Intelligent Quotes

“Few skills are more important than knowing how to distinguish what’s true from what’s false.”

“The axiom that you learn more from your failures than your successes is trite but absolutely true.”

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

“Anytime we have new forms of communication it changes behavior whether it is political or business or any type of behavior.”

“Of all the things humans have ever created, AI will change society the most.”

“The type of person who comes up with the brilliant idea isn’t often the best person to turn it into a business.”

“Any company that stays the same will be passed by very quickly.”

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

“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 development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other.”

“The most exciting impact of AI agents is the way they will democratize services that today are too expensive for most people.”

“Computers haven’t had the effect on education that many of us in the industry have hoped.”

“Although some researchers think hallucinations are an inherent problem, I don’t agree. I’m optimistic that, over time, AI models can be taught to distinguish fact from fiction.”

“Computing is a good historical example where lower costs actually caused the overall market to grow.”

“If the 1980s were about quality 1990s were about reengineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity. About how quickly the nature of business will change. About how quickly business itself will be transacted.”

“I don’t think AI’s impact will be as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution, but it certainly will be as big as the introduction of the PC.”

“The most important speed issue is often not technical but cultural. It’s convincing everyone that the company’s survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible.”

“Implement policy and business structures that tie complaints directly to a fast solution.”

“A company’s ability to respond to unplanned events, good or bad, is a prime indicator of its ability to compete.”

“Killer applications change technological advances from curiosities into moneymaking essentials.”

“The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981.”

“Embrace bad news to learn where you need the most improvement.”

“A PC on every desk and in every home.”

“It [using ChatGPT in schools] reminds me of the time when electronic calculators became widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. Some math teachers worried that students would stop learning how to do basic arithmetic, but others embraced the new technology and focused on the thinking skills behind the arithmetic.”

“If I think something’s a waste of time or inappropriate I don’t wait to point it out. I say it right away. It’s real time. So you might hear me say That’s the dumbest idea I have ever heard many times during a meeting”

“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.”

“Our hiring was always focused on people right out of school. We had a few key hires like Charles Simonyi who came in with experience. But most of our developers, we decided that we wanted them to come with clear minds, not polluted by some other approach, to learn the way that we liked to develop software, and to put the kind of energy into it that we thought was key.”

“The key to the competition in operating systems was getting lots of applications.”

“Starting out behind is sometimes an advantage.”

David: “What do you read?”, Gates: “The Economist, every page. Also The Wall Street Journal and Business Week. And I read Time. If I'm traveling, every once in a while I’ll pick up an issue of People. I read USA Today.”

“The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules. It is an incredible opportunity as well as incredible challenge.”

“Fear should guide you, but it should be latent.”

“Strategically a major function of the CEO is to look for bad news and courage the organization to respond to it. Employees must be encouraged to share bad news as much as good news.”

“I want every product plan to try and go overboard on Internet features.”

“The IT job is one where you get an F if you fail but only a C if you succeed.”

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

“If you look out far enough the computer will eventually learn to reason in somewhat the same way that humans do, so called "artificial intelligence". If you take that far enough you can imagine an evolution, essentially, moving over to silicon-based life and carbon-based life, playing a much more limited role than it does today.”

“None of the protection systems that exist today, whether steering-wheel locks or steel vaults, are completely fail-safe. The best we can do is make it as difficult as possible for somebody to break a security device or get inside.”

“However good you were at math, that’s how good you’d be at other subjects.”

“I encourage everyone to follow developments in AI as much as possible. It’s the most transformative innovation any of us will see in our lifetimes.”

“[AI] Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. They’re also going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons.”

“Amazingly it is easier to find information on the Web than it is to find information on the Microsoft Corporate Network.”

“Most important is that the Internet has bootstrapped itself as a place to publish content. It has enough users that it is benefiting from the positive feedback loop of the more users it gets, the more content it gets, and the more content it gets, the more users it gets.”

“Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?”

“To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.”

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

“I wrote my first program for a computer when I was thirteen years old.”

“A new competitor ‘born’ on the Internet is Netscape. Their browser is dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network extensions will catch on. They are pursuing a multi-platform strategy where they move the key API into the client to commoditize the underlying operating system.”