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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.

-Bill Gates

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Over 80% Of The

Bill Gates

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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.

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I Was Announcing To The Public, In 2006, That I'd Be Leaving Microsoft In A Couple Of Years And Focusing Full-time On The Foundation. That Was The Time At Which We Went Back To New York And Warren [buffett] Announced These Gifts To A Number Of Foundations, With A Very High Percentage Of It Going To Us And Basically Doubling Our Capacity.

The Current Information Revolution Is A Cultural Revolution, A Social Revolution, A Thoroughgoing Technological Revolution That Involves Not Just Information, But Labor, Leisure, Entertainment, Communication, Education, Culture And Thus Is Part Of A Major Cultural And Social Shift.

Some Very Poor Countries Run Great Vaccination Systems, And Some Richer Ones Run Terrible Programs.

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.

We Got A Malaria Initiative, Really A Phenomenal Time, Even Though In The Early Stages There Was Some Uncertainty. Then Of Course [barack] Obama, Although He Had Budget Constraints, He Believed In These Things; A Lot Of New Initiatives, Including In Agriculture.

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.'

Microsoft's Only Factory Asset Is The Human Imagination.

I Believe In Innovation And That The Way You Get Innovation Is You Fund Research And You Learn The Basic Facts.

The Ceo's Role In Raising A Company's Corporate Iq Is To Establish An Atmosphere That Promotes Knowledge Sharing And Collaboration.

Dos Is Ugly And Interferes With Users' Experience.

User Experience

The Power Of Capitalism To Mediate The Gap Between Rich And Poor Is Pretty Incredible. Indeed, I Think, Year By Year, The Gap Gets Less.

If You Can't Make It Good, At Least Make It Look Good.

The Aids Is A Disease That Is Hard To Talk About.

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

You Can Always Think Of Something Like The Xbox 360 As A Super Set-top Box That Can Do Everything The Set-top Box Does, But Then Have The Graphics To Do The Games As Well.

Let's Face It, The Average Computer User Has The Brain Of A Spider Monkey.

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.

The Future Of Advertising Is The Internet.

The Scientific Understanding Of Some Of These [childhood] Diseases Is Advancing Quite Rapidly. There's Some Things Like Premature Birth Or Nutrition, First Day Deaths That We Need A Lot More Insights So That We Can Build The Tools To Solve Those Problems.

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

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.

While Microsoft Does Not Share All Of Oracle's Ambitions For Java, We Agree That It Is A Very Valuable Tool For Software Developers.

Really Advanced Civilization Is Based On Advances In Energy.

Advanced Civilization

I Have Seen Firsthand That Agricultural Science Has Enormous Potential To Increase The Yields Of Small Farmers And Lift Them Out Of Hunger And Poverty.

Hunger And Poverty

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.

We Need To Look At Less Obvious Paths, Things Like The Wind In The Jet Stream, Which Is Very High Up. The Material Science Of What Type Of Kite String You Would Need To Connect Up To That. That's Still At The Basic Research Level.

People Care A Lot That The Usa Is Well Run, And People Globally Expect Us To Do Things In Upgrading Science And More.

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.

[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.

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.

We All Learn Best In Our Own Ways. Some People Do Better Studying One Subject At A Time, While Some Do Better Studying Three Things At Once. Some People Do Best Studying In Structured, Linear Way, While Others Do Best Jumping Around, Surrounding A Subject Rather Than Traversing It. Some People Prefer To Learn By Manipulating Models, And Others By Reading.

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

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.

We Need To Cooperate Globally On Epidemic Preparedness And Prevention In The Same Way We Are Cooperating Globally To Stop People From Getting Nuclear Weapons.

I'm Not A Macroeconomics Person.

[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.

The Typical Project Design Time For A Large Company Like Ibm - And They Keep Track Of This - Is A Little Over Four Years.

People Everywhere Love Windows.

That It's A Worldwide Thing That Families Are Better Off.

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.

Perhaps I Should Be Flattered That Somebody Imagines The Name Is Worth So Much, Especially Since My Parents Gave Me The Same Name 42 Years Ago For Free.

Today, You Always Know Whether You Are On The Internet Or On Your Pc's Hard Drive. Tomorrow, You Will Not Care And May Not Even Know.

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

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

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.

Who Can Afford To Do Professional Work For Nothing? What Hobbyist Can Put Three Man-years Into Programming, Finding All Bugs, Documenting His Product, And Distributing It For Free?

Software Is More Important Than Hardware.

Automation Applied To An Inefficient Operation Will Magnify The Inefficiency.

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.

I Think When Smallpox Was Eliminated, The Whole World Got Pretty Excited About That Because It’s Just Such A Dramatic Success.

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

If I Was Down To The Last Dollar Of My Marketing Budget I'd Spend It On Pr!

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.

No One Person Controls Microsoft. The Board And The Shareholders Decide Whether They Want To Have Me As Ceo.

We Will Never Make A 32-bit Operating System.

Operating Systems

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

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.

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

Positive Thinking

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.

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

The Gates Foundation Has Learned That Two Questions Can Predict How Much Kids Learn: 'does Your Teacher Use Class Time Well?' And, 'when You're Confused, Does Your Teacher Help You Get Straightened Out?'

You Can Be A Business Thinker.

We’re No Longer In The Days Where Every Program Is Super Well Crafted. But At The Heart Of The Programs That Make It To The Top, You’ll Find That The Key Internal Code Was Done By A Few People Who Really Knew What They Were Doing.

We Have To Find A Way To Make The Aspects Of Capitalism That Serve Wealthier People Serve Poorer People As Well.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Vision Without Execution Is Daydreaming.

I Believe That If You Show People The Problems And You Show Them The Solutions They Will Be Moved To Act.

We're Only At The Beginning Of What We Have To Do Here.

What I Do Best Is Share My Enthusiasm.

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

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.

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.

Of All The Statistics In Health, Death Is The Easiest, Because You Can Go Out And Ask People, "hey, Have You Had Any Children Who Died, Did Your Siblings Have Any Children Who Died?" People Don't Forget That.

Does The E-mail Say It's About 'enlargement' - That Might Be Spam.

America's High Schools Are Obsolete. By Obsolete, I Don't Just Mean That They're Broken, Flawed, Or Underfunded, Though A Case Could Be Made For Every One Of Those Points. By Obsolete, I Mean Our High Schools-even When They're Working As Designed-cannot Teach All Our Students What They Need To Know Today.

We're Focused On Providing Innovations In Software, Driving The Continuous Improvement For A Much Better Experience, And There's A Lot Going On Here That Speaks To This Decade And What's Going To Happen In This Decade. We Can Kind Of Sum It Up In Terms Of Saying, "yes, You Can."

The World Has Been Very Careful To Pick Very Few Diseases For Eradication, Because It Is Very Tough.

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

In 1990, One In 10 Children Died Before The Age Of Five. That's Now Down To One In 20, And Vaccines Were The Single Biggest Factor In That. Had It Stayed At 10 Percent, 122 Million More Children Would Have Died.

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.

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.

The Impact Of Improving Health Is That The Population Growth Goes Down, And So You Can Educate More Kids, Feed More Kids.

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

Our Modern Lifestyle Is Not A Political Creation. Before 1700, Everybody Was Poor As Hell. Life Was Short And Brutish. It Wasn't Because We Didn't Have Good Politicians; We Had Some Really Good Politicians. But Then We Started Inventing - Electricity, Steam Engines, Microprocessors, Understanding Genetics And Medicine And Things Like That. Yes, Stability And Education Are Important - I'm Not Taking Anything Away From That - But Innovation Is The Real Driver Of Progress.

People Who Say They Don't See The Acceleration Of Innovation Is A Wilful Blindness. We Are Innovation At A Wonderful Speed For The Basic Things We Think Everyone Should Get.

If You Think You're A Really Good Programmer... Read Knuth's Art Of Computer Programming... You Should Definitely Send Me A Resume If You Can Read The Whole Thing.

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.

Globalization Has Made Copper And Other Minerals More Valuable, And Ghana And Kenya Have Recently Discovered Mineral Resources.

India Just Went 3 Years With No Cases [of Polio]. Pakistan Is Our Toughest Location Right Now Because Some Parts Of The Taliban Have Not Allowed Vaccinators To Come In And Have Even Attacked Vaccinators. We Are Hopeful This Will Get Resolved Since No One Wants Their Kid To Be Paralyzed. I Spend A Lot Of Time Making Sure The Polio Campaign Is Doing The Best It Can. We Have Great Computer Models That Help Guide Our Activities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In This Business, By The Time You Realize You're In Trouble, It's Too Late To Save Yourself. Unless You're Running Scared All The Time, You're Gone.

Funny Inspirational

Software Suppliers Are Trying To Make Their Software Packages More 'user-friendly'... Their Best Approach So Far Has Been To Take All The Old Brochures And Stamp The Words 'user-friendly' On The Cover.

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

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

The Common Thread For Everything I Do Is This Idea Of A Web-services Architecture. What Does That Mean? It Means Taking Components Of Software And Systems And Having Them Be Self-describing, So That You Can Aim Them, Ask Them What Their Capabilities Are, And Communicate With Them Using A Standard Protocol.

Now Everyone Takes It For Granted That You Can Look Up Movie Reviews, Track Locations, And Order Stuff Online. I Wish There Was A Way We Could Take It Away From People For A Day So They Could Remember What It Was Like Without It.

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.

If People Want Capital Gains Taxed More Like The Highest Rate On Income, That's A Good Discussion. Maybe That's The Way To Help Close The Deficit.

I Believe Technology Will Continue To Become More Affordable And More People Will Have The Chance To Use It. This Will Help More People Get Medical Care And A Good Education.

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.

If Something's Expensive To Develop, And Somebody's Not Going To Get Paid, It Won't Get Developed. So You Decide: Do You Want Software To Be Written, Or Not?

When I Say "miracle" I Mean A Kind Of Thing Like A Computer On A Chip, Or The Internet, Or The Cellphone, That Are Really Quite Miraculous. Most People Would Not Have Predicted Them, And Their Effect Has Been Very, Very Dramatic.

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.

We All Know That There Are These Exemplars Who Can Take The Toughest Students, And They'll Teach Them Two-and-a-half Years Of Math In A Single Year.

The Poor Can't Wait. Philanthropists Needed To Carry On Being Generous.

Microsoft Does Not Dominate The Software Industry By Any Stretch Of The Imagination. We Have Lots Of Very Able Competitors Who Keep Us Constantly Vigilant, And Sometimes They Beat Us To The Punch. Microsoft's Success To Date Is Based Solely On The Fact That People Like Microsoft Software.

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

Analytical Software Enables You To Shift Human Resources From Rote Data Collection To Value-added Customer Service And Support Where The Human Touch Makes A Profound Difference.

Data Collection

If We Have Optimism Without Empathy Then It Doesn't Matter How Much We Master The Secrets Of Science. We're Not Really Solving Problems, We're Just Working On Puzzles.

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?

Software Will Get To Be Somewhat More Mature, Ah, But It Will Never Be As Predictable As Most Areas Of Engineering.

Vaccination Is Pretty Special Because You Can Do A Vaccination Campaign Anywhere In The World. All You Are Doing Is Gathering Women From The Villages, Getting Them The Vaccines And Asking Them To Go Around And Find The Children.

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.

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.

Contraception Really Shouldn't Be All That Controversial Because It's A Tool A Woman Can Use To Delay Her First Birth Until She's, Say, 18 Or 19 Years Old.

We All Have The Chance To Create A World Where Extreme Poverty Is The Exception Rather Than The Rule.

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.

And Knowledge Management Is A Means, Not An End.

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

This Is Not About Trade, No One Is A Stronger Supporter Of Capitalism And Trade Than I Am. This Is About Sovereignty And Whether A Country Has The Right To Set Its Own Public Health Policies.

Customer Service Will Become The Primary Value Added Function Of Every Business.

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.

When A Country Has The Skill And Self-confidence To Take Action Against Its Biggest Problems, It Makes Outsiders Eager To Be A Part Of It.

Self Confidence

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

Being Maniacal About Something Is Very Helpful.

...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.

That Way You Can Be Certain To Learn Something You Didn't Know Previously.

People Always Fear Change. People Feared Electricity When It Was Invented, Didn't They? People Feared Coal, They Feared Gas-powered Engines... There Will Always Be Ignorance, And Ignorance Leads To Fear. But With Time, People Will Come To Accept Their Silicon Masters.

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.

The Ability Of A Successful Company To Add Functionality To Its Product Has Long Been Upheld.

To Win Big, You Sometimes Have To Take Big Risks.

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

You Don't Have To Own A Tv Network To Go Out And Do A Cool Show.

It Was Really Phenomenal [warren Buffett Donation]. It Grew Out Of The Friendship That We Had And The Fact That His Plan To Have His Wife Run The Foundation And Give Things Away Changed When She Tragically Died.

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.

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.

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.

Almost Every Way We Make Electricity Today, Except For The Emerging Renewables And Nuclear, Puts Out Co2. And So, What We're Going To Have To Do At A Global Scale, Is Create A New System. And So, We Need Energy Miracles.

There Are Gmo Skeptics More In Europe Maybe Than In Other Places, But Not Exclusively.

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

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.

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

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

Fortunately For India, It Has Got A Growing Economy. If It Is Doing The Right Things With Taxation And Focusing On The Right Areas For Human Development, It Is Going To Have No Problem, Over A Period Of Time, Taking Care Of Its Own Needs.

Does The Universe Exist Only For Me? It's Possible. If So, It's Sure Going Well For Me, I Must Admit.

Optimistic Life

Don't Let Complexity Stop You.

The Need To Communicate Effectively With Your Customers Will Come Up Again And Again.

There Is This Broad, Broad Recognition Of How Technology Is Enabling New Things. Companies That Never Paid Attention To Computers In Any Form Now See Digital Technology As Creating Threats And Opportunities For Them.

Another Trick In Software Is To Avoid Rewriting The Software By Using A Piece That's Already Been Written, So Called Component Approach Which The Latest Term For This In The Most Advanced Form Is What's Called Object Oriented Programming.

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

If We Think Long Term, The Younger Generation Here Is Better About Embracing The World. Not Seeing Countries Boundaries Kind Of An "us Versus Them" Thing.

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

Network Marketing

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

Our Current Expectations For What Our Students Should Learn In School Were Set ﬁfty Years Ago To Meet The Needs Of An Economy Based On Manufacturing And Agriculture. We Now Have An Economy Based On Knowledge And Technology.

[we In Microsoft] Are Not The Only Software Company But We Are A Great Software Company Doing Some Unique Work.

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.

I Appoint The Laziest Person To Do The Hardest Job As They'll Find The Easiest Way To Do It

Death Is Something We Really Understand Extremely Well.

How Much Further Beyond Basic Research The Role Of The Government Should Be, You Could Have A Really Good Debate About It. Almost Nobody Would Say It's Zero. But That's Where At Least We Need The Private Sector To Play A Big Role.

Lectures Should Go From Being Like The Family Singing Around The Piano To High-quality Concerts.

I Am Super Lucky. I've Been In The Area Where Things Have Been Changing And Been Part Of The Digital Revolution, The Magic Of Software, The Internet, The Computer, And Now The Cellphone... So It's Been A Great Privilege.

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.

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

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

If Empathy Channels Our Optimism, We Will See The Empathy And The Diseases And The Poor School. We Will Answer With Our Innovations And We Will Surprise The Pessimists.

I Remember Thinking Quite Logically That I Didn't Want To Spoil My Children With Wealth And So That I Would Create A Foundation, But Not Knowing Exactly What It Would Focus On.

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.

When You Have A Fortune That Is Almost Hard To Imagine, The Best Thing Is Not To Pass That On To One's Children. That Distorts Their Life Situation.

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.

Know Your Numbers' Is A Fundamental Precept Of Business.

Here Are Economies Like China's Economy Where It's Less Than A Tenth [of A Percent] Today, Although It Is Growing, Is Quite Small, Because Of The Notion That The Government Takes Care Of Everything, And Europe And China, Philanthropy Has Not Been Nearly Of The Same Scale.

Philanthropy Is Fun And Fulfilling.

The General Idea Of The Rich Helping The Poor, I Think, Is Important.

I Think It Makes Sense To Believe In God, But Exactly What Decision In Your Life You Make Differently Because Of It, I Don't Know.

I Spend A Lot Of Time Reading.

My Fascination Is Broadly With Biology And The Fact That Our Increased Understanding Of Biology Allows For Breakthroughs In A Broad Set Of Diseases.

It's An Experiment, And It's Probably Good To Have A Couple States Try It Out To See Before You Make That National Policy.

There Is No Doubt Pc Prices Will Be Coming Down.

The Center For Disease Control Started Out As The Malaria War Control Board Based In Atlanta. Partly Because The Head Of Coke Had Some People Out To His Plantation And They Got Infected With Malaria, And Partly Cause All The Military Recruits Were Coming Down And Having A Higher Fatality Rate From Malaria While Training Than In The Field.

When Paul Allen And I Started Microsoft Over 30 Years Ago, We Had Big Dreams About Software. We Had Dreams About The Impact It Could Have.

With World Health, Every Life You Save Is A Wonderful Thing, So It's Not This Question Of Whether You Solve It Or You Don't. The Chance Of Completely Solving The Problems Has Long Odds. But Really, The Thing Is That You Get To Save The First Child, The Second Child, The Third Child. You Can Just Feel Good About That.

If African Farmers Can Use Improved Seeds And Better Practices To Grow More Crops And Get Them To Market, Then Millions Of Families Can Earn Themselves A Better Living And A Better Life.

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.

The Answer Is Simple, And Harsh. The Market Did Not Reward Saving The Lives Of These Children, And Governments Did Not Subsidize It. So The Children Died Because Their Mothers And Their Fathers Had No Power In The Market And No Voice In The System.

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.

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

Focus In Business

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.

Unfortunately, In Rich-world Health, Innovation Is Both Your Friend And Your Enemy. Innovation Is Inventing Organ Replacement, Joint Replacement. We're Inventing Ways Of Doing New Things That Cost $300,000 And Take People In Their 70s And, On Average, Give Them An Extra, Say, Two Or Three Years Of Life. And Then You Have To Say, Given Finite Resources, Should We Fire Two Or Three Teachers To Do This Operation?

Teaching Is The Human Thing, In Terms Of Building The Kids' Self-confidence, So If We Take The Broad Ways That We Want To See Society To Be Better, Science Can Only Provide Certain Pieces Of That.

Self Confidence

Treatment Without Prevention Is Simply Unsustainable.

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

Money Has No Utility To Me Beyond A Certain Point.

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.

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Walter Anderson

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