“You've got to give great tools to those small teams. So, pick good people, use small teams, give them excellent tools; vast compilation, debugging, lots of machines, profiling technology, so that they are very productive in terms of what they are doing. Make it very clear what they can do to change the spec. Make them feel like they are very much in control of it.”
Bill Gates
Smithsonian Interview: Bill Gates (Primary source)
Bill Gates reflects on the early personal computing revolution, Microsoft’s role, and how software shaped the industry in this Smithsonian oral history interview from the Computer History Collection.
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“People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Few skills are more important than knowing how to distinguish what’s true from what’s false.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“The axiom that you learn more from your failures than your successes is trite but absolutely true.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Good criticism is very rare, and always precious.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“Any company that stays the same will be passed by very quickly.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“How unreasonable people are! They never use the freedoms they have but demand those they do not have; they have freedom of thought—they demand freedom of speech.”
— Søren Kierkegaard Primary source