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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.

-Bill Gates

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There's Always Been A

Bill Gates

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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.

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The Two Areas That Are Changing... Are Information Technology And Medical Technology. Those Are The Things That The World Will Be Very Different 20 Years From Now Than It Is Today.

It's Pretty Incredible To Look Back 30 Years To When Microsoft Was Starting And Realize How Work Has Been Transformed. We're Finally Getting Close To What I Call The Digital Workstyle.

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

Competition Is Always A Fantastic Thing, And The Computer Industry Is Intensely Competitive.

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.

Investing In Innovation, Which Was My Broad Theme Talking To [warren Buffett ], That Included Health Vaccines, It Included Energy And Education.

Be Nice To Nerds, They'll Probably Be Your Boss One Day.

Leaders Are Those Who Empower Others.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Flatter The Corporate Hierarchy, The More Likely It Is That Employees Will Communicate Bad News And Act Upon It.

I Try To Make Time For Reading Each Night. In Addition To The Usual Newspapers And Magazines, I Make It A Priority To Read At Least One Newsweekly From Cover To Cover. If I Were To Read What Intrigues Me- Say, The Science And Business Sections - Then I Would Finish The Magazine The Same Person I Was When I Started. So I Read It All.

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.

There Are A Variety Of Techniques For Breaking Software Down Into Pieces And Making Software Development More Efficient. Many Of These Techniques Have Been Sort Of... And Everybody Got Excited About But Very Little Benefit Was Actually Derived Once The Thing Was Put Into Practice.

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

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

I Don't Generally Read A Lot Of Fiction.

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

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

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

Molecular Biology

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Be Nice To Nerds,,, One Day U Might Have To Work For One

At Every Juncture, Advanced Tools Have Been The Key To A New Wave Of Applications, And Each Wave Of Applications Has Been Key To Driving Computing To The Next Level.

Software Is A Great Combination Between Artistry And Engineering.

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

The Best Way To Prepare [to Be A Programmer] Is To Write Programs, And To Study Great Programs That Other People Have Written. In My Case, I Went To The Garbage Cans At The Computer Science Center And I Fished Out Listings Of Their Operating Systems.

Robots Will Play An Important Role In Providing Physical Assistance And Even Companionship For The Elderly.

Connectivity Enables Transparency For Better Government, Education, And Health.

Government Education

The Vision Is Really About Empowering Workers Giving Them All The Information About What’s Going On So They Can Do A Lot More Than They’ve Done In The Past.

We [corbis] Make It So Easy To Call Up Images, Whether Art Or People Or Beaches Or Sunsets Or Nobel Prize Winners.

Here At Work We're All Just Trying To Get A Job Done. My People Have The Confidence Of Their Convictions And They Know Their Skills. And That Occupies Most Of My Time.

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

Life's Not Fair, Get Over It!

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.

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

The Only Definition By Which Americas Best Days Are Behind It Is On A Purely Relative Basis.

You’ve Got To Give Great Tools To Small Teams. Pick Good People, Use Small Teams And Give Them Great Tools So That They Are Very Productive In Terms Of What They Are Doing.

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

For One Thing, There's An Essential Human Factor In Every Business Endeavor. It Doesn't Matter If You Have A Perfect Product, Production Plan And Marketing Pitch; You'll Still Need The Right People To Lead And Implement Those Plans.

Computers And Games Don't Waste Time - People Do.

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

According To Ethiopian Custom, Parents Wait To Name A Baby Because Children Often Die In The First Weeks Of Life.

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

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

I Think Of Myself As A Global Citizen.

I'm A Big Believer That As Much As Possible, And There's Obviously Political Limitations, Freedom Of Migration Is A Good Thing.

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.

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

Public Education

Personal Computing Today Is A Rich Ecosystem Encompassing Massive Pc-based Data Centers, Notebook And Tablet Pcs, Handheld Devices, And Smart Cell Phones. It Has Expanded From The Desktop And The Data Center To Wherever People Need It - At Their Desks, In A Meeting, On The Road Or Even In The Air.

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.

The Wright Brothers Created The Single Greatest Cultural Force Since The Invention Of Writing. The Airplane Became The First World Wide Web, Bringing People, Languages, Ideas, And Values Together.

Whether You Believe It A Moral Imperative Or In The Rich World's Enlightened Self-interest, Securing The Conditions That Will Lead To A Healthy, Prosperous Future For Everyone Is A Goal I Believe We All Share.

Prosperous Future

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Rich Countries Can Afford To Overpay For Things.

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

Making Sure All Our Students Get A Great Education, Find A Career That's Fulfilling And Rewarding, And Have A Chance To Live Out Their Dreams ... Wouldn't Just Make Us A More Successful Country - It Would Also Make Us A More Fair And Just One.

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.

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

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

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.

Whenever You Have Multiple Devices Including Multiple Pcs That You Want To Share Information With, It's Always Been A Bit Complicated.

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

Around The World

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Automation Applied To An Inefficient Operation Will Magnify The Inefficiency.

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

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?

I Believe In Generous Aid Policies.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It's Fine To Celebrate Success But It Is More Important To Heed The Lessons Of Failure.

If The 1980s Were About Quality And The 1990s Were About Reengineering, Then The 2000s Will Be About Velocity.

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

You Know, I'm A Big Believer In Touch And Digital Reading, But I Still Think That Some Mixture Of Voice, The Pen And A Real Keyboard - In Other Words A Netbook - Will Be The Mainstream On That.

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

Often You Just Have To Rely On Your Intuition.

On The Supply Side, For Innovation, You'd Say, Go Look At Those R&d Budgets, And They Haven't Moved In The Last 20 Years. In The Case Of The Us - Which Is The Majority Of R&d Funding Across Every Category You Can Name: Health, Energy, Whatever - It's Been About $5 Billion A Year From The Department Of Energy.

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

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

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 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.

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

Countries Which Receive Aid Do Graduate. Within A Generation, Korea Went From Being A Big Recipient To Being A Big Aid Donor. China Used To Get Quite A Bit Of Aid; Now It's Aid-neutral.

Rules Broken Today Become Norms Tomorrow.

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

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

Even For The Diseases We Don't Focus On, Cancer, Heart Disease, You're Going To Be Way Better Off Being Sick 10 Years From Now Than Any Time In The Past.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

Optimistic Life

We Are Always Saying To Ourself.. We Have To Innovate. We Got To Come Up With That Breakthrough... We're Only Paid For Breakthroughs.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If We Can Find Approaches That Meet The Needs Of The Poor In Ways That Generate Profits For Business And Votes For Politicians, We Will Have Found A Sustainable Way To Reduce Inequity In The World. This Task Is Open-ended. It Can Never Be Finished. But A Conscious Effort To Answer This Challenge Will Change The World.

Depending On Where You Live, Cooking, Sex And Pooping Are Either 3 Of Life's Pleasures Or What Kills You

Investing In Tomorrow's Technology Today Is More Critical Than Ever.

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

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

Humanity’s Greatest Advances Are Not In Its Discoveries – But In How Those Discoveries Are Applied To Reduce Inequity.

Know Your Numbers' Is A Fundamental Precept Of Business.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

By Almost Any Measure, The World Is Better Than It Has Ever Been. People Are Living Longer, Healthier Lives. Many Nations That Were Aid Recipients Are Now Self-sufficient. You Might Think That Such Striking Progress Would Be Widely Celebrated, But In Fact, Melinda And I Are Struck By How Many People Think The World Is Getting Worse. The Belief That The World Can’t Solve Extreme Poverty And Disease Isn’t Just Mistaken. It Is Harmful. That’s Why In This Year’s Letter We Take Apart Some Of The Myths That Slow Down The Work. The Next Time You Hear These Myths, We Hope You Will Do The Same.

From The Day Microsoft Was Started, The Only Constraint To Our Growth Has Been Attracting Ah, More Great Programmers, Very Smart, Committed, Ah, People. And So We're Always On... On The Look For Ah, That Kind Of Person.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Started From The Chair Hop Now We Here.

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.

If I'd Had Some Set Idea Of A Finish Line, Don't You Think I Would Have Crossed It Years Ago?

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

If I Will Start All Over Again I Would Chose Network Marketing.

Network Marketing

A Breakthrough In Machine Learning Would Be Worth Ten Microsofts.

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

It's Pretty Amazing To Go From A World Where Computers Were Unheard Of And Very Complex To Where They're A Tool Of Everyday Life.

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

Since When Has The World Of Computer Software Design Been About What People Want? This Is A Simple Question Of Evolution. The Day Is Quickly Coming When Every Knee Will Bow Down To A Silicon Fist, And You Will All Beg Your Binary Gods For Mercy.

[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.

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.

Software Is More Important Than Hardware.

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.

Windows 8 Is Key To The Future, The Surface Computer.

There's Life And Death In Every Email.

I Spend A Lot Of Time Reading.

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

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.

We [us] Are The Biggest Per Person, By A Substantial Amount, Greenhouse Emitters, And We Give The Most Foreign Aid, Not Per Person But In Absolute. This Is Another Issue Where Hopefully We Will Take A Long-term Approach Which, Even Though We Sometimes Have A Hard Time Doing That, It's Easier For Us, As A Rich Country With This Kind Of Scientific Depth, Than It Is For The Poor Countries Who Will Suffer The Problems.

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

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

You've Got To Be Willing To Read Other People's Code, Then Write Your Own, Then Have Other People Review Your Code.

The Fight Against Aids In China Is Already Well Underway. The Chinese Government And Other Funders Are Providing Major Support, And They'll Continue To Bear Primary Responsibility For Delivering Prevention And Treatment.

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

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

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.

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.

Before You Were Born, Your Parents Weren't As Boring As They Are Now. They Got That Way From Paying Your Bills, Cleaning Your Clothes And Listening To You Talk About How Cool You Thought You Were. So Before You Save The Rain Forest From The Parasites Of Your Parent's Generation, Try Delousing The Closet In Your Own Room.

Dos Is Ugly And Interferes With Users' Experience.

User Experience

I Don't Think There's Anything Unique About Human Intelligence.

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 Been Proven That Of All The Interventions To Reduce Poverty, Improving Agricultural Productivity Is The Best.

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.

At The End Of The Day, Natural-gas Peakers Sit Back There And Get Financed So That The Midwest Corridor Can Have A Huge [period] Of Four To Five Days Of No Wind. The Peakers Are Running Big Time To Make That Up, Because That Is The Swing Piece That Can Always Be Turned On.

You Might Say, Well, Aren't People Saying That About Wind And Solar Today? Not Really. Only In The Super-narrow Sense That The Capital Costs Per Output, When The Wind Is Blowing, Is Slightly Lower.

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

Newspaper Readership Is Still Growing In India.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I Believe Innovation Is The Most Powerful Force For Change In The World. People Who Are Pessimistic About The Future Tend To Extrapolate From The Present In A Straight Line. But Innovation Fundamentally Shifts The Trajectory Of Development.

We Are Not Even Close To Finishing The Basic Dream Of What The Pc Can Be.

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