Background Image

...

For All These Infectious Diseases, The Goal Is To Eventually Get Rid Of Them. And To Do That We Need To Invent New Tools, But Nobody Was Doing That Because There Was No Money To Buy On Behalf Of The Poorest, Even The Existing Tools.

-Bill Gates

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

For All These Infectious

Bill Gates

...

For All These Infectious Diseases, The Goal Is To Eventually Get Rid Of Them. And To Do That We Need To Invent New Tools, But Nobody Was Doing That Because There Was No Money To Buy On Behalf Of The Poorest, Even The Existing Tools.

Views: 8

Topic

More From Bill Gates

The Outpouring Of Support From Millions Of People In The Immediate Aftermath Of The Earthquake In Haiti Has Been Impressive.

I Would Certainly Use My Voice To Try And Avoid Anything That Undermines Confidence, So That Parents Are Using Vaccines Fully.

The World Is Progressing And Resources Are Becoming More Abundant. I'd Rather Go Into A Grocery Store Today Than A King's Banquet A Hundred Years Ago.

U.k. Companies Are In Very International And Very Competitive Markets. If You Look At Pc Penetration In The U.k., It Is Very Similar To The United States Market.

It Is Hard To Smash A Computer When You're Laughing.

Positive Thinking

When Aids Emergency Broke Out And Was Killing Millions In Africa, The Global Fund Was Created So That A Level Of Generosity Would Show Up And Buy The Medicines To Save Those Lives.

The Misconception That Aid Falls Straight Into The Hands Of Dictators Largely Stems From The Cold War Era.

You May Have Heard Of Black Friday And Cyber Monday. There's Another Day You Might Want To Know About: Giving Tuesday. The Idea Is Pretty Straightforward. On The Tuesday After Thanksgiving, Shoppers Take A Break From Their Gift-buying And Donate What They Can To Charity.

Banking Is Necessary - Banks Are Not.

Software Innovation, Like Almost Every Other Kind Of Innovation, Requires The Ability To Collaborate And Share Ideas With Other People, And To Sit Down And Talk With Customers And Get Their Feedback And Understand Their Needs.

Windows 95 Was A Nice Milestone.

So We Can Simulate Richter-10 Earthquakes. We Simulate 70-foot Waves Coming Into These Things. Very Cool. We Basically Say No Human Should Ever Be Required To Do Anything, Because If You Judge By Chernobyl And Fukushima, The Human Element Is Not On Your Side.

When I Was Trying To Figure Out Why Lives Have Improved So Much In The Last 300 Years, Where We've Gone From A Third Of Kids Dying Before 5 To - By 1990 It Was Down To 10% - Now It's Down To 5%. And Saying Why, Over All History, There Were Smart People, But That Number Didn't Change. Average Life Span Didn't Change. What's Magical About What's Been Deemed The Industrial Revolution? It's Really Energy Intensity.

There Is No Author Whose Books I Look Forward To More Than Vaclav Smil.

I Have This Very Positive View Of The World Getting Better And Better. The List Of Things That Could Be Huge Setbacks Is Not Very Long: A Nuclear War, Climate Change And Epidemics.

The Way To Be Successful In The Software World Is To Come Up With Breakthrough Software, And So Whether It's Microsoft Office Or Windows, Its Pushing That Forward. New Ideas, Surprising The Marketplace, So Good Engineering And Good Business Are One In The Same.

There's Only One Trick In Software, And That Is Using A Piece Of Software That's Already Been Written.

Creating A Piece Of Software Is Always Complicated Because You're Doing Something New. If You Just Wanted Something That Had Been Done Before You'd Just Use That Old Piece Of Software. So There Are No Repetitive Tasks.

We're Creating This Alliance, Gavi, That Has Helped Buy The Vaccines That Were In The Rich World But Not Getting To The Poor Kids, Getting A Very Cheap Price And Figuring Out The Cold Chain, Getting The Delivery Right, And Then Funding Research For New Vaccines. A Lot Of Them Are Coming Along. We've Got A Meningitis Vaccine Out, Got That Through Large Parts Of Africa. That Has Been A Huge Success.

If You Believe That All Men Are Created Equal, Then A Child's Death In Some Other Country Is No Less Tragic Than In The United States.

I'm Not A Macroeconomics Person.

Something Like Windows Is Still An Unbelievable Asset But Because The World Is Somewhat Phone-centric, It's An Asset That Has To Be Managed Very Carefully To Make Sure That It's Extended, And There Are Very Interesting Things That Are Being Done With That.

I've For Some Reason Or Other... Never Met Donald Trump.

I Didn't Completed My University Education

University Education

Virtually Every Company Will Be Going Out And Empowering Their Workers With A Certain Set Of Tools, And The Big Difference In How Much Value Is Received From That Will Be How Much The Company Steps Back And Really Thinks Through Their Business Processes, Thinking Through How Their Business Can Change, How Their Project Management, Their Customer Feedback, Their Planning Cycles Can Be Quite Different Than They Ever Were Before.

Taxes Are An Investment In America.

With Nuclear Weapons, You'd Think You Would Probably Stop After Killing 100million. Smallpox Won't Stop. Because The Population Is Naïve, And There Are No Real Preparations. That, If It Got Out And Spread, Would Be A Larger Number.

How You Gather, Manage, And Use Information Will Determine Whether You Win Or Lose.

Music, Even With These Dial-up Connections You Have To The Internet, Is Very Practical To Download.

We're Still Missing About A Dozen Vaccines That Will Make A Huge Difference. For Adults, We've Got Hiv And Tb Are Still Huge; For Kids Malaria Is Still Killing A Half Million Kids A Year Out Of That 6 Million. We Probably Need Some Vaccines, But We Need A Little More Data To Make Sure We're Getting The Vaccines That Will Save The Most Lives.

Dna Is Like A Computer Program But Far, Far More Advanced Than Any Software Ever Created.

It's Not Easy To Remember, But Ibm Was The Computer Industry When I Was Growing Up. You Loved 'em. You Hated 'em. You Knew What They Were Doing. They Had Set A Standard For Mainframes. They Also Set A Standard For Great Sales Focus And Heavy Product R & D.

I Have Drifted Away From Thinking About These Philanthropic Things. And It Was Only As The Wealth Got Large Enough And Melinda And I Had Talked About The View That Wealth Wasn't Something That Would Be Good To Just Pass To The Children.

Well-spent Aid Money Is Saving Lives For A Few Thousand Dollars Per Life Saved.

In American Math Classes, We Teach A Lot Of Concepts Poorly Over Many Years. In The Asian Systems They Teach You Very Few Concepts Very Well Over A Few Years.

If Your Goal Is To Make The World A Better Place, One Thing You Can Do Is Pick A Specific Challenge That You Really Care About. Then, Learn As Much As You Can About It And Try To Volunteer Your Time To Help An Organization That Is Working In This Area. While You're Doing That, Look For Creative New Ways To Use Technology To Tackle Parts Of The Problem That You Come In Contact With.

My Mom And My Dad Were Both Very Sociable, Meeting Lots Of Interesting People.

What Are The Top 20 Universities In The World That Do Good Materials Research That Might Create Carbon Fibers To Do Jet Stream Kites Or New Magnets That Will Allow [energy] Generation To Be Done Up There And You Just Bring The Electricity Down. You Either Have To Bring Down Rotational Energy, Which Is Hard, Or You Have To Have The Generator Up There And Bring Down The Electricity. Well, Putting The Generator Up There Is Hard To Do Because It's Too Heavy.

People Think About This Idea That There's 122 Million Kids That Are Alive That Would Not Be If That Fatality Rate Had Stayed At The 1990 Level, That's 122 Million Families.

K To 12 Is Partly About Babysitting The Kids So The Parents Can Do Other Things.

It's The Knowledge Derived From Information That Gives You A Competitive Edge.

I'm Truly Saddened To Learn Of Steve Jobs' Death. The World Rarely Sees Someone Who Has Had The Profound Impact Steve Has Had, The Effects Of Which Will Be Felt For Many Generations To Come. For Those Of Us Lucky Enough To Get To Work With Him, It's Been An Insanely Great Honor. I Will Miss Steve Immensely.

In Most Of These Things Our Foundation Is A Co-funder, So I Can Say That A Polio Or An Hiv Vaccine, That I'm Putting Our Resources Behind It In A Very Big Way And The U.s. Government Would Be The Best Partner For Those Efforts.

The Internet Will Help Achieve "friction Free Capitalism" By Putting Buyer And Seller In Direct Contact And Providing More Information To Both About Each Other.

I've Always Been Amazed By Da Vinci, Because He Worked Out Science On His Own. He Would Work By Drawing Things And Writing Down His Ideas. Of Course, He Designed All Sorts Of Flying Machines Way Before You Could Actually Build Something Like That.

In China When You're One In A Million, There Are 1300 People Just Like You

Harnessing Steam Power Required Many Innovations, As William Rosen Chronicles In The Book 'the Most Powerful Idea In The World.'

I'm Not Big On To-do Lists. Instead, I Use E-mail And Desktop Folders And My Online Calendar. So When I Walk Up To My Desk, I Can Focus On The E-mails I've Flagged And Check The Folders That Are Monitoring Particular Projects And Particular Blogs.

R&d Generally Has Been A Bipartisan Thing, Because In The It Space, In The Medical Space, The U.s., The Benefits To Ourselves And The World And Our Economy Have Been Very, Very Clear. I'm Hopeful We Can Make A Very Strong Case There. Energy Is Actually Harder; It Takes More Time To Get A Product, But If You Do It's A Very, Very Big Market And The Constraints Of Doing That In A Clean Way Are More Obvious All The Time.

I've Been Very Lucky, And Therefore I Owe It To Try And Reduce The Inequity In The World. And That's Kind Of A Religious Belief. I Mean, It's At Least A Moral Belief.

The Next Time Someone Tells You We Can Trim The Budget By Cutting Aid, I Hope You Will Ask Whether It Will Come At The Cost Of More People Dying.

The Information Society Should Serve All Of Its Citizens, Not Only The Technically Sophisticated And Economically Privileged.

Expectations Are A Form Of First-class Truth: If People Believe It, It's True.

My Job Is About The Most Fun Thing I Do, But I Have A Broad Set Of Interests, Going Places, Reading Things, Doing Things.

Intellectual Property Has The Shelf Life Of A Banana.

Software Substitution, Whether It's For Drivers Or Waiters Or Nurses ... It's Progressing. ... Technology Over Time Will Reduce Demand For Jobs, Particularly At The Lower End Of Skill Set. ... 20 Years From Now, Labor Demand For Lots Of Skill Sets Will Be Substantially Lower. I Don’t Think People Have That In Their Mental Model.

Now We've Got That [children's Death Rate] Down To About 5 Percent, So We've More Than Cut It In Half, And That's Because We're Getting Vaccines Out, Economic Improvement Also Helps There, But The Vaccines Are Why We've Seen An Acceleration In Getting That Down.

Given How Few Young People Actually Read The Newspaper, It's A Good Thing They'll Be Reading A Newspaper On A Screen.

When The Pc Was Launched, People Knew It Was Important.

If You're A Guest [at My $113 Million House], You'll Be Able To Call Up On Screens Throughout The House Almost Any Image You Like - Presidential Portraits, Reproductions Of High Renaissance Paintings, Pictures Of Sunsets, Airplanes, Skiers In The Andes, A Rare French Stamp, The Beatles In 1965.

Microsoft's Only Factory Asset Is The Human Imagination.

Vaccines Are Extremely Well Tested; Their Safety Is Well Understood. The False Allegations About Vaccines Causing Autism Have Been Disproven. But There Are Still Echoes Out There Confusing People.

If Success Corrupts, I'm Probably Pretty Corrupted By Now.

My Broad Sense Of This Is That Authors Like Smil Really Paint The Clear Picture, And Once You See That, It's Kind Of Oh, Of Course. That's Such A Primal Thing To All These Physical Services That We Take For Granted.

Money Has No Utility To Me Beyond A Certain Point.

In The Old Generation, If One Kid Bought A Playstation 2 And The Other Kid Bought An Xbox, At His House You Played Playstation, At Your House You Played Xbox. Now That It's Online, All Those Early Buyers Who... You Want To Play With, They've Got Their Reputation Online Of Who They Are And How Good They Are At These Games.

Understanding Science And Pushing The Boundaries Of Science Is What Makes Me Immensely Satisfied.

A Company Needs To Have Good Business Reflexes, To Be Able To Marshal Its Forces In A Crisis Or In Response To Any Unplanned Event.

I Have A Particular Relationship With Vinod Khosla Because He's Got A Lot Of Very Interesting Science-based Energy Startups.

Very Interesting

Sometimes We Do Get Taken By Surprise. For Example, When The Internet Came Along, We Had It As A Fifth Or Sixth Priority.

I Watched The Piles Of Feces Go Up The Conveyor Belt... They Made Their Way Through The Machine... A Few Minutes Later I Took A Long Taste Of The End Result: A Glass Of Delicious Drinking Water.

The Market Does Not Drive The Scientists, The Communicators, The Thinkers, The Government To Do The Right Things.

Don't Wallow In Failure. Instead, Learn From It.

Whenever You Have War, You Often Have More Deaths Because The Medical System And The Food System Breaks Down, Than You Have Directly Through Violence.

Polio's Pretty Special Because Once You Get An Eradication, You No Longer Have To Spend Money On It; It's Just There As A Gift For The Rest Of Time.

The Term, Information At Your Fingertips, Is To Remind People What A Broad Role The Personal Computer Will Be Playing. It's Not A Computation Device, It's Not A Word Processing Or A Spreadsheet Device. It's A Window Onto The World Of Information.

The Mainstream Is Always Under Attack.

The First Rule Of Any Technology Used In A Business Is That Automation Applied To An Efficient Operation Will Magnify The Efficiency. The Second Is That Automation Applied To An Inefficient Operation Will Magnify The Inefficiency.

Most Of Our Competitors Were One-product Wonders... They Would Do Their One Product, But Never Get Their Engineering Sorted Out.

When You Are Failing, You Are Forced To Be Creative, To Dig Deep And Think, Night And Day.

Hopefully, Whether It's Energy Or Child Vaccines, The Case Of The Many Benefits Helping Countries So That They Are Stable, So These Refugee Problems That Have Been Troubling For Europe - A Little Less So For The U.s. But, Even So, A Lot Of Controversy There - These Things Are Why The Future's Going To Be Better Than The Past. People Really Do Look To The United States, So We'll Be There Making The Case.

In A System Of Capitalism, As People's Wealth Rises, The Financial Incentive To Serve Them Rises. As Their Wealth Falls, The Financial Incentive To Serve Them Falls, Until It Becomes Zero. We Have To Find A Way To Make The Aspects Of Capitalism That Serve Wealthier People Serve Poorer People As Well.

The Tablet Is Not Mainstream. Reading Off The Screen Is Not Mainstream.

In The Philanthropy Game, You're Going For Different Outcomes: Saving Childhood Lives, Having Kids Grow Up - Because They Don't Have Malnutrition Or Disease - That They Achieve Their Full Potential. We Take For Warren [buffett] Things That, Because He's Very Intelligent About The World But Doesn't Get To Go Out In Africa And See What We See, We've Taken And Say To Him Where We Stand And It's Basically A Very Positive Report That His Gift Has Made A Phenomenal Difference.

My Tax Return In The United States Has To Be Kept On A Special Computer Because Their Normal Computers Can't Deal With The Numbers. So I Am Constantly Getting These Notices Telling Me I Haven't Paid Something When Really It Is Just On The Wrong Computer.

When You Have The Medical Advances You Think Will They Be Available To Everyone. Will They Not Just Be For The Rich World Or Even Just The Rich People And The Rich World? Will They Be For The World At Large?

Now, We Put Out A Lot Of Carbon Dioxide Every Year, Over 26 Billion Tons. For Each American, It's About 20 Tons. For People In Poor Countries, It's Less Than One Ton. It's An Average Of About Five Tons For Everyone On The Planet. And, Somehow, We Have To Make Changes That Will Bring That Down To Zero.

Technology Is Just A Tool. In Terms Of Getting The Kids Working Together And Motivating Them, The Teacher Is The Most Important.

Internet Tv And The Move To The Digital Approach Is Quite Revolutionary. Tv Has Historically Has Been A Broadcast Medium With Everybody Picking From A Very Finite Number Of Channels.

I Have $100 Billion... You Realize I Could Spend $3 Million A Day, Every Day, For The Next 100 Years? And That's If I Don't Make Another Dime.

The Moral Systems Of Religion, I Think, Are Super Important.

We Can Make Market Forces Work Better For The Poor If We Can Develop A More Creative Capitalism-if We Can Stretch The Reach Of Market Forces So That More People Can Make A Profit, Or At Least Make A Living, Serving People Who Are Suffering From The Worst Inequities. ... You Have More Than We Had; You Must Start Sooner, And Carry On Longer.

I Didn't Even Complete My University Education

University Education

Antitrust Is The Way That The Government Promotes Markets When There Are Market Failures. It Has Nothing To Do With The Idea Of Free Information.

When We Face A Choice Between Adding Features And Resolving Security Issues, We Need To Choose Security.

Reward Worthy Failure - Experimentation.

Making Mistakes

I Have To Say That In 1981, Making Those Decisions, I Felt Like I Was Providing Enough Freedom For 10 Years. That Is, A Move From 64k To 640k Felt Like Something That Would Last A Great Deal Of Time. Well, It Didn't - It Took About Only 6 Years Before People Started To See That As A Real Problem.

Don't Let Yourself Be Lulled Into Inaction.

Now You Have To Be A Collaborator And You Have To Bring On Governments And Convince People.

Bitcoin Is A Technological Tour De Force

The Willingness To Hear Hard Truth Is Vital Not Only For Ceos Of Big Corporations But Also For Anyone Who Loves The Truth. Sometimes The Truth Sounds Like Bad News, But It Is Just What We Need.

This [philanthropy] Work Is Even More Fascinating. It Requires Us To Think Harder About How We Build Partnerships, Who We Get Behind. And Yet We Get To See Progress That In Some Ways Is Even More Profound Than The Great Advances That Digital Technology Has Provided.

A Bad Strategy Will Fail No Matter How Good Your Information Is. And Lame Execution Will Stymie A Good Strategy. If You Do Enough Things Poorly, You'll Go Out Of Business.

In The U.s., We Believe The Best Way To Improve Lives Is To Improve Public Education.

Automation Applied To An Inefficient Operation Will Magnify The Inefficiency.

If You Take From The Most Wealthy And Give To The Least Wealthy, It's Good. It Tries To Balance Out.

The World Won't Care About Your Self-esteem. The World Will Expect You To Accomplish Something Before You Feel Good About Yourself.

Our Success Has Really Been Based On Partnerships From The Very Beginning.

There's 20 Companies That I Have Investments In - Some Batteries, Some Solar-thermal, One Big Nuclear Thing. We Need Hundreds And Hundreds Of Companies Like That, So That In A 20-year Time Frame We Really Are Starting To Change The Energy Infrastructure.

Everyone Needs A Coach. It Doesn't Matter Whether You're A Basketball Player, A Tennis Player, A Gymnast Or A Bridge Player.

You Can Make Money And You Can Make Excuses, But You Can Never Make Money Out Of Excuses

Your School May Have Done Away With Winners And Losers, But Life Has Not. In Some Schools They Have Abolished Failing Grades And They'll Give You As Many Times As You Want To Get The Right Answer. This Doesn't Bear The Slightest Resemblance To Anything In Real Life.

People Always Fear Change. People Feared Electricity When It Was Invented, Didn't They?

I'm Serious When I Do My Work. I'm Not Serious When I'm Home With My Kids.

I'm Invested In A Lot Of Battery Companies - And There's A Lot That Exists I'm Not In.

If You Are Born Poor Its Not Your Mistake, But If You Die Poor Its Your Mistake.

One Thing I've Always Loved About The Culture At Microsoft Is There Is Nobody Who Is Tougher On Us, In Terms Of What We Need To Learn And Do Better, Than The People In The Company Itself. You Can Walk Down These Halls, And They'll Tell You, 'we Need To Do Usability Better, Push This Or That Frontier.'

If Somebody Is Considering Being Willing To Go Out And Work In The Field In Global Health, Those Are A Particular Class Of Heroes Because It's Hard To Work In Those Places. Our Foundation Gets So Many Of Our Learnings From People Who've Been Out There And Seen, "this Tool Is Not Going To Work There, There's More Of A Problem Here Than You Know." You Should Really Get Involved In That.

The Close Relationships We Form Between Researchers And Product Groups Have Already Shown We Can Move The Great Ideas As They Come Along, Without A Schedule, Into The Products.

I Want To Admit That I Am An Optimist. Any Tough Problem, I Think It Can Be Solved.

Our Work In Global Health Is About Things Like Cutting Childhood Deaths, And Every Year We Continue To Make Progress There.

Success Is A Lousy Teacher. It Makes You Think You Know What You're Doing.

Microsoft Has Had Its Success By Doing Low-cost Products And Constantly Improving Those Products And We've Really Redefined The It Industry To Be Something That's About A Tool For Individuals.

I Know That Historically Our Foundation Has Had Great Relations With All The Administrations.[bill] Clinton Administration Did A Lot Of Outreach. The Greatest Rise In U.s. Foreign Aid Was Under The [george] Bush Administration, That's Where We Got The Aids Initiative, Which Is Called Pepfar.

Who Decides What's In Windows? The Customers Who Buy It.

I Never Took A Day Off In My Twenties. Not One.

To Be A Good Professional Engineer, Always Start To Study Late For Exams Because It Teaches You How To Manage Time And Tackle Emergencies.

Change The Boundaries Of Business.

Philanthropy Is Fun And Fulfilling.

Microsoft Research Has A Thing Called The Sense Cam That, As You Walk Around, It's Taking Photos All The Time. And The Software Will Filter And Find The Ones That Are Interesting Without Having To Think, 'let's Get Out The Camera And Get That Shot.' You Just Have That, And Software Helps You Pick What You Want.

I Definitely Think Leaving Kids Massive Amounts Of Money Is Not A Favor To Them.

You Don't Go To Other Books And Take Little Pieces Because Although Say A Romantic Scene May Have Been Many Times Before All The Details Of Who It Is, Where It Is, Are So Intertwined In That Text That It's Easier To Write It From Scratch.

Teaching's Hard! You Need Different Skills: Positive Reinforcement, Keeping Students From Getting Bored, Commanding Their Attention In A Certain Way.

Going Out In The Field, It's Always Enlightening To See What's Working And What's Not And To Sit Down And Talk - I Was With Young Girls In South Africa - Understanding Why Our Tools For Prevention Aren't Being Adopted, And What Way May Need To Invent To Help Protect Them.

I Went To A Public School Through Sixth Grade, And Being Good At Tests Wasn't Cool.

Over 80% Of The Poor Are People Who Have Small Plots Of Land And Grow Their Own Food And They Don't Grow Enough To Sell Much Into The Marketplace. So They Will Be Hit Hard By The Worst In Climate. They Really Get Hit Hard Starting In The 20-year Time Frame And Thereafter.

If Your Business Is Not On The Internet, Then Your Business Will Be Out Of Business.

Network Marketing

I'm An Investor In A Number Of Biotech Companies, Partly Because Of My Incredible Enthusiasm For The Great Innovations They Will Bring.

My Success, Part Of It Certainly, Is That I Have Focused In On A Few Things.

Focus In Business

We Flew Down Weekly To Meet With Ibm, But They Thought The Way To Measure Software Was The Amount Of Code We Wrote, When Really The Better The Software, The Fewer Lines Of Code.

I Failed In Some Subjects In Exam, But My Friend Passed In All. Now He Is An Engineer In Microsoft And I Am The Owner Of Microsoft.

One Thing People Underestimate Is How Markets Don't Allow Anyone To Do Anything Except Make Better And Better Products. There's Not Much Leeway. The World Is A Lot More Competitive Than Most People Think, Particularly In A High-technology Area. If A Company Takes Its Eye Off Improving Its Products, If It Tries To Do Anything That Would Be Viewed As An Exercise Of Power, It'll Be Displaced Very Rapidly.

We Paired This Announcement Of The R&d [commitment] With The So-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, Which Is 27 [major Investors] Saying, "hey, We'll Put Significant Money Into [energy Innovations] When They're Ready To Spin Out Probably Into Startup Companies."

I Think If You Talk To The Experts In Any Field Where You Have To Take On A Unknown Challenge, Where You're Going To Be Working On It For A Long Time You'd Find That To Work Themselves Up To Their Best Performance And Really Throw Themselves Into It, You Know, Spend All These Hours In There And Ah, Give It Their... Give It Their Best That Optimism Plays A Role.

Helping Convene Global Stakeholders To Establish A Set Of Measurable, Actionable And Consensus-built Goals Focused On Extreme Poverty Is Invaluable.

Often You Have To Rely On Intuition.

What Destroys More Self-confidence Than Any Other Educational Thing In America Is Being Assigned To Some Remedial Math When You Get Into Some College, And Then It's Not Taught Very Well And You End Up With This Sense Of, 'hey, I Can't Really Figure Those Things Out.'

Self Confidence

The Leader Needs To Create An Environment In Which People Can Analyze The Situation And Develop A Good Response.

In Energy, You Have To Plan And Do Research Way In Advance, Sometimes Decades In Advance To Get A New System That's Safer, Doesn't Require Us To Go Around The World To Get All Our Oil.

My Innovation Message, Specifically Including Energy, Happened To Be The Same Week That On Monday And Tuesday I Announced The Breakthrough Energy Venture Group. Then On That Tuesday Afternoon, In December, Was When I Sat Down With Him. I Explained The Us Has Great Science Here, This Is Where The Market For These Things Is Going To Be. It Connects To Less Pollution, It Connects To U.s. Jobs, It Connects To Security, Not Needing The Energy Coming From Far Away.

When I Walk Into A Grocery Store And Look At All The Products You Can Choose, I Say, "my God!" No King Ever Had Anything Like I Have In My Grocery Store Today.

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.

Hey, Size Works Against Excellence.

I've Been Studying How Quickly We Can Get Energy Out To The Poor Countries - A Lot Of Which Are In Africa - And How Little Progress We've Made There. There's No More Electricity Today In Sub-saharan Africa Per Person Than There Was 20 Years Ago.

I Went Public Too Soon. Stay Private As Long As You Can.

Your Most Unhappy Customers Are Your Greatest Source Of Learning.

The United States Has A Huge Budget Deficit So Taxes Are Going To Have To Go Up And I Certainly Agree They Should Go Up More On The Rich Than Everyone Else. That - That's Just Justice.

Capitalism Has Shortfalls. It Doesn't Necessarily Take Care Of The Poor, And It Underfunds Innovation, So We Have To Offset That.

Well, It's Taken Time To Get This Going, But He Was Right. If You Give People A Chance To Associate Themselves With A Cause They Care About, While Buying A Great Product, They Will. That Was How The Red Campaign Was Born, Here In Davos.

We Had Planned To Integrate A Web Browser With Our Operating System As Far Back As 1993( Filing Its First Court Responses To Federal Antitrust)

I'm A Great Believer That Any Tool That Enhances Communication Has Profound Effects In Terms Of How People Can Learn From Each Other, And How They Can Achieve The Kind Of Freedoms That They're Interested In.

There's Always A Tricky Issue When You Get Into Stolen Material Or Pornography. The Laws For Online Publishing The Same As For Print-based Publishing, Where If You're Hosting Certain Types Of Things And Somebody Notifies You About That.

People Are Always Coming Up To Me And Saying, 'i Heard Your Dad's Speech, And It's Really Great.' And They'll Mention Some Place I Didn't Even Know My Dad Was Going To.

The Pc Has Improved The World In Just About Every Area You Can Think Of. Amazing Developments In Communications, Collaboration And Efficiencies. New Kinds Of Entertainment And Social Media. Access To Information And The Ability To Give A Voice People Who Would Never Have Been Heard.

Depending On How Quickly You Get Ocean Rise, You Have People Who Live In River Deltas [at Risk]. Bangladesh Is Largely A River Delta, And The Rising Sea Level Means That When Storms Come In, The Human Sanitation Is Backing Up, The Ability To Farm, It's Destructive-type Situations Like You Saw In New Orleans With Katrina. You're Increasing The Frequency Of That Stuff In Low-lying Areas Fairly Dramatically.

The Intersection Of Law, Politics, And Technology Is Going To Force A Lot Of Good Thinking.

Long-term Vision And Product Strategy.

About Three Million Computers Get Sold Every Year In China, People Don't Pay For The Software. Someday They Will, Though. And As Long As They're Going To Steal It, We Want Them To Steal Ours. They'll Get Sort Of Addicted, And Then We'll Somehow Figure Out How To Collect Sometime In The Next Decade.

I'll Get To See Many Disease Eradications. And We're Seeing A Lot Of Progress.

I Read A Lot Of Obscure Books And It Is Nice To Open A Book.

Technology Is Unlocking The Innate Compassion We Have For Our Fellow Human Beings.

Outlook 2003 Did Create The Idea Of Search Folders And The Whole Longhorn Philosophy. You Can See It At Work In Search Folders, Where Instead Of Having To Drop Things Into Individual Folders, And Things Exist Only In One Folder, You Create These Search Folders And You Have The Criteria For The Search Folder.

Five Years From Now On The Web For Free You’ll Be Able To Find The Best Lectures In The World. It Will Be Better Than Any Single University.

The Phenomenal Generosity Of The United States In Its Aid Budget Towards Health Issues Is The Best In The World. You Can Look At That Broadly, You Can Look At It In Terms Of Hiv, The Pepfar Money Which Came Together In A Republican Administration With Bipartisan Support.

I Hope Someday What People Can Do With Their Lives Depends On Their Talents And How Hard They Are Willing To Work, Rather Than On Where They Happen To Be Born.

America And Japan Are The Two Leading World Economies In Terms Of Technology And Innovative Products. And In Software, Information-age Technology And Biotechnology The U.s. Has An Amazing Lead.

[aids ] Is Not A Short-term Emergency But It Is Something That, Just Like Smallpox Was Many Decades Ago, We Should Aim For Complete Eradication.

No One Will Need More Than 637kb Of Memory For A Personal Computer

Any Machine That Can Run A Browser Is Not Thin. The Browser Has To Be The Thickest Application Man Has Ever Invented, And It's Getting Thicker Faster Than Anything Ever Development By Man.

Embrace Bad News To Learn Where You Need The Most Improvement.

The Early Personal Computers Were Not Very Powerful So The Idea Of Feeding Their Program Into A Small Amount Of Memory Requires Immense Skill.

In Programming When You're Making A Change You Have To Know All The Affected Places, And You Have To Be Able To Model In Your Head What The Performance Impact Will Be.

My Wife Thinks She's Better Than Me At Puzzles. I Haven't Given In On That One Yet.

[smart] Is An Elusive Concept. There's A Certain Sharpness, An Ability To Absorb New Facts. To Ask An Insightful Question. To Relate To Domains That May Not Seem Connected At First. A Certain Creativity That Allows People To Be Effective.

If I Had A Dollar For Every Time Someone Made Fun Of Me In High School-oh Wait, I Do!

I Was Lucky To Be Involved And Get To Contribute To Something That Was Important, Which Is Empowering People With Software.

The Microprocessor Is A Miracle.

One Of The Statistics That Always Amazes Me Is The Approval Of The Chinese Government, Not Elected, Is Over 80 Percent. The Approval Of The U.s. Government, Fully Elected, Is 19 Percent. Well, We Elected These People And They Didn't Elect Those People. Isn't It Supposed To Be Different? Aren't We Supposed To Like The People That We Elected?

I Can Understand Wanting To Have Millions Of Dollars; There's A Certain Freedom, Meaningful Freedom, That Comes With That.

Well Private Money Can Take Risks In A Way That Government Money Often Isn't Willing To.

Giving Money Effectively Is Almost As Hard As Earning It In The First Place.

The Nuclear Industry Has This Amazing Record, Even Equipment From Generations One And Two. But Nuclear Mishaps Tend To Come In These Big Events - Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, And Now Fukushima - So It's More Visible.

I Was A Kind Of Hyper-intense Person In My Twenties And Very Impatient.

Even With Cameras Being Very Cheap, One Thing That Researchers Noticed Was That You Look Really Bad In A Videoconference Image Because The Lighting Is Bad And You Get Shadows And Things.

By 2035, There Will Be Almost No Poor Countries Left In The World.

In Almost Every Job Now, People Use Software And Work With Information To Enable Their Organization To Operate More Effectively.

There Are Ecosystems Like Coral Reefs [at Risk] Through Ocean Acidification. Those Are Valuable Things That We Should Protect.

Some People Read Off Of Their Palms And Pocket Pcs, But The Real Immersible Reading Experience Takes A Full-screen Device.

You Have To Be Willing To See That Sometimes The Governments Of These Poor Countries Don't Come Through. You Have To Think About That As A Constraint. How Do You Help Them Be Better? How Do You Come Up With Things That Actually Work, Even In Those Tough Situations.

Of My Mental Cycles, I Devote Maybe 10 Percent To Business Thinking. Business Isn't That Complicated. I Wouldn't Want To Put It On My Business Card.

Trending Author

Lindsay Davenport

Category