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If You Say To People That There's Less Violence Today Than In The Past, They Would Be Stunned To Hear That. But It's The Truth, Even Though We Have Awful Things Happening In Syria Or Sudan.

-Bill Gates

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If You Say To

Bill Gates

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If You Say To People That There's Less Violence Today Than In The Past, They Would Be Stunned To Hear That. But It's The Truth, Even Though We Have Awful Things Happening In Syria Or Sudan.

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The Huge Turnout For Live 8 Here And Around The World Proves That Thanks To The Leadership From People Like Tony Blair And Gordon Brown The World Is Beginning To Demand More Action On Global Health And Poverty.

Around The World

We Win Because We Hire The Smartest People. We Improve Our Products Based On Feedback, Until They're The Best. We Have Retreats Each Year Where We Think About Where The World Is Heading.

Even For The Very Best Programmers Ah, Sometimes You'll See Someone Else's Program Or Somebody Will Come Along And They'll Show You What Can Be Done In A Simpler Way.

The Us Spends More On Energy R&d Than All Other Countries Put Together, And I Personally Consider It Quite Inadequate. In Fact, I Would Have Said We Should More Than Double It, If I Thought The Absorptive Capacity Could Scale Up And If It Was Actually Possible To Get To That Level.

Strategically, A Major Function Of The Ceo Is To Look For Bad News And Encourage The Organization To Respond To It. Employees Must Be Encouraged To Share Bad News As Much As Good News.

A Lot Of People Assume That Creating Software Is Purely A Solitary Activity Where You Sit In An Office With The Door Closed All Day And Write Lots Of Code.

If You Think Your Teacher Is Tough, Wait Till You Get A Boss.

You're Never Going To Get The Amount Of Co2 Emitted To Go Down Unless You Deal With The One Magic Metric, Which Is Co2 Per Kilowatt-hour.

Never Before In History Has Innovation Offered Promise Of So Much To So Many In So Short A Time.

Part Of The Magic Of Economic Growth Is How You Educate People, And The Leading Economies Have To Stay In Front Of That. From An Economic Point Of View, It Affects Competitiveness And Creates Jobs. Or From A Social Justice Point Of View, You Can Take Someone In The Bottom Tier Of Income And Let Him Compete To Be A Doctor Or Lawyer. The Education System Is The Only Reason The Dream Of Equal Opportunity Has A Chance Of Being Delivered - And We're Not Running A Good Education System.

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

Eradications Are Special. Zero Is A Magic Number. You Either Do What It Takes To Get To Zero And You're Glad You Did It; Or You Get Close, Give Up And It Goes Back To Where It Was Before, In Which Case You Wasted All That Credibility, Activity, Money That Could Have Been Applied To Other Things.

An Important Re-engineering Principle Is That Companies Should Focus On Their Core Competence And Outsource Everything Else.

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

Don’t Tax My Income, Tax My Consumption.

We Need To Start Thinking About The Future Of Food If We Are Going To Feed 9 Billion People In A Way That Does Not Destroy Our Environment.

The People Who Resist Change Will Be Confronted By The Growing Number Of People Who See That Better Ways Are Available; Thanks To Technology.

There Won't Be Anything We Won't Say To People To Try And Convince Them That Our Way Is The Way To Go.

This Is A Fantastic Time To Be Entering The Business World, Because Business Is Going To Change More In The Next 10 Years Than It Has In The Last 50.

With Polio, We've Gone Several Years With No Polio In All Of Africa, But Now With This We're Having To Go And Mop Up In That Whole Region, So It's A Bit Of A Setback For Polio. So In Parallel We Have To Go Back And Get Rid Of Those Cases.

Middle-income Countries Are The Biggest Users Of Gmos. Places Like Brazil.

By Improving Health, Empowering Women, Population Growth Comes Down.

Just In Terms Of Allocation Of Time Resources, Religion Is Not Very Efficient. There's A Lot More I Could Be Doing On A Sunday Morning.

In Three Years, Every Product My Company Makes Will Be Obsolete. The Only Question Is Whether We Will Make Them Obsolete Or Somebody Else Will.

I Think We Knew That This Would Be Just Like Raising The Kids Together, This Would Be A Fun Thing To Do In Partnership. And You Know, We're So Lucky Because We Get To Hire In Very Smart People. We Get To Partner With Governments Like The Canadian Development Organization - Cida, Usaid - Tonnes Of Scientists Doing This Work. This Is Fascinating.

I Believe It’s Not Only Possible To Eradicate Malaria; I Believe It’s Necessary. Ultimately, The Cost Of Controlling It Endlessly Is Not Sustainable. The Only Way To Stop This Disease Is To End It Forever.

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.

If You Want To Build A Great Company, Get The Hell Out Of Silicon Valley.

Spam Is Taking E-mail, Which Is A Wonderful Tool, And Exploiting The Idea That It's Very Inexpensive To Send Mail.

Finding Information Is Either A Software Question Or A Question Of How Much Information Is Online.

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

You Have To Have A Certain Realism That Government Is A Pretty Blunt Instrument And Without The Constant Attention Of Highly Qualified People With The Right Metrics, It Will Fall Into Not Doing Things Very Well.

The World Needs Banking But It Does Not Need Banks.

I Think That Society Has To Be Careful Not To Shift All Of Its Resources To The Elderly Versus The Young. I Get Very Concerned When People Talk About Cutting Education Budgets.

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.

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

Focus In Business

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.

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

I Have Been Struck Again And Again By How Important Measurement Is To Improving The Human Condition.

Success Is A Lousy Teacher.

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.

Sometimes We Do Get Taken By Surprise. For Example, When The Internet Came Along, We Had It As A Fifth Or Sixth Priority. It Wasn't Like Somebody Told Me About It And I Said, "i Don't Know How To Spell That." I Said, "yeah, I've Got That On My List, So I'm Okay." But There Came A Point When We Realized It Was Happening Faster And Was A Much Deeper Phenomenon Than Had Been Recognized In Our Strategy.

People Who Feared Ibm Were Wrong, ... Technology Is Ever-changing.

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

A First-generation Fortune Is The Most Likely To Be Given Away, But Once A Fortune Is Inherited It's Less Likely That A Very High Percentage Will Go Back To Society.

Well The Protester I Think Is A Very Powerful Thing. It's Basically A Mechanism Of Democracy That, Along With Capitalism, Scientific Innovation, Those Things Have Built The Modern World. And It's Wonderful That The New Tools Have Empowered That Protestor So That State Secrets, Bad Developments Are Not Hidden Anymore.

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

Computer Science … Jobs Should Be Way More Interesting Than Even Going To Wall Street Or Being A Lawyer--or, I Can Argue, Than Anything But Perhaps Biology, And There It's Just A Tie.

Every Day Were Saying, 'how Can We Keep This Customer Happy?' How Can We Get Ahead In Innovation By Doing This, Because If We Don't, Somebody Else Will.

Loyal Customers

When I Was In My 40s, Microsoft Was My Primary Activity.

People Can Criticize Microsoft For Supporting This Tv Thing For The Past Eight Years, But It Is A Long-term Bet, There Is Not Any Other Software Business That Is As Dedicated To The Vision Of The Tv And The Pda [personal Digital Assistant] As We Are.

Bill Gates' Success Factors For Microsoft 1. Long-term Approach 2. Passion For Products And Technology 3. Teamwork 4. Results 5. Customer Feedback 6. Individual Excellence

Software Is A Great Combination Between Artistry And Engineering. When You Finally Get Done And Get To Appreciate What You Have Done It Is Like A Part Of Yourself That You've Put Together. I Think A Lot Of The People Here Feel That Way.

The Most Important Work I Got A Chance To Be Involved In, No Matter What I Do, Is The Personal Computer... I Even Knew Not To Get Married Until Later Because I Was So Obsessed With It. That's My Life's Work.

Being Flooded With Information Doesn't Mean We Have The Right Information Or That We're In Touch With The Right People.

Capitalism Has Worked Very Well. Anyone Who Wants To Move To North Korea Is Welcome.

Most People Overestimate What They Can Do In One Year And Underestimate What They Can Do In Ten Years.

When I Was Growing Up, My Parents Were Almost Involved In Various Volunteer Things. My Dad Was Head Of Planned Parenthood. And It Was Very Controversial To Be Involved With That.

I Love Building The Products, Seeing People Use The Products But You Know Along With Success Comes The Need For A Dialogue With The Government.

There Is No Doubt That As An Economy Grows In A Great Way Like India Has, That You Have To Step Back And Change Your Tax Systems, Because You Start To Get More Disparities Of Wealth.

People Want To Watch Whatever Video They Want To Watch Whenever They Want To Watch. If You Provision Your Internet Infrastructure Adequately, You Can Do That.

Life Is A Lot More Fun If You Treat Its Challenges In Creative Ways.

Innovations That Are Guided By Smallholder Farmers, Adapted To Local Circumstances, And Sustainable For The Economy And Environment Will Be Necessary To Ensure Food Security In The Future.

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.

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.

I Don't Think There's Anything Unique About Human Intellience. All The Nuerons In The Brain That Make Up Perceptions And Emotions Operate In A Binary Fashion.

Anything You Do, You Better Enjoy It For Its Value. Because People Are Going To Second-guess Everything You Do.

Until We're Educating Every Kid In A Fantastic Way, Until Every Inner City Is Cleaned Up, There Is No Shortage Of Things To Do.

The Key For Us, Number One, Has Always Been Hiring Very Smart People.

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.

Whenever There Is Hard Work To Be Done, I Assign It To The Laziest Man As He Is Sure To Find An Easy Way Of Doing It. Be Lazy, Think Crazy.

Discrimination Has A Lot Of Layers That Make It Tough For Minorities To Get A Leg Up.

I Choose A Lazy Person To Do A Hard Job. Because A Lazy Person Will Find An Easy Way To Do It.

Why Do People Benefit In Inverse Proportion To Their Need? Well, Market Incentives Make That Happen.

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

Look At The Clock When You Are Sitting Idle. But Never Look At The Clock When You Are Working.

Natural Epidemics Can Be Extremely Large. Intentionally Caused Epidemics, Bioterrorism, Would Be The Largest Of All.

People Don't Want Lots And Lots Of Single Purpose Devices. They Do Not Want To Have To Learn How To Set Up Something For Photos, Another Thing For Music, Another Thing For Video.

The Main Thing That's Missing In Energy Is An Incentive To Create Things That Are Zero-co2-emitting And That Have The Right Scale And Reliability Characteristics.

Kenya’s M-pesa Proves That When People Are Empowered, They Will Use Digital Tech To Innovate On Their Own Behalf.

The Inventory, The Value Of My Company, Walks Out The Door Every Evening.

[melinda Gates] Is A Lot Of Fun To Work With. There's Some Of The People Skills That She's Better At And Cares About More. It'd Be A Mistake Not To Think Of Her As Very Numerical And Interested In The Science. I Enjoy, If I Get Ahead Of Her, Say, Understanding The Immune System, Then We Can Spend A Few Hours, Where I'm Going Through How Amazing It Is And Interesting, And How That Affects Our Creating New Products, So I've Always Had A Partner.

That's The Part Where The Governments Have A Unique Role, And Then When It Progresses Well Enough, Then Existing Companies Or New Startup Companies Should Take It. In The $3 Trillion A Year Energy Market, The Rewards Will Be Quite Fantastic.

Certain Teams Are More Careful In What They Write. They Generate Less Bugs. You Can Know That But It Still Doesn't Mean There Might Be There Might Not Be One Bug That Would Be Bad To Ship The Product With.

Sorghum Is Kind Of Unusual. It Can Go To Very High Heats, But It's Not As Productive In Most Environments As Maize Is.

I Would Counsel People To Go To College, Because It's One Of The Best Times In Your Life In Terms Of Who You Meet And Develop A Broad Set Of Intellectual Skills.

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.

Television Is Not Real Life. In Real Life People Actually Have To Leave The Coffee Shop And Go To Jobs.

Great Organizations Demand A High Level Of Commitment By The People Involved. Eliminate Politics, By Giving Everybody The Same Message. Keep A Flat Organization In Which All Issues Are Discussed Openly. Empower Teams To Do Their Own Things.

Nuclear Energy, In Terms Of An Overall Safety Record, Is Better Than Other Energy.

It Is Hard To Overstate How Valuable It Is To Have All The Incredible Tools That Are Used For Human Disease To Study Plants.

Software Was The Key Element That Would Determine How Useable And How Broadly Applicable The Machine Was.

I Am Not A Huge Gamer. My Son Knows A Lot More Than I Do About What Is Cool On Xbox. I Played Halo But The Sports Games That The Whole Family Can Use Are The Things I Use The Most. I Threw The Javelin Very Very Far!

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)

The Spread Of Online Information Isn't Just Good For Charities. It's Also Good For Donors. You Can Go To A Site Like Charity Navigator, Which Evaluates Nonprofits On Their Financial Health As Well As The Amount Of Information They Share About Their Work.

All Lives Have Equal Value. And So You Say, 'why Do Poor Children Die When Other Children Don't? Why Do Some People Have Enough Nutrition Or Reasonable Toilets And Other People Don't?' So Those Basic Needs That, Through Innovation, Actually It's Very Affordable To Bring Them...to Everyone.

With Tech Companies, Whoever's The Leader Is Always Questioned, You Know. They Say, 'is This The End Of Them?' And - There's More - More Times People Think That's The Case Than It Really Is The Case.

If I Hadn't Given My Money Away, I'd Have Had More Than Anyone Else On The Planet.

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

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.

In Terms Of Fast Food And Deep Understanding Of The Culture Of Fast Food, I'm Your Man.

Deep Understanding

The Government Is There Day In And Day Out, If You Want All Kids To Have Education, If You Want To Run Courts, If You Want To Have An Army, If You Want To Have Roads, You've Got To Have The Taxation System That Funds Everything That You Expect.

The Us Really Has To Get Out In Front. We Are The Biggest Per Person, By A Substantial Amount, Greenhouse Emitters, And We Give The Most Foreign Aid, Not Per Person But In Absolute.

The Software Is Where The Magic Is. If You're Going To Have All This Power Be Simple Enough, Appealing Enough And Cool Enough, It's Going To Be Because The Software Is Right.

You Wish That You Could Move More Rapidly And You Have Setbacks. You Know, The Aids Epidemic Was A Huge Setback For Africa, And It's Only Through Generosity That We've Avoided That Just Completely Crippling An Entire Generation There.

The Most Impactful Dollars That Australia Can Spend Are Actually What Goes To Help The Poorest.

We'll Have Infinite Bandwidth In A Decade's Time.

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.

I Think (the Internet) Is Contributing To Chinese Political Engagement..access To The Outside World Is Preventing More Censorship.

As I Look Forward, I'm Very Optimistic About The Things I See Ahead.

We Believe Unbelievable Progress Can Be Made, In Both Inventing New Vaccines And Making Sure They Get Out To All The Children Who Need Them.

Information Technology And Business Are Becoming Inextricably Interwoven. I Don't Think Anybody Can Talk Meaningfully About One Without The Talking About The Other.

Playing Bridge Is A Pretty Old Fashioned Thing In A Way That I Really Like. I Was Watching My Daughter Ride Horses This Weekend And That Is Also A Bit Old Fashioned But Fun. I Do The Dishes Every Night - Other People Volunteer But I Like The Way I Do It.

Banking Is Necessary - Banks Are Not.

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.

With A Public Library Card In Your Hand, You Have Access To The Internet And A World Of Opportunities.

The First Big Effects Will Be Farmers That Live On The Edge. Today's Weather, They Barely Get By. Their Kids, A High Percentage Are Malnourished, And So If You Impose More Variable Weather And More Heat, You're Getting More Floods, More Droughts, And During The Germination Time, The High Heat, Most Crops...do Poorly When There's More Heat.

I've Always Been Interested In Science - One Of My Favourite Books Is James Watson's 'molecular Biology Of The Gene.'

Molecular Biology

We All Need People Who Will Give Us Feedback. That's How We Improve.

I Feel Pretty Stupid That I Don't Know Any Foreign Languages. I Wish I Knew French Or Arabic Or Chinese.

Your School May Have Done Away With Winners And Losers, But Life Has Not.

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

Automation Applied To An Inefficient Operation Will Magnify The Inefficiency.

Robotics And Other Combinations Will Make The World Pretty Fantastic Compared With Today.

You Always Overestimate What You Can Get Done In A Year And Underestimate What You Can Get Done In 10 Years.

Effective Philanthropy Requires A Lot Of Time And Creativity - The Same Kind Of Focus And Skills That Building A Business Requires.

How We Deal With The Aids Epidemic Should Be One Of The Greatest Ways That The World Gets Measured. The Report Card For This Era.

The Best Teacher Is Very Interactive.

I Think Philanthropy Is Also Growing And Catching On. Figuring Out How The Philanthropy Sector, Which Is Quite Small Compared To The Private Sector, Which Is The Biggest By Far, And Then The Governments, You Know, Even In These Poor Countries Over Time Has To Take On These Key Responsibilities. How Does Philanthropy Accelerate That? Drive The Kind Of Innovations, Make Sure They Get Used Well. So It Plays This Kind Of Special Role.

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.

The First Five Years Have So Much To Do With How The Next 80 Turn Out.

The Only Thing I Understand Deeply, Because In My Teens I Was Thinking About It, And Every Year Of My Life, Is Software. So I'll Never Be Hands-on On Anything Except Software.

Looking At These Issues As A Businessman, I Believe That Investing In The World's Poorest People Is The Smartest Way That Our Government Spends Money.

We Should All Grow Our Own Food And Do Our Own Waste Processing, We Really Should.

The General Idea Of The Rich Helping The Poor, I Think, Is Important. That Your Sense Of Justice Says, Why Should Rich Kids - Who Barely Get These Diseases And Almost Never Die Of Them - Why Should They Get The Vaccines, When Poor Kids, Who Actually Do Die From These Diseases, Don't Get Those Things? It's An Unbelievable Inequity That There Isn't That Access.

Certainly There's A Phenomenon Around Open Source. You Know Free Software Will Be A Vibrant Area. There Will Be A Lot Of Neat Things That Get Done There.

I Believe Innovation Is The Most Powerful Force For Change In The World.

The Thing About Hd-dvd That Is Attractive To Microsoft Is That It's Very Pro-consumer In Letting You Copy All Movies Up Onto The Hard Disk.

It's Fantastic That Microsoft In The Cloud Space Is One Of Very Few Companies That's Got The Critical Mass, The Particular Emphasis On Helping Business Customers Get Up To That Cloud With All The Unique Requirements They Have. It's Very Exciting.

Our Flame Is Taking The Normal Depleted Uranium - The 99.3 Percent That's Cheap As Heck, And There's A Pile Of It Sitting In Paducah, Kentucky That's Enough To Power The United States For Hundreds And Hundreds Of Years. You're Taking That And You Are Converting It To Plutonium - And Then You're Burning That.

I Think There Will Be Pcs At Every Price Point.

My Experience Of Malaria Was Just Taking Anti-malarials, Which Give You Strange Dreams, Because I Don't Want To Get Malaria.

I Believe That With Great Wealth Comes Great Responsibility, A Responsibility To Give Back To Society And A Responsibility To See That Those Resources Are Put To Work In The Best Possible Way To Help Those Most In Need.

By Helping Us To Be More Productive, Technology Lets Us To Spend Less Time Focusing On Survival, And More On Solving Other Challenges.

I Believe Os/2 Is Destined To Be The Most Important Operating System, And Possibly Program, Of All Time. As The Successor To Dos, Which Has Over 10,000,000 Systems In Use, It Creates Incredible Opportunities For Everyone Involved With Pcs.

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?

The Billion People Who Wake Up Every Day Trying To Figure Out If They Have Enough Food To Eat Won't Be At Davos.

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.

Sometimes, I Think My Most Important Job As A Ceo Is To Listen For Bad News. If You Don't Act On It, Your People Will Eventually Stop Bringing Bad News To Your Attention And That Is The Beginning Of The End.

I'm Never Fully Satisfied With Any Microsoft Product.

Aids We're - Most Of These Diseases - We Are Down From The Peak. We're Down About 40 Per Cent From The Peak And If We Got The Right Vaccines, Which Are At The Early Stage Of Discovering, Then The Numbers Would Come Down Very Dramatically. So That's Why We Talk About It As An Emergency.

I Don't Believe In Creating Dynastic Wealth. I Don't Really Believe That In A Society That Aspires To Be Meritocratic And That Believes In Equality Of Opportunity - My Kids Have Had Advantage Over 99 Percent Of The Kids In The Country.

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.

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

Innovation Is Often The Hidden Thing, Because We Can't Put Numbers To It. And Yet It's The Thing That Defines The Way We Live, The Things We'd Like To Have For Everyone Whether It's Health Or Education.

When You Lose A Customer, It Can Be Tempting To Tell Each Other, "that Customer's Not Very Sharp. They Just Made The Wrong Decision".

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.

It Is My Belief That Industry And Government Around The World Should Work Even More Closely To Protect The Privacy And Security Of Internet Users, And Promote The Exchange Of Ideas, While Respecting Legitimate Government Considerations.

The Great Thing About A Computer Notebook Is That No Matter How Much You Stuff Into It, It Doesn't Get Bigger Or Heavier.

Software Is More Important Than Hardware.

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

There Is A Difference Between What Technology Enables And What Historical Business Practices Enable.

In My Parents I Saw A Model Where They Were Really Always Communicating, Doing Things Together. They Were Really Kind Of A Team. I Wanted Some Of That Magic Myself.

Living On $6 A Day Means You Have A Refrigerator, A Tv, A Cell Phone, Your Children Can Go To School. That's Not Possible On $1 A Day.

Melinda [gates] Has Been My Partner In Raising The Kids And I Went From Before I Met Her, Intentionally Having An Unbalanced Life, To Having A More Balanced Life With All Sorts Of Fun Things That She And I Do Together.

The Chinese Are Clearly Inculcating The Idea That Science Is Exciting And Important, And That's Why They, As A Whole-they're Graduating Four Times As Many Engineers As We Are, And That's Just Happened Over The Last 20 Years.

Like Any Well Designed Software Product, Windows Is Designed, Developed And Tested As An Integrated Whole.

We're Very Enthused About The Idea That In The Third Trimester We Actually Give The Mother A Vaccine And Her Antibodies, The Protective Things That The Immune System Makes, Actually Pass Through To The Baby, Both When The Baby Is Born, And Through The Mother's Milk. Because The Baby's Immune System Is Actually Not Very Strong For That First Few Months, Using The Mother's Immune System To Do This - It's A Very Exciting Idea And Something That We're Investing Heavily In.

In Fact, Batteries Haven't Improved Over The Last 100 Years As Much As They Would Need To In Order To Make That Happen. So I'm Invested In A Lot Of Battery Companies - And There's A Lot That Exists I'm Not In. They're All Having A Tough Time Achieving It.

In The Long Run, Your Human Capital Is Your Main Base Of Competition. Your Leading Indicator Of Where You're Going To Be 20 Years From Now Is How Well You're Doing In Your Education System.

If You Think Of Global Public Goods Like Polio Eradication, The Kind Of Risk-taking New Approach, Philanthropy Really Does Have A Role To Play There, Because Government Doesn't Do R&d About New Things Naturally As Much As It Probably Should, And So Philanthropy's There.

There's Nobody Getting Rich Writing Software That I Know Of.

Learning From Mistakes And Constantly Improving Products Is A Key In All Successful Companies.

Although I Don't Have A Prescription For What Others Should Do, I Know I Have Been Very Fortunate And Feel A Responsibility To Give Back To Society In A Very Significant Way.

The Ideal Thing Would Be To Have A 100 Percent Effective Aids Vaccine. And To Have Broad Usage Of That Vaccine. That Would Literally Break The Epidemic.

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.

Started From The Chair Hop Now We Here.

Cutting Through Complexity To Find A Solution Runs Through Four Predictable Stages: Determine A Goal, Find The Highest-leverage Approach, Discover The Ideal Technology For That Approach, And In The Meantime, Make The Smartest Application Of The Technology That You Already Have - Whether It's Something Sophisticated, Like A Drug, Or Something Simpler, Like A Bednet.

The Idea That You Encourage Companies To Take Their Innovative Thinkers And Think About The Most Needy - Even Beyond The Market Opportunities - That's Something That Appropriately Ought To Be Done.

This Is A Very Exciting Time In The World Of Information. It`s Not Just That The Personal Computer Has Come Along As A Great Tool. The Whole Pace Of Business Is Moving Faster. Globalization Is Forcing Companies To Do Things In New Ways.

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.

The World Today Has 6.8 Billion People...that's Headed Up To About 9 Billion. If We Do A Really Great Job On Vaccines, Health Care, Reproductive Health Services, We Could Lower That By Perhaps 10 To 15 Percent.

We're At The Point Now Where The Challenge Isn't How To Communicate Effectively With E-mail; It's Ensuring That You Spend Your Time On The E-mail That Matters Most.

China Has Many Successful Entrepreneurs And Business People. I Hope That More People Of Insight Will Put Their Talents To Work To Improve The Lives Of Poor People In China And Around The World, And Seek Solutions For Them.

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

I Like The Idea Of Putting Your Christmas Wish List Up And Letting People Share It.

Christmas Wishes

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

We Need To Get A Broader Awareness. People Say Climate Change Is Really Bad, But Painting That Picture Of What You're Putting At Risk.

People Everywhere Love Windows.

Well, I Don't Think There's Any Need For People To Focus On My Career.

Software Is Different Than Other Products Um, Partly Because It's, It's Not Physical And, And Partly Because Of Its Complexity. You Can Express In Software Millions Of Different Cases And Making Sure That You Handle All Of Them Correctly Is Extremely Difficult.

Thinking About Impact On Children Meant Adding To The Agenda, Both The R&d Agenda And The Delivery Agenda, But It's Amazing News, Even In The Scale Of Other Tragedies.

I'm Going To Retain A Lot Of Microsoft's Stock.

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."

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

These Four Policy Prescriptions - Strengthening Educational Opportunities, Revamping Immigration Rules For Highly Skilled Workers, Increasing Federal Funding For Basic Scientific Research, And Providing Incentives For Private-sector R&d - Should In My View Be Top Priorities As Congress And The Administration Consider How To Maintain The Nation's Leadership In Science, Technology, And Innovation.

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

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

There Are Websites That Any Government Wants To Block. The Truth About The Internet Is That It's Extremely Hard To Block Anything - Extremely Hard. You'll Never Get Perfect Blocking.

Computers Are Great Because When You're Working With Them You Get Immediate Results That Let You Know If Your Program Works. It's Feedback You Don't Get From Many Other Things.

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