Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates IIIis an American business magnate, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and programmer. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates has authored and co-authored several books...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth28 October 1955
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
Four or five years from now, you will wonder when somebody called up to get technical support how they just used the phone to try and describe what was going on with their PC.
The phone is very different. The idea of a meeting is very different.
There has never been any discussion about us (buying) any part of a phone company, British Telecom or any other phone company,
Consumers are getting more connected, and software is the center of that. The idea of holding meetings is different. The phone is different. That's because software is the center of it.
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.
So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on.
I don't like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.
There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints.
...one of the most inventive forms of creative capitalism involves someone we all know very well. A few years ago, I was sitting in a bar here in Davos with Bono. Late at night, after a few drinks, he was on fire, talking about how we could get a percentage of each purchase from civic-minded companies to help change the world. He kept calling people, waking them up, and handing me the phone to show me the interest.
The interview process tests not what the applicant knows, but how well they can process tricky questions: If you wanted to figure out how many times on average you would have to flip the pages of the Manhattan phone book to find a specific name, how would you approach the problem? If a spider fell to the bottom of a 50-foot well, and each day climbed up 3 feet and slipped back 2, how many days would it take the spider to get out of the well? .
Well before the case was filed Microsoft did everything it could to try and settle the case. In fact, there were about 10 days when day and night I was on the phone and made every effort I could.
The one top problem we've got in hardware advances is getting everybody connected at high speeds...Most people even five years from now will probably still be connected through the phone line,
I think five or six years ago, if you'd said to people that software would be incredible in terms of making photos better, music better, TV better, phone calls very different, they would have been quite skeptical, they would have thought, 'How can software do that? Now, particularly in music and to some degree in TV, they've seen that it makes a huge difference. It allows them to pick the things that they're interested in, it allows them to see it when they want to, to share with friends what they've seen and what they like.
We went down to Apple to talk to them about putting QuickTime into our media player,