that runs on the PC client, where you can
run offline, you can do reading and speech recognition and handwriting
recognition, that's the pillar on which everything rests." (U.S. News
& World Report, Aug. 20, 2001)

• "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China,
but people don't pay for the software," he said. "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." (On software piracy in
China, July 1998)

• "Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing
we have museums to document that." (At the Computer History Museum,
Oct. 2004)

• "When we have the information highway, I'll put it out there.
Everybody who wants to pay, I don't know, one cent, can see what
movies I'm watching and what books I'm reading and certain other
information. If I'm still interesting, I'll rack up dollars as people
access that part of the highway." (Playboy, 1994)

• "At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is
that they all come from the top--I'm afraid that's not quite right but
fortunately there are plenty that are coming." (BBC, Dec. 2001)

• "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." (Programmers at Work
by Susan Lammers, 1986)

• "When you really look at it, Oracle's gotten where it is now by
dumping cheap and buggy software on tens of thousands of businesses
across the country and the world--trapping them within closed,
proprietary systems and making them pay through the nose. Larry
Ellison is public enemy number one when it comes to innovation and
fairness." (Interview with Krakt Korteks, Nov. 20, 2000)

• "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."
(Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2003)
related coverage
Changing of the guard
The end of the Gates era

• "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." (Forbes Greatest
Business Stories of All Time, Daniel Gross, 1997)

• "It really is a failure of capitalism. You know capitalism is this
wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions
to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's
really let us down." (Interview with Bill Moyers, May 9, 2003)

• "I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the
most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of
communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by
their user." (In a speech at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,
Feb. 24, 2004)

• "Information technology and business are becoming inextricably
interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one
without talking about the other." (Business @ the Speed of Thought)

• "I wish I wasn't (the world's richest man)... There's nothing good
that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it."
(Speaking at online advertising conference in Redmond, Wash., May 5,
2006)

• "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking
they can't lose." (The Road Ahead)

• "Let's face it, the average computer user has the brain of a Spider
Monkey." (To Andrew Lephter, Feb. 21, 2000)

• "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any
significant number of users want fixed." (Focus Magazine, Oct. 23,
1995)

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hehe

-JP<who thinks the last quote sounds kinda like the recent Vista quote>

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