Cited to "Challenges and Strategy" (16 May 1991) via Fred Warshofsky (1994), The Patent Wars. This is a misreading of Warshofsky's text; the quotation is actually from League for Programming Freedom (1991), " Against Software Patents http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-prop/lpf-against-software-patents.html." An example of the misattribution appears in Lawrence Lessig (2001), The future of ideas. Misattributed

“"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not." -Bill Gates, Fortune Magazine, July 17 2007”

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Bill Gates

2000s

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

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Bill Gates

Interview with Electronics magazine (1989)
1980s

“As soon as I learned about this miracle of chip making I thought, what is the key missing element? … I'd been working on software so I decided that maybe that was what was necessary to bring all this power to life. I talked about that with a friend, Paul Allen, and we kept saying, "What can we do? Can we start our own software company?" It seemed impossible at the time because software was not done by independent companies. The companies that built the computers — IBM and DEC — they did all the software. And when we called them up and said, "We would like to do an operating system," they said, "who are you?" to which we said, "we're high-school students."”

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Bill Gates

That was s, uh — that was the end of that conversation. Speech to the Economic Club of Detroit (1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzX6UUJ461s 1990s

“Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.”

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BBC News (24 January 2004) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3426367.stm 2000s

“Life is not fair. Get used to it… Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.”

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Bill Gates

Though widely attributed to Gates on the internet, this list of life suggestions is actually based on one from Charles J. Sykes. More information at Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/language/document/liferule.htm Misattributed

“Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.”

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Bill Gates

Speech at the Computer History Museum, as quoted in InfoWorld magazine (October 2001) http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/01/HNgatestalksmuseum_1.html 2000s

“I’d like to start by telling you about my wife Melinda’s Aunt Myra. We see her a few times a year. Aunt Myra worked for many years taking reservations for Delta Airlines. She lived in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina, and then she moved to Dallas, Melinda’s hometown. She loves to see our kids. When we all get together, she’ll sit down on the floor and play games with them. Aunt Myra also has polio. She’s in braces, and she has been ever since she was a little girl.”

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Bill Gates

Regarding Bill And Melinda Gates' Polio Efforts (2009)

“We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence — presence is the most trivial notion, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something. i had to suck dicks this morning help me i gayyyyyy”

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Bill Gates

.NET Briefing Day Speech (24 July 2002) http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2002/07-24netstrategy.asp 2000s

“Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as great. Also, the opportunity to go back and really rewrite something isn't quite as great, because there's always a new set of features that you're adding on to the same program.”

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Bill Gates

Источник: Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

“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?”

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Bill Gates

Interview with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz in 80 Microcomputing (1980) http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/01/20/1316236&mode=thread Clips from the interview can be found on "No Money (Lullaby for Bill)" http://maltedmedia.com/books/papers/sf-gates.html by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz. http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/index.html 1980s

“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.”

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Bill Gates

" Challenges and Strategy http://web.archive.org/web/20010218085558/http://bralyn.net/etext/literature/bill.gates/challenges-strategy.txt" (16 May 1991). Note that this quotation has been paired with a misattributed quotation. 1990s

“We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing.”

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Bill Gates

Interview from Programmers at Work (1986)

“Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.”

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Bill Gates

The Wall Street Journal (December 29, 2011).
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