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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.

-Bill Gates

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My Innovation Message, Specifically

Bill Gates

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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.

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More From Bill Gates

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.

Don't Let Complexity Stop You.

What I Do Best Is Share My Enthusiasm.

The Belief That The World Is Getting Worse, That We Can't Solve Extreme Poverty And Disease, Isn't Just Mistaken. It Is Harmful.

It's The Poorer People In Tropical Zones Who Will Get Really Hit By Climate Change - As Well As Some Ecosystems, Which Nobody Wants To See Disappear.

I'm Going To Save My Public Voice Largely For The Issues Where I Have Some Depth.

Setting Clear Goals And Finding Measures That Will Mark Progress Toward Them Can Improve The Human Condition.

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 Really Had A Lot Of Dreams When I Was A Kid, And I Think A Great Deal Of That Grew Out Of The Fact That I Had A Chance To Read A Lot.

When I Was Young I Liked Taking Tests. I Happened To Be Good At It. Certain Subjects Came Easily, Like Math. All The Science Stuff. I Would Just Read The Textbooks In The First Few Days Of Class.

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.

Security Guys Break The Mac Every Single Day. Every Single Day, They Come Out With A Total Exploit, Your Machine Can Be Taken Over Totally.

Drones Overall Will Be More Impactful Than I Think People Recognize In Positive Ways To Help Society.

The Job Was To Put Into A, A Computer With Only 4k Of Memory An Entire Basic Full Blown, Floating Point Basic And That's One Of The Greatest Programming Feats I've Ever Had A Chance To Work On.

It's Ok For China To Invent Cancer Drugs That Cure Patients In The United States. We Want Them To Catch Up. But As The Leader, We Want To Keep Setting A Very, Very High Standard. We Don't Want Them To Catch Up Because We're Slowing Down Or, Even Worse, Going Into Reverse.

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

To Be Born Poor Is Not Our Fault, But To Die Poor Is Crime

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.

The Government's Ability To Select Scientists And Pick Things That Are Fairly Strange, Because Politicians Don't Like Failures. They're Only In Office A Short Term, And Many Of These Things Take A Long Time.

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

I Reboot [my Windows Pc] Every Night.

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.

The Future Of Windows Is To Let The Computer See, Listen And Even Learn.

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

I Have To Admit That Business-type Thoughts Do Sneak Into My Head: I Hope Our Customers Pay Us, I Hope This Stuff Is Decent, I Hope We Get It Done On Time. The Little Additions And Subtractions That One Has To Do. Take Sales, Take Costs And Try To Get That Big Positive Number At The Bottom.

I Was Lucky To Be In The Right Place At The Right Time. But Many Others Were Also In The Same Place. The Difference Was That I Took Action.

The Most Important People Is To Pick People Who Like To Write Software And Who Are Good At... Good Developers Like Working With Each Other. And They... They Reinforce Each Other's Skills.

If You Count E-mail, I'm On The Internet All Day, Every Day.

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.'

The Worst Pandemic In Modern History Was The Spanish Flu Of 1918, Which Killed Tens Of Millions Of People. Today, With How Interconnected The World Is, It Would Spread Faster.

The Us Spends More On Energy R&d Than All Other Countries Put Together, And I Personally Consider It Quite Inadequate.

When You Have Money In Hand,only You Forget Who Are You .but When You Do Not Have Any Money In Your Hand,the Whole World Forget Who You Are.it's Life.

In Ninth Grade, I Came Up With A New Form Of Rebellion. I Hadn't Been Getting Good Grades, But I Decided To Get All A's Without Taking A Book Home. I Didn't Go To Math Class, Because I Knew Enough And Had Read Ahead, And I Placed Within The Top 10 People In The Nation On An Aptitude Exam.

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.

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.

Don’t Tax My Income, Tax My Consumption.

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.

It's Hard To Improve Public Education - That's Clear.

Public Education

I Didn't Completed My University Education

University Education

I Think The Thing We See Is That As People Are Using Video Games More, They Tend To Watch Passive Tv A Bit Less. And So Using The Pc For The Internet, Playing Video Games, Is Starting To Cut Into The Rather Unbelievable Amount Of Time People Spend Watching Tv.

You Will Not Make $60,000 A Year Right Out Of High School. You Won't Be A Vice-president With A Car Phone Until You Earn Both.

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.

Online Education Is Pretty Special For Two Reasons. One Is That You Can Get The Very Best Lecture In The World And Wherever You Are, Whenever You Want, You Can Connect To That Lecture. The Other Is This Interactivity, Where If You Know A Topic, You Can Kind Of Skip Over It. Or If You're Confused About It, [the Area] Where You're Confused Can Be Analyzed By Software.

The U.s. And Canada Are Two Generous Governments And We Reach Out And Partner With Anyone Who Believes In Foreign Aid.

I Keep Bumping Into That Silly Quotation Attributed To Me That Says 640k Of Memory Is Enough. There's Never A Citation; The Quotation Just Floats Like A Rumor, Repeated Again And Again.

I Think There Certainly Was A Milestone In The '90s With Regards To The Internet Achieving Critical Mass. There Were Several Magical Factors That Came Together: The Creation Of Html By Tim Berners-lee, The Drop In The Price Of Communications, And All The Pcs Out There That You Could Put This Software Into.

If Geek Means You're Willing To Study Things, And If You Think Science And Engineering Matter, I Plead Guilty. If Your Culture Doesn't Like Geeks, You Are In Real Trouble.

Typically, Your Corporate E-mail Account Is Not, Today, That Spam-targeted. It's More The Free E-mail Accounts That Are Spam-targeted.

Spam Will Be A Thing Of The Past In Two Years' Time.

A Lot Of The Things That Will Really Improve The World Fortunately Aren't Dependent On Washington Doing Something Different.

Hey, Size Works Against Excellence.

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.

When You Have A Product That Has Zero Sales, It Is Easy For People To Say Whatever They Want About It And Almost Fantasize About It.

The World Is Very Disparate, In Terms Of The Us Using The Most Energy Per Person, And Then The Other Rich Countries - Europe, Japan, New Zealand - Using About Half Of What We Do, And Then The World Average Being About A Fifth Of What We Use, With China Just Now Surpassing The World Average.

[africa] Is The One Continent Where You Still Have A Lot More Young People Than Old People. So Making Sure They're Healthy, Good Nutrition, Good Education. That'll Be Important For The World.

Windows 2000 Already Contains Features Such As The Human Discipline Component, Where The Pc Can Send An Electric Shock Through The Keyboard If The Human Does Something That Does Not Please Windows.

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

In Terms Of Doing Things I Take A Fairly Scientific Approach To Why Things Happen And How They Happen. I Don't Know If There's A God Or Not, But I Think Religious Principles Are Quite Valid.

Measuring Programming Progress By Lines Of Code Is Like Measuring Aircraft Building Progress By Weight.

Scientists And Companies Weren't Creating Things Like New Vaccines. Now That We Have This Fund That's There To Buy At The Lowest Price, But Buy For Those People These Medicines, We See Scientists Everywhere Coming Up With Those New Tools.

Creating Things

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.

Improving The Health & Productivity Of The Poorest Is One Of The Best Investments You Can Make In The Future Of The World

For Africa To Move Forward, You've Really Got To Get Rid Of Malaria.

I Am Not Topper In My University But All Toppers Are Working In My Microsoft Company.

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.

[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.

People Are Building The Software And So Having The Pieces Be Such That A Single Person Understands All The Tradeoffs And Everything That's Going On In A Piece Is Extremely Valuable. It Avoids Getting Into An Experimental Mode Where You're Just Trying Things Out. That Never Works.

Vision Without Execution Is Daydreaming.

I Spend A Lot Of Time Reading.

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.

In A Budget, How Important Is Art Versus Music Versus Athletics Versus Computer Programming? At The End Of The Day, Some Of Those Trade-offs Will Be Made Politically.

The End Of The Day

In The Same Way That When The Car Got Going, People Thought It Would Be An Electric Car, People Thought It Would Be A Steam Car. Actually, The Dark Horse In That Race Was Internal Combustion, But Because Of The Energy Density Of Gasoline And Discovery Of Oil In Large Amounts At That Point In First Pennsylvania And Then Texas, It Won Out Over Those Other Two, To The Point That Those Other Two Are Actually Viewed As Obscure Footnotes In History.

Being Able To See An Activity Log Of Where A Kid Has Been Going On The Internet Is A Good Thing.

As I See It, There Are Two Great Forces Of Human Nature: Self-interest, And Caring For Others. Capitalism Harnesses Self-interest In A Helpful And Sustainable Way, But Only On Behalf Of Those Who Can Pay. Government Aid And Philanthropy Channel Our Caring For Those Who Can't Pay. But To Provide Rapid Improvement For The Poor We Need A System That Draws In Innovators And Businesses In A Far Better Way Than We Do Today.

Make It Just Like A Mac.

It's Paradoxical That, When You Have Better Health, Families Choose To Have Less Children, Because They've Been Having Enough Children So That They Can Be Sure That A Few Of Them Will Survive And Take Care Of Them. So As Health Improves, Then All The Other Problems Are Dramatically Easier To Tackle.

We Make The Future Sustainable When We Invest In The Poor, Not When We Insist On Their Suffering.

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

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.

I Love Nuclear. It Does This Radiation Thing That's Tricky. But They're Good Solutions. You Know, It Was Interesting; Recently, In Connecticut This Natural Gas Plant Blew Up 11 Guys. It Just Blew Them Up.

We Need A Malaria Epidemic In The Blogging Community! Either That Or We Need People Who Have Seen The Malaria Epidemic To Start Blogging.

In K-12, Almost Everybody Goes To Local Schools. Universities Are A Bit Different Because Kids Actually Do Pick The University. The Bizarre Thing, Though, Is That The Merit Of University Is Actually How Good The Students Going In Are: The Sat Scores Of The Kids Going In.

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.

Is The Rich World Aware Of How Four Billion Of The Six Billion Live? If We Were Aware, We Would Want To Help Out, We'd Want To Get Involved.

Business Success

Self Improvement

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.

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

If You're Too Focused On Your Current Business, It's Hard To Change And Concentrate On Innovating.

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

Talking To Mothers, Always Brings It Home Because They're So Anxious To Do Everything They Can For Their Kids And So Tragic For Them.

My Son Likes To Go See Mines And Electric Plants, Or The Large Hadron Collider, And We've Had A Chance To See A Lot Of Interesting Stuff.

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.

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

Personally, I'd Like To See More Of Our Leaders Take A Technocratic Approach To Solving Our Biggest Problems.

When You Want To Do Your Homework, Fill Out Your Tax Return, Or See All The Choices For A Trip You Want To Take, You Need A Full-size Screen.

Microsoft Is Involved In Setting Some Fairly Key Standards And People Are Afraid Of It Because They Think, Geez, They Are Quite Capable. It's Daunting, I Suppose.

The Bulk Of The Universities Are About Teaching Kids.

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.

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.

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.

Treatment Without Prevention Is Simply Unsustainable.

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

The Microprocessor Is A Miracle.

If You Really Could Take The Co2, When You Burn Hydrocarbons - Coal, For Example - If You Could Really Capture The Carbon And Sequester It - They Call It Ccs - If The Extra Capital Cost, Energy Cost, And Storage Costs Over Time Didn't Make It Super Expensive, Then That's Another Path That You Could Go Down.

I See Little Commercial Potential For The Internet For At Least Ten Years.

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.

Netscape Was Able To Get The Government Working On Its Behalf.

Reward Worthy Failure - Experimentation.

Making Mistakes

Leaders Need To Provide Strategy And Direction And To Give Employees Tools That Enable Them To Gather Information And Insight From Around The World. Leaders Shouldn't Try To Make Every Decision.

In The Next 15 Years, We Can Halve Childhood Deaths. That's Doable.

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.

I'm Not An Educator ... I'm A Learner.

When I Was In College, For The Games Of That Era, I Was As Hard Core As Anyone Was. I Wouldn't Say I Outgrew It, But You Always Have To Have A Finite Number Of Addictions.

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.

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

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

Oh, I Think There Are A Lot Of People Who Would Be Buying And Selling Online Today That Go Up There And They Get The Information, But Then When It Comes Time To Type In Their Credit Card They Think Twice Because They're Not Sure About How That Might Get Out And What That Might Mean For Them.

Your Most Unhappy Customers Are Your Greatest Source Of Learning.

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

I Think That Our Progress On Key Diseases Over The Next Several Decades Is Going To Be Pretty Amazing And So I Am Very Interested In That.

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.

Only Through Focus Can You Do World-class Things, No Matter How Capable You Are.

Students Deserve Great Teachers. And Teachers Deserve The Support They Need To Become Great.

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.

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."

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

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

Vaccines Are A Miracle; They're Fantastic. Anything That Makes People Hesitate To Give Their Children These Vaccines According To The Recommended Schedule Creates Risk. Risk For The Children Who Don't Get Vaccinated And Risk For Children, Some Of Whom Don't Have An Immune System, So They're Benefiting From The Fact That The Community Protection Means The Disease Doesn't Get To Them.

Make Sure People Get Educated, Help Out With Health Emergencies. Those Things, The Government Should Do. That's 96 Per Cent Of The Economy, Those Two Sectors.

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

The U.s. Couldn't Even Get Rid Of Saddam Hussein. And We All Know That The Eu Is Just A Passing Fad. They'll Be Killing Each Other Again In Less Than A Year. I'm Sick To Death Of All These Fascist Lawsuits.

Killing Each Other

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

Creative Capitalism Takes This Interest In The Fortunes Of Others And Ties It To Our Interest In Our Own Fortunes In Ways That Help Advance Both. This Hybrid Engine Of Self-interest And Concern For Others Can Serve A Much Wider Circle Of People Than Can Be Reached By Self-interest Or Caring Alone.

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.

I'd Be Happy If I Could Think That The Role Of The Library Was Sustained And Even Enhanced In The Age Of The Computer.

A Great Lathe Operator Commands Several Times The Wage Of An Average Lathe Operator, But A Great Writer Of Software Code Is Worth 10,000 Times The Price Of An Average Software Writer.

The More You Learn, The More You Have A Framework That The Knowledge Fits Into.

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.

Stolen's A Strong Word. It's Copyrighted Content That The Owner Wasn't Paid For.

...one Of The Most Inventive Forms Of Creative Capitalism Involves Someone We All Know Very Well. A Few Years Ago, I Was Sitting In A Bar Here In Davos With Bono. Late At Night, After A Few Drinks, He Was On Fire, Talking About How We Could Get A Percentage Of Each Purchase From Civic-minded Companies To Help Change The World. He Kept Calling People, Waking Them Up, And Handing Me The Phone To Show Me The Interest.

If Africa Seeks Prosperity, It Must Provide For The Health And Nutrition Of All – Including The Poorest.

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

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.

I Like My Job Because It Involves Learning. I Like Being Around Smart People Who Are Trying To Figure Out New Things. I Like The Fact That If People Really Try They Can Figure Out How To Invent Things That Actually Have An Impact.

Even In Some Of Our Vaccine Areas, Like An Aids Vaccine, Things Have Taken Longer Than We Expected, But We Have The Pipeline Of Tools. The Biological Information That We Have That Gives Us Insights Is Fantastic.

Getting Ready For A Global Pandemic Is Every Bit As Important As Nuclear Deterrence And Avoiding A Climate Catastrophe.

If We [the Usa] Don't Innovate In Education, It's Literally Going To Mean Less People Get To Go Have That Education At A Time When More People Are Going To Want It. We've Got To Put Courses Out On The Web, We've Got To Put Interactive Learning Out On The Web.

Good Stuff Tends To Happen Gradually, Whereas Violence Or Catastrophes Are Deemed More Newsworthy.

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

To Get A Big Company Moving Fast, Especially On A Many-headed Opportunity Like The Internet, You Have To Have Hundreds Of People Participating And Coming Up With Ideas.

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

Software Is Inherently Complicated. If You Say To Somebody I Want An Airline Reservation System, To Really Say What You Want In Terms Of Overbooking And Fares, And Different Airlines Communicating With Each Or Schedule Changes, It's Immensely Complex. And So You Can't Write A Program That's Any Simpler Than That Full Specification.

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.

Everything On The Internet Is Real God Damn It!

I Have A Company That Is Not Microsoft, Called Corbis. Corbis Is The Operation That Merged With Bettman Archives. It Has Nothing To Do With Microsoft. It Was Intentionally Done Outside Of Microsoft Because Microsoft Isn't Interested.

Paul And I, We Never Thought That We Would Make Much Money Out Of The Thing. We Just Loved Writing Software.

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.

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?

Software Is A Great Combination Between Artistry And Engineering.

We All Sort Of Do Want Incentives For Creative People To Still Exist At A Certain Level. You Know, Maybe Rock Stars Shouldn't Make As Much; Who Knows? But You Want As Much Creativity To Take Place In The Future As Took Place In The Past.

Microsoft Is Always Two Years Away From Failure.

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.

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.

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

Focus In Business

Often You Have To Rely On Intuition.

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.

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

If You Were Born Poor, It's Not Your Fault. But If You Die Poor It Is.

But The Improvements Will Happen Faster And Last Longer If We Can Channel Market Forces, Including Innovation That's Tailored To The Needs Of The Poorest, To Complement What Governments And Nonprofits Do. We Need A System That Draws In Innovators And Businesses In A Far Better Way Than We Do Today.

The Truth Of Moore's Law Has Made Remarkable Things Possible. On The Software Side, I Think Natural User Interfaces In All Their Forms Are Equally Significant.

The Kids Are A Big Part Of My Schedule.

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.

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".

A Breakthrough In Machine Learning Would Be Worth Ten Microsofts.

The Trouble With Energy Farming Is That The Energy Isn't Always Where You Want To Use It, And It Isn't Always When You Want To Use It.

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

(on Being The World's Richest Man) I Wish I Wasn't ... There's Nothing Good That Comes Out Of That. You Get More Visibility As A Result Of It.

Creativity Allows People To Be Effective.

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

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

I Understand How Every Healthy Child, Every New Road, Puts A Country On A Better Path, But Instability And War Will Arise From Time To Time, And I'm Not An Expert On How You Get Out Of Those Things.

Software Is More Important Than Hardware.

Www? Nice Toy, But What A Waste Of Time.

Test Scores Aren't Perfect, But Having A Test Score For Math Or Reading Or Other Things That We Can Objectively Measure Is A Meaningful Component That Makes A Lot Of Sense.

I Don't Have Any Tvs With Their Over-the-air Receivers Connected In My House. But When I'm In A Hotel Room Or Other Places That Have A Tv, Then I Turn It On And Flip The Channels Just Like Everybody Else. I'm Not Immune To The Lures Of Television. I Just Try To Stay Away From It Because I Like To Read.

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

This Antitrust Thing Will Blow Over.

I Think There Will Be Pcs At Every Price Point.

Steve Jobs' Ability To Focus In On A Few Things That Count, Get People Who Get User Interface Right, And Market Things As Revolutionary Are Amazing Things.

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

The Most Meaningful Way To Differentiate Your Company From Your Competition, Is To Do An Outstanding Job With Information.

Well I Think Any Author Or Musician Is Anxious To Have Legitimate Sales Of Their Products, Partly So They're Rewarded For Their Success, Partly So They Can Go On And Do New Things.

Humanity’s Greatest Advances Are Not In Its Discoveries – But In How Those Discoveries Are Applied To Reduce Inequity. Whether Through Democracy, Strong Public Education, Quality Health Care, Or Broad Economic Opportunity – Reducing Inequity Is The Highest Human Achievement.

So On The Demand Side [for Energy], There Have Been A Variety Of Policies That Globally Have Been Way Over $50 Billion A Year Of Tax Credits, Raising The Price Of Electricity Through Things Like Renewable Portfolio Standards, So The Total Amount Of Money That's Gone Into Sending A Price Signal To Push Up Demand Versus What Would Happen Without It Has Been Gigantic.

To Succeed, You Also Have To Know How To Make Choices And How To Think More Broadly.

Like A Human Being, A Company Has To Have An Internal Communication Mechanism, A "nervous System", To Coordinate Its Actions.

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

The Advance Of Technology Is Based On Making It Fit In So That You Don't Really Even Notice It, So It's Part Of Everyday Life.

China And The U.s. Need Each Other Very Badly. Yes, We Should Argue About Some Things, But It's Not An 'us Versus Them,' It's An 'us And Them' Type Scenario.

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.

You Have The Refugee Crisis Triggered By Syria. That's Got A Lot Of Costs Associated With It. Domestically, Budgets Are Incredibly Tight Because The Economy's Not Generating The Growth That Makes For Easy Trade-offs.

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William Blackstone

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