Microsoft Longhorn to cost as much as man on moon project, Gates says: "...Etre Conference... in Berlin: Wednesday 15 October 2003... Bill Gates was sat in a chair in a museum in Berlin tonight... surely one of his more remarkable claims here at the Etre conference in Old Berlin was the following bite.
Bill said that developing its next generation of Windows operating system software will cost as much as it cost the United States government to put a man on the Moon... there’s been a heap of inflation between then and now, and the dollars in themselves aren’t important – what’s important is that Bill thinks that the two events are somehow congruent.
...We checked our notes again. Bill definitely said that the next version of Windows costs as much as the US spent putting a man on the Moon."