Science & Tech Quote by Bill Gates

Gates is making a power move in the mildest possible language: he’s collapsing two domains that used to be treated as separate, then daring you to pretend you can still keep them apart. “Inextricably interwoven” isn’t just a description of reality; it’s a forecast that doubles as a sales pitch. If IT and business are fused, then the people who build the software stack aren’t vendors on the sidelines - they’re co-authors of strategy. And if strategy lives in software, Microsoft’s platform isn’t a tool you buy; it’s the environment you operate in.

The subtext is managerial, almost territorial: stop treating technology as back-office plumbing. The real decision-making is shifting into systems - databases, networks, enterprise applications - and whoever controls those systems shapes what a company can measure, optimize, automate, and ultimately imagine. “Talk meaningfully” is the tell. Gates isn’t saying you can’t discuss business without IT; he’s saying any discussion that ignores it is unserious, behind the times, professionally unsafe.

Context matters: this is the worldview that hardens in the 1990s and early 2000s, when personal computing becomes corporate infrastructure and the internet turns from novelty to necessity. Gates is speaking from the winning side of that transition, but also warning executives who still think software is a cost center. The line works because it flatters anxiety: if you don’t understand tech, you don’t just miss a trend - you miss the language your business is now written in.