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

I wrote my first software program when I was thirteen years old. It was for playing tic-tac-toe. The computer I used was huge and cumbersome and slow and absolutely compelling.

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10 percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

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.

Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it — at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

The idea of representative democracy will change. Today, we claim we don't use direct democracy because it would be impractical to poll everybody on every issue. The truth is that we use representative democracy because we want to get an above-average group to think through problems and make choices that, in the short term, might not be obvious--even if they are to everybody's benefit over the long term.

Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone. Businesses and nonprofits, including foundations, play important roles, too. The market drives businesses to solve a lot of problems—for example improving health care in the rich world. But markets don’t serve the poor in some important sectors, like health, because the poor can’t afford to pay. In those areas, foundations can help drive innovation and take risks that governments and businesses can’t. Once we find solutions that work for the poor, we look to governments and business to take on the large-scale delivery.

I had a problem with Facebook, because the friend requests got out of hand.

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.

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.

If you want to improve the situation of the poorest two billion on the planet, having the price of energy go down substantially would be the best thing you could do for them. That, along with the carbon constraint, is hugely important, partly because global warming makes tropical agriculture virtually impossible.

The next big thing is definitely speech and voice recognition. You’ll be able to touch that board or speak to it and get your message to colleagues around the world. Screens are cheap.

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

DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.

Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down.

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.

Fear should guide you, but it should be latent. I have some latent fear. I consider failure on a regular basis.

Understand that [Blu-ray] is the last physical format there will ever be.

The Billionaire song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It's funny.

The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple.

We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world.

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.

Computers are great because when you're working with them you get immediate results: You know right away whether your program works. It's feedback you don't get from many other kinds of activity. The feedback from simple programs is particularly unambiguous. To this day it thrills me to know that if I can get the program right it will always work perfectly, every time, just the way I told it to. Experiencing this thrill was the beginning of my fascination with software.

Although I don’t have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way. It’s fun and quite rewarding. I also think that businesses have an important role to play in solving big problems. It’s great to see companies devoting a small part of their top people’s time to solving those problems. For instance, some pharmaceutical companies have been very generous in having some of their best researchers work on drugs for diseases that mainly affect the developing world. That’s a great example, and I hope more companies follow it.

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.

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

People thought I was a goof-off, a class clown at times. That was okay, not really a problem. Then I went to private school, and there was no position called the clown. I applied for it, but either they didn't like my brand of humor or humor wasn't in that season.

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.

We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing.

Every aspect of what's about to happen seems exciting to me. When I was nineteen, I caught sight of the future and based my career on what I saw. I turned out to have been right. But the Bill Gates of nineteen was in a very different position from the position I'm in now. In those days, not only did I have all the self-assurance of a smart teenager, but also nobody was watching me. If I failed--so what? Today my position is much more like the position of the computer giants in the seventies, and I hope I've learned some lessons from them.

Browse Bill Gates Quotes II