Quotes from Bill Gates

If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn't be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers.

I don't think there's a... boundary between digital media and print media. Every magazine is doing an online version.

My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we've had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.

The best teacher is very interactive.

If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was 'satisfactory, ' I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?

If your business is not on the Internet, then your business will be out of business.

A fundamental new rule for business is that the Internet changes everything.

Know your numbers' is a fundamental precept of business.

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.

There will be two types of businesses in the next 5 years, those that are on the Internet, and those that are out of business

If you're too focused on your current business, it's hard to change and concentrate on innovating.

We are always saying to ourself.. we have to innovate. We got to come up with that breakthrough... we're only paid for breakthroughs.

Change the boundaries of business.

Think of business as a good game. Lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money.

Eventually you won't think of 'the Internet business.' You'll think of it more like news, weather, sports, but even that taxonomy isn't clear.

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

Customer service will become the primary value added function of every business.

Most of our competitors were one-product wonders... They would do their one product, but never get their engineering sorted out.

A company needs to have good business reflexes, to be able to marshal its forces in a crisis or in response to any unplanned event.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs.

Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

You can't have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it.