Bill Gates Quotes

Technology has the shelf life of a banana.

The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.

It's Moore's Law, everything will be obsolete in 10 years - I'll be obsolete in 10 years!

About every year or two, there is a moment of truth where there's some new development in the marketplace, some new technology, some sort of existential crisis. You just have to be vigilant about looking out for those moments.

In the years that I've been in this business, a lot of things have changed in a major way. In all aspects.

Every generation’s breakthroughs are proven false by the next generation’s Technology

And because technology is moving so rapidly, things become obsolete very, very quickly. In 15 years time, Will Caster is probably going to be in some weird room in Vegas where people are plugging quarters into him. Who has a mini-disc of a laser disc player? It's over!

Moore's law is really about economics.

When a technology is replaced by another technology, the previous technology either becomes art or it dies.

A new idea is obsolete in seconds, right? I just said it and now it's obsolete.

In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it's computing power or memory rises very, very quickly.

You can't do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge.

When you start working as an Internet entrepreneur, the world is moving at a million miles an hour and is changing rapidly.

You can go overboard in how quickly you might expect new technologies to transform people's lives. But I very much believe the way software is used, the way information gets distributed, will be dramatically different within 10 years. There is fire to go with all this smoke.

The essence and the glory of the free market is that individual firms and businesses, competing on the market, provide an ever-changing orchestration of efficient and progressive goods and services: continually improving products and markets, advancing technology, cutting costs, and meeting changing consumer demands as swiftly and as efficiently as possible.

A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.

In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will.

History repeats itself again, I guess. The rate of innovation is so high in our industry that if you don't innovate at that speed you can be replaced pretty quickly. The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about, is now five years old.

The future of the German automobile industry is very much at stake. Will we help shape the upheaval that goes along with the shift to electric cars or will we suffer from it? We are the country of automobiles. If we aren't able to remain out front technologically, it will be painful. That is one of the decisive questions when it comes to jobs, income and prosperity - and not just for a few of the wealthy or super-rich, but for a huge number of people.

It’s foolish to talk of an “Asian century” or an “emerging market century” because events move at a pace that renders this degree of durability obsolete.

Every new change forces all the companies in an industry to adapt their strategies to that change.

We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often "crash" when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I'm sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for "productivity"

You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.

Technology enables consumers and investors to have extraordinary choice and ease of switching, which, in turn, stimulates much fiercer competition than ever before, which, in turn, makes it imperative for every institution to innovate like mad. That innovation is powering our economy these days, and it requires companies to find and utilize creative workers. That's the most important syllogism going; technology is embedded in that syllogism, but it's not as if we're seeing these productivity gains because of the technology.

There are many things that have stayed consistent. But the biggest change, of course, is technology, the way it's used, the way films are shot, the format that they're shot in, and the way films, of course, are edited. It's very different than it was in the past.