Last Updated on August 9, 2024
Bill Gates, a man who is synonymous with the Microsoft brand and Windows operating system, has evolved from being a workaholic executive to a gentle philanthropist in the past two decades.
Despite his wealth and popularity, little is known about the personal life of the entrepreneur who turned things around in the world of personal computing.
Early Years
William Henry Gates III was born to an upper-middle-class family in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955. He has an older sister, Kristianne, and a younger sister, Libby.
His father, Henry II, was a lawyer, while his mother, Mary Ann Maxwell, was a teacher who later held high positions in charities and non-profit organizations.
It was during Gates’ high school years at the private Lakeside School that he got hooked into computers. In a speech he gave at the school in 2005, he said that the way the faculty freely allowed students to use a newly acquired teletype terminal, which was rare during the late 1960s, became the seed that inspired him to build Microsoft.
Gates was just 13 and still in seventh grade when he wrote his first software: a tic-tac-toe game that allowed users to play against the computer. He and school mate Paul Allen, who was two years his senior, later developed Lakeside’s payroll system.
They also made a roadway traffic data-analyzing program called Traf-O-Data in the 1970s, which they offered to the Washington State Roads Department for a fee. This experience helped them understand the inner workings of microprocessors, which was necessary in setting up Microsoft.
Leaving Harvard to Set Up Microsoft
Gates joined Harvard University, where his parents hoped he would finish law studies, but dropped out in 1975 to start a venture with Allen, who also left college and had started working for Boston-based Honeywell Inc. as a programmer.
The two shortly wrote a BASIC software program that ran on Altair 8800 mini-computers produced by Albuquerque firm, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems.
The pair eventually established Micro-soft (“micro” from microcomputers and “soft” from software), which supplied their software to other computer companies. They licensed the MS-DOS operating system for IBM’s first microcomputer in 1980.
Within three years, Microsoft’s operations expanded to the United Kingdom and Japan.
How Windows Was Born
Gates got the idea for the Windows OS when Steve Jobs invited Microsoft to develop an application for their Macintosh computers in 1981.
Finding out that Apple was coming up with a graphic interface that was much easier to use than MS-DOS, Gates quickly came up with an advertising campaign to avert possible market loss by claiming that his company was developing a new operating system that would use a similar technology. Windows was launched in 1985, two years after Apple introduced its operating system.
The rest, of course, is history. Gates became a billionaire in 1987 when he was 31—the youngest person then to reach such a milestone. His net worth is $110 billion as of 2019.
From Tech Adviser to Anti-Poverty and Child Advocate
Gates turned over the post of Chief Executive Officer to college friend Steve Ballmer in 2000. Between that year and 2014, the Microsoft co-founder gradually relieved himself of more corporate responsibilities, moving from Chief Software Architect to Technology Adviser.
It was also in 2000 that he and his wife Melinda, a former product manager at Microsoft whom he married in 1994, formed the William H. Gates Foundation, which later on became Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The organization’s assets are worth more than $40 billion.
Currently the second richest man in the world, just behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Gates said that he and his wife are very hands-on with their foundation work, which focuses on hunger and disease reduction and education, especially among children. A three-episode Netflix series titled “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates” reveals more of Gates’ philanthropy and glimpses into his genius.
Here are some quotes from Bill Gates on leadership, power, success, and life in general:
Best Motivational Quotes by Bill Gates
- “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” – Bill Gates
- “If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.” – Bill Gates
- “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates
- “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” – Bill Gates
- “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” – Bill Gates
- “I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.” – Bill Gates
- “If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.” – Bill Gates
- “In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don’t know if there’s a god or not…” – Bill Gates
- “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” – Bill Gates
- “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” – Bill Gates
- “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” – Bill Gates
- “Computers are great because when you’re working with them you get immediate results that let you know if your program works. It’s feedback you don’t get from many other things.” – Bill Gates
- “Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.” – Bill Gates
- “The vision is really about empowering workers giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.” – Bill Gates
- “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” – Bill Gates
- “Well, Steve [Jobs]… I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” – Bill Gates
- “So it’s an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn’t have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts – you know, they, they kill children. It’s a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.” – Bill Gates
- “I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.” – Bill Gates
- “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care and reproductive health services, we could LOWER that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.” – Bill Gates
- “Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.” – Bill Gates
- “Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared.” – Bill Gates
- “Some people may call me a nerd. I claim the label with pride.” – Bill Gates
- “If you are born poor then it’s not your mistake but if you die poor then it is your mistake.” – Bill Gates
- “Powerful women are either sexually voracious rulers like Catherine the Great or Elizabeth I, or treacherous bitches like Cleopatra or Helen of Troy.” – Bill Gates
- “Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren’t so exciting.” – Bill Gates
- “If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.” – Bill Gates
- “There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw. It’s like saying that as of 1932, cars didn’t have radios in them, so they should never have radios in them.” – Bill Gates
- “Well, I went for a ride but I didn’t find my car.” – Bill Gates
- “In this business, by the time you realize you are in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.” – Bill Gates
- “The vision is about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.” – Bill Gates
- “We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.” – Bill Gates
- “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” – Bill Gates
- “We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” – Bill Gates
- “Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.” – Bill Gates
- “Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.” – Bill Gates
- “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” – Bill Gates
- “We’ve got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.” – Bill Gates
- “Reward worthy failure – experimentation.” – Bill Gates
- “The most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice.” – Bill Gates
- “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?” – Bill Gates
- “Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy.” – Bill Gates
- “Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.” – Bill Gates
- “Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.” – Bill Gates
- “Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work.’”- Bill Gates
- “We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.” – Bill Gates
- “Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.” – Bill Gates
- “The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.” – Bill Gates
- “When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.” – Bill Gates
- “Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.” – Bill Gates
- “I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.” – Bill Gates
- “If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.” – Bill Gates
- “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.” – Bill Gates
- “I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.” – Bill Gates
- “We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what a PC can be.” Bill Gates
- “The first rule of any technology use in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify an inefficient operation.” – Bill Gates
- “I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.” – Bill Gates
- “On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.” – Bill Gates
- “What’s amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It’s so far away in time that they can’t appreciate what it means for their whole life.” – Bill Gates
- “People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they.” – Bill Gates
- “The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.” – Bill Gates
- “Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.” – Bill Gates
- “Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.” – Bill Gates
- “Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.” – Bill Gates
- “I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.” – Bill Gates
- “I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.” – Bill Gates
- “I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.” – Bill Gates
- “To win big, you sometimes need to take big risks.” – Bill Gates
- “The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.” – Bill Gates
- “Eventually, all companies are replaced.” – Bill Gates
- “We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.” – Bill Gates
- “I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.” – Bill Gates
- “I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.” – Bill Gates
- “Philanthropy should be voluntary.” – Bill Gates
- “By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.” – Bill Gates
- “I don’t think there’s a…boundary between digital media and print media. Every magazine is doing an online version.” – Bill Gates
- “Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.” – Bill Gates
- “If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.” – Bill Gates
- “Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.” – Bill Gates
- “The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.” – Bill Gates
- “Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.” – Bill Gates
