Intelligent Quotes

“People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Starting out behind is sometimes an advantage.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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”

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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“[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.”

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

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

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