Bill has made a number of contributions to the software industry. The biggest one: the insight that made computing personal. More than anybody else, Bill recognized that there was an enormous amount of computing that could be done on the desktop on industry standard hardware and software, and by playing off that standardization, deliver an incredible level of functionality to the user." John Swainson, CEO of CA
"Bill Gates is the proxy for how Microsoft will be remembered. First and foremost, he's a businessman. He's not an inventor or technologist, per se, and I don't think he would claim to be. He's fundamentally a geek." Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems
"Pound for pound, he's the most controversial figure in IT." Rich Powers, director of advanced technologies with FMC
"He has this ability to know if somebody is shooting him a pile of malarchy. He could drill right into the weakness in a presentation. Sometimes it would be on an arcane piece of technology. Almost immediately he would pick up on where to drill in with questions." Michael Cherry, analyst with Directions On Microsoft and former Microsoft employee