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The Interview Process Tests Not What The Applicant Knows, But How Well They Can Process Tricky Questions: If You Wanted To Figure Out How Many Times On Average You Would Have To Flip The Pages Of The Manhattan Phone Book To Find A Specific Name, How Would You Approach The Problem? If A Spider Fell To The Bottom Of A 50-foot Well, And Each Day Climbed Up 3 Feet And Slipped Back 2, How Many Days Would It Take The Spider To Get Out Of The Well? .

-Bill Gates

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The Interview Process Tests

Bill Gates

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The Interview Process Tests Not What The Applicant Knows, But How Well They Can Process Tricky Questions: If You Wanted To Figure Out How Many Times On Average You Would Have To Flip The Pages Of The Manhattan Phone Book To Find A Specific Name, How Would You Approach The Problem? If A Spider Fell To The Bottom Of A 50-foot Well, And Each Day Climbed Up 3 Feet And Slipped Back 2, How Many Days Would It Take The Spider To Get Out Of The Well? .

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More From Bill Gates

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.

Software Is More Important Than Hardware.

Success Today Requires The Agility And Drive To Constantly Rethink, Reinvigorate, React, And Reinvent.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

People Often Overestimate What Will Happen In The Next Two Years And Underestimate What Will Happen In Ten.

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

Patience Is A Key Element Of Success.

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.

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

If You're Asking Whether I Intentionally Mess Up My Hair, No, I Don't. And Certain Things, Like My Freckles, They're Just There. I Don't Do Anything Consciously. I Suppose I Could Get Contact Lenses. I Suppose I Could Comb My Hair More Often.

The Present And Future Of Knowledge Attainment And Essential Business Skills.

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

Like Almost Everyone Who Uses E-mail, I Receive A Ton Of Spam Every Day. Much Of It Offers To Help Me Get Out Of Debt Or Get Rich Quick. It Would Be Funny If It Weren't So Irritating.

There Are Several Hundred People Who Stayed In The Ebola-affected Countries And Continued To Do The Work, Put Themselves At Great Risk Because Medical Workers Are The Most Likely To Be Infected Because They're Helping Out When The Person's Health Is Deteriorating, Including Quite A Bit Of Bleeding As They're Getting Very, Very Sick.

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.

Software Is The Magic Thing Whose Importance Only Goes Up Over Time.

Corruption Is One Of The Most Common Reasons I Hear In Views That Criticize Aid.

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

Molecular Biology

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

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.

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.

Government Investment Unlocks A Huge Amount Of Private Sector Activity, But The Basic Research That We Put Into It Work That Led To The Internet And Lots Of Great Companies And Jobs, The Basic Work We Put Into The Health Care Sector, Where It's Over $30 Billion A Year In R&d That Led The Biotech And Pharma Jobs. And It Creates Jobs And It Creates New Technologies That Will Be Productized. But The Government Has To Prime The Pump Here. The Basic Ideas, As In Those Other Industries, Start With Government Investment.

In My 20s, I Worked Very, Very Hard. I Have A Much More Balanced Life Now.

In Low-income Countries, Getting To A Health Post Is Hard. It's Very Expensive.

The Most Amazing Philanthropists Are People Who Are Actually Making A Significant Sacrifice.

This Whole Phenomenon Of The Computer In A Library Is An Amazing Thing.

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.

Long-term Vision And Product Strategy.

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.

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

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

When You Program, You Want To Think You're Writing The Best Possible Program For The... For The Task You're Trying To Solve.

Certainly I'll Never Be Able To Put Myself In The Situation That People Growing Up In The Less Developed Countries Are In. I've Gotten A Bit Of A Sense Of It By Being Out There And Meeting People And Talking With Them.

Success Is A Lousy Teacher. It Seduces Smart People Into Thinking They Can't Lose.

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

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.

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

I Hope You Will Judge Yourselves Not On Your Professional Accomplishments Alone, But Also On How Well You Have Addressed The World's Deepest Inequities...on How Well You Treated People A World Away Who Have Nothing In Common With You But Your Humanity.

In Poor Countries, We Still Need Better Ways To Measure The Effectiveness Of The Many Government Workers Providing Health Services. They Are The Crucial Link Bringing Tools Such As Vaccines And Education To The People Who Need Them Most. How Well Trained Are They? Are They Showing Up To Work?

The Finest Pieces Of Software Are Those Where One Individual Has A Complete Sense Of Exactly How The Program Works. To Have That, You Have To Really Love The Program And Concentrate On Keeping It Simple, To An Incredible Degree.

There Was A Concept A Long Time Ago That You Would Do A Different Type Of Reactor Called A "fast Reactor," That Would Make A Bunch Of Another Element Called Plutonium, And Then You Would Pull That Out, And Then You Would Burn That. That's Called "breeding" In A Fast Reactor. That Is Bad Because Plutonium Is Nuclear Weapons Material. It's Messy. The Processing You Have To Get Through Is Not Only Environmentally Difficultly, It's Extremely Expensive.

There Were A Lot Of Missteps In The Early Days, But Because We Got In Early We Got To Make More Mistakes Than Other People.

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

Software Is A Great Combination Between Artistry And Engineering.

Billionaires Should Never Be Responsible For Solving Problems, Because They're Not The Government.

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

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

A Breakthrough In Machine Learning Would Be Worth Ten Microsofts.

I Think Of Myself As A Global Citizen.

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

Often You Just Have To Rely On Your Intuition.

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

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

Success On The Web Require High-level Corporate Understanding Of The Internet's Capabilities And Support Of Early Test-and-invest Projects.

Windows Is Probably The Most Important Product In The Entire Pc Industry. Everything We Do In Terms Of Supporting Touch, New Hardware, Accessibility Has Incredible Impact.

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.

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

Employers Have Decided That Having The Breadth Of Knowledge That's Associated With A Four-year Degree Is Often Something They Want To See In The People They Give That Job To.

My Parents Are Very Successful, And I Went To The Nicest Private School In The Seattle Area. I Was Lucky. But I Never Had Any Trust Funds Of Any Kind, Though My Dad Did Pay My Tuition At Harvard, Which Was Quite Expensive.

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.

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

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

I 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.

It's Easier To Add Things On To A Pc Than It's Ever Been Before. It's One Click, And Boom, It Comes Down.

The World Is Not Flat, And Pcs Are Not, In The Hierarchy Of Human Needs, In The First Five Rungs.

The World At Large Is Less Inequitable Today Than At Any Time In History. Number Of People In Abject Poverty, As A Percentage, Is At All-time Low.

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.

I Am Surprised That In Various Countries, Whether It's The U.k. Or The U.s., You See Isolationist Tendencies That Would Tend To Work Against The Co-operation, Whether It's Climate Change, Immigration, Innovation, Helping The Very Poorest. Those Are Things Where You Want To Think Across Country Boundaries And See A Win-win-type Solution.

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

Don't Let Yourself Be Lulled Into Inaction.

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

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.

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

The Most Important Thing Was The Creation Of A... A Standard, Where Hundreds Of Companies Build Hardware That Can All Run The Same Software.

Flying Cars Are Not A Very Efficient Way To Move Things From One Point To Another.

As We Look Ahead Into The Next Century, Leaders Will Be Those Who Empower Others.

I Don't Think There Is Any Philosophy That Suggests Having Polio Is A Good Thing.

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.

Newspaper Readership Is Still Growing In India.

Every Three Years, We Have To Go To The Governments And Say, Okay, You Know You're Saving Millions Of Lives And Even Though Your Budgets Are Tight, Helping Africa Avoid This Disaster Really Is A Priority.

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

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.

If We [microsoft Corporation] Weren't Still Hiring Great People And Pushing Ahead At Full Speed, It Would Be Easy To Fall Behind And Become A Mediocre Company. Fear Should Guide You, But It Should Be Latent. I Have Some Latent Fear. I Consider Failure On A Regular Basis.

3d Is A Way Of Organizing Things, Particularly As We're Getting Much More Media Information On The Computer, A Lot More Choices, A Lot More Navigation Than We've Ever Had Before.

I'm Quite Worried About The Fiscal Imbalances That We've Got And What That Might Mean In Terms Of Financial Crisis Ahead.

Philanthropy, Although It's Tiny Compared To The Government, It's 2% Of The Us Economy, Which Is The Largest Percentage, Other Than The Middle East.

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.

If There Was An Epidemic, That Definitely Would Make People Accept Vaccines. I Wouldn't Hope For That, Of Course, But If You Wanted People To Love Vaccines, An Epidemic Would Remind Them How Magical They Are.

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?

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.

We Will Never Make A 32-bit Operating System.

Operating Systems

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

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

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.

The Information Highway Will Transform Our Culture As Dramatically As Gutenberg's Press Did The Middle Ages.

There Was A Magical Breakthrough When The Computer Became Cheap And We Could See That Everyone Could Afford A Computer.

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

Rich Countries Can Afford To Overpay For Things.

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.

I Believe The Government Has The Right To Recover From The Heirs To The Fortunes Of Its Most Successful Citizens Some Portion Of Those Fortunes.

Unfortunately, The Highly Curious Student Is A Small Percentage Of The Kids.

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.

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

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.

Imagine The Disincentive To Software Development If After Months Of Work Another Company Could Come Along And Copy Your Work And Market It Under Its Own Name...without Legal Restraints To Such Copying, Companies Like Apple Could Not Afford To Advance The State Of The Art.

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

The Concept Of This So-called "terrapower Reactor" Is That You, In The Same Reactor, You Both Burn And Breed. So, Instead Of Making Plutonium And Then Extracting It, We Take Uranium - The 99.3 Percent That You Normally Don't Do Anything With - We Convert That, And We Burn It.

The Competition To Hire The Best Will Increase In The Years Ahead. Companies That Give Extra Flexibility To Their Employees Will Have The Edge In This Area.

Access To The Outside World Is Preventing More Censorship. I Do Think Information Flow Is Happening In China. .. There's No Doubt In My Mind That It's Been A Huge Plus.

Information Flow

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

While We're All Very Dependent On Technology, It Doesn't Always Work.

(talking About His First Computer) Like All Kids We Not Only Fooled Around With Our Toys, We Changed Them. If You've Ever Watched A Child With A Cardboard Carton And A Box Of Crayons Create A Spaceship With Cool Control Panels, Or Listened To Their Improvised Rules, Such As "red Cars Can Jump All Others," Then You Know That This Impulse To Make A Toy Do More Is At The Heart Of Innovative Childhood Play. It Is Also The Essence Of Creativity.

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.

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

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.

I'm Certainly Well Taken Care Of In Terms Of Food And Clothes ... Money Has No Utility To Me Beyond A Certain Point. Its Utility Is Entirely In Building An Organization And Getting The Resources Out To The Poorest In The World.

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.

The Outside Perception And Inside Perception Of Microsoft Are So Different. The View Of Microsoft Inside Microsoft Is Always Kind Of An Underdog Thing.

Great Organizations Demand A High Level Of Commitment By The People Involved.

If Your Culture Doesn't Like Geeks, You Are In Real Trouble.

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.

My Dream Is That Every Child Has Enough Food To Eat, Good Medical Care, And The Chance To Go To School And Even Attend College.

Reward Worthy Failure - Experimentation.

Making Mistakes

You Can't Have A Rigid View That All New Taxes Are Evil.

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.

Our Teachers Deserve Better Feedback.

If I Only Had Two Dollars Left I Would Spend One Dollar On Pr.

Whether I'm At The Office, At Home, Or On The Road, I Always Have A Stack Of Books I'm Looking Forward To Reading.

'i Don't Know' Has Become 'i Don't Know Yet'.

It's A Nice Reader, But There's Nothing On The Ipad I Look At And Say, 'oh, I Wish Microsoft Had Done It.'

Anyone Who Spends Their Life On A Computer Is Pretty Unusual.

Well, Jobs Are A Great Thing. You Have To Be A Bit Careful: If You Raise The Minimum Wage, You’re Encouraging Labor Substitution And You’re Going To Go Buy Machines And Automate Things - Or Cause Jobs To Appear Outside Of That Jurisdiction. And So Within Certain Limits, You Know, It Does Cause Job Destruction. If You Really Start Pushing It, Then You’re Just Making A Huge Trade-off.

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

Anything That Someone's Interested In Should Be Very, Very Easy To Call Up Onto The Screen. And In Fact The Computer Over Time Will See What You're Interested In And Make That Immediately Available Without Your Having To Be Give Any Commands At All.

Every Company Can Choose Whether To Lead Or Follow The Emerging Digital Trends.

Programs Today Get Very Fat; The Enhancements Tend To Slow The Program Down Because People Put In Special Checks. When They Want To Add Some Feature, They’ll Just Stick In These Checks Without Thinking About How They Might Slow The Thing Down.

What I Do Best Is Share My Enthusiasm.

As We Have Taken Diarrhea And Pneumonia Down, Even Malaria Down Quite A Bit, The Portion Of The Days That Are Very Early In That 5 Years - The First Month, The First Day - It's About Half Now. Yet That's The Part We Understand The Least.

People Should Just Buy A Cd And Rip It. You Are Legal Then.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

More And More Software Would Just Increase The Number Of Tasks That The Computer Would Help Solve.

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

I Think The Positive Competition Between States In India Is One Of The Most Positive Dynamics That The Country Has.

There's Always Been A Lot Of Information About Your Activities. Every Phone Number You Dial, Every Credit-card Charge You Make. It's Long Since Passed That A Typical Person Doesn't Leave Footprints.

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.

There's Life And Death In Every Email.

In Business, The Idea Of Measuring What You Are Doing, Picking The Measurements That Count Like Customer Satisfaction And Performance... You Thrive On That.

The Most Meaningful Way To Differentiate Your Company From Your Competitors, The Best Way To Put Distance Between You And The Crowd Is To Do An Outstanding Job With Information. How You Gather, Manage And Use Information Will Determine Whether You Win Or Lose.

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

Microsoft Has Some Assets Like Office That Have Stayed Strong And There's So Much Room For Innovation In Those.

Over Time, Yes, Countries Will Need To Look At Specific Gmo Products Like They Look At Drugs Today, Where They Don't Approve Them All. They Look Hard At The Safety And The Testing. And They Make Sure That The Benefits Far Outweigh Any Of The Downsides.

Well The Global Fund, Because Of How Well It's Worked On Not Only Aids, But Also Malaria And Tuberculosis, I'd Say It's Well Accepted. I Mean, It's Not Politically Controversial That This Is A Great Humanitarian Effort. But Budgets Are Very Very Tight.

Microsoft's Only Factory Asset Is The Human Imagination.

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

If You Give People Tools, And They Use Their Natural Abilities And Their Curiosity, They Will Develop Things In Ways That Will Surprise You Very Much Beyond What You Might Have Expected.

Creativity Allows People To Be Effective.

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

The Barrier To Change Is Not Too Little Caring; It Is Too Much Complexity. To Turn Caring Into Action, We Need To See A Problem, See A Solution, And See The Impact. But Complexity Blocks All Three Steps.

The Most Straightforward Path Would Be If We Could Bring The Cost Of Solar Electric And Wind Down By Another Factor Of Say, Three, And Then Have Some Miraculous Storage Solution, So That Not Only Over The 24-hour Day But Over Long Periods Of Time Where The Wind Doesn't Blow, You Have Reliable Energy. That's A Path. But Energy Storage Is Hard. That's Not A Guaranteed Path.

Should Surveillance Be Usable For Petty Crimes Like Jaywalking Or Minor Drug Possession? Or Is There A Higher Threshold For Certain Information? Those Aren't Easy Questions.

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.

Taking A Look Back, One Big Reqret Is, I Left Harvard With No Real Awareness Of The Awful Inequities In The World. The Appalling Disparities Of Health And Wealth And Opportunity That Condemned Millions Of People To The Lives Of Despair. I Learned A Lot Here At Harvard About New Ideas And Economics, And Politics. I Got Great Exposure To The Advances Being Made In The Sciences. But Humanities Greatest Advances Are Not In Its Discoveries, But In How Those Discoveries Are Applied To Reduce Inequity.

If You Get Health, Then You Have Opportunity For Literacy. Health First, Then Literacy. Once You Have Literacy, Then You Have A Chance To Bring In The New Tools Of Communication. Let People Reach Out And Have Access To The Latest Advances.

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.

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

Taxes Are An Investment In America.

People Are Going To Buy Cheap Fertilizer So They Can Grow Enough Crops To Feed Themselves, Which Will Be Increasingly Difficult With Climate Change.

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

Banking Is Necessary - Banks Are Not.

Investing For The Poor Requires Participation From The Entire Community.

I'm Not Somebody Who Goes To Church On A Regular Basis. The Specific Elements Of Christianity Are Not Something I'm A Huge Believer In.

We Have Two Other Countries, Pakistan And Afghanistan - Again It's The Instability That Is A Problem There. So Over The Next Several Years, We Expect To Drive The Number Of [polio] Cases Back Down To Zero Because That Is Likely To Be The Second Disease After Smallpox That We Completely Eradicate.

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 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.

We're Changing The World With Technology.

Changing The World

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

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

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

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

Innovation Is A Good Thing. The Human Condition - Put Aside Bioterrorism And A Few Footnotes - Is Improving Because Of Innovation.

Human Condition

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

I Read An Hour Almost Every Night. It's Part Of Falling Asleep.

The Microprocessor Is A Miracle.

Microsoft Was Founded With A Vision Of A Computer On Every Desk, And In Every Home. We've Never Wavered From That Vision.

Good Programmers Stay Open Minded To That Even Though There Is No Obvious Way To Improve What They've Done They... They Keep Looking And They Listen To What Other People Have To Say.

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

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.

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.

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.

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