Rule 12: Many speeches and quotes circulated on the internet are misattributed for ironic or humorous effect.

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_bill_gates_speech.htm

Sometimes reality is more ironic than fiction

http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html

Hmm, that's a tough one to verify. Focus didn't begin their online presence until 1996. All searches lead back to Cantrip or Risk, except for one UK link that had identical formatting to Cantrip. It's interesting to me that the actual German transcript is never provided (though the Cantrip page is translated into Italian, Japanese and Spanish), and that the interview translation contains quite a bit of American vernacular. I did find one link that tossed in a few German phrases here and there, but that actually made it seem less convincing. At least the MS Word version references fit. There is a Dr. Jürgen Scriba who is in the computing field, but I don't know that he ever interviewed anyone. It has that hoaxy "extraneous details for no good reason" whiff to it, but I can't disprove it.

Hmmm... Snopes does have the first one, but not the second one. Still, I agree with Whistler, it's very likely to be a hoax. Read some real interviews with Bill Gates, the guy doesn't talk like that.

Uh yeah... unless Gates lost about 40 years of maturity, plus had his PR strategy changed from "Clever Bullshit" to "Alienate as many potential Customers as Possible in the Shortest Possible Time", then I think its pretty clear that's a hoax.

Whistler: The original ones are dead links at this point (can't imagine why the one in the microsoft.com domain disappeared...)

Bear in mind it was translated from English to German and back to English again (twice - original retranslation to english was allegedly deemed poor), probably with a bit of creative rewording thrown in at some point to help remove the 'clever bullshit' from the 'facts'.

Also, I'm pretty damn sure I've seen the german version before, around 6 months ago when I looked for it.

It's still hilarious, and as one who's attempted to report bugs to MS before, I can't say it's very far from the truth... in fact, it's right on.

So if Bill did at some point decide to tell the truth, that's... probably what it would look like.

No offense Cunjo, but that makes it sound even hoaxier!

In the interest of trying not to look like an idiot who is arguing over a point he doesn't have enough information to really form an opinion about (which is an ongoing struggle for me), I have written both Focus and Snopes. I'm no fan of Gates, but I hate to accept "common knowledge" when it sounds this crazy.

I'll share whatever I get back.