Bill Gates

There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.

To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination — and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.

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

If something is expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?

Gary Kildall was one of the original pioneers of the PC revolution. He was a very creative computer scientist who did excellent work. Although we were competitors, I always had tremendous respect for his contributions to the PC industry. His untimely death was very unfortunate and he and his work will be missed.

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.... The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can.

It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.

The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.

Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company.

I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64 K to 640 K felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.