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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.

-Bill Gates

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We Win Because We

Bill Gates

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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.

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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.

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

Life Is Not A Continuous Process, There's Some Sort Of Finite Number Of Achievements That Defines Your Life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Making Choices, Or Setting Policies About The Economy, Education Or Medicine, Society Is Best Served By Electing People Who Are Particularly Hardworking, Intelligent And Interested In Long-term Thinking.

The Pace Of Progress In Biology Creates A Foundation That Naturally Gets Picked Up By The Biotech And Pharmaceutical Industry To Solve Rich-world Diseases. This Is Attractive Science. It's Science That People Want To Work On.

Africa Is On The Rise.

I Actually Thought That It Would Be A Little Confusing During The Same Period Of Your Life To Be In One Meeting When You're Trying To Make Money, And Then Go To Another Meeting Where You're Giving It Away. I Mean Is It Gonna Erode Your Ability, You Know, To Make Money? Are You Gonna Somehow Get Confused About What You're Trying To Do?

Nobody Has A Guaranteed Position In Computer Technologies Business. We've Done Some Good Work, But All Of These Products Become Obsolete So Fast And The Structure Of The Business As It Broadens Out Is Going To Be So Different.

I Can Understand Wanting To Have Millions Of Dollars; There's A Certain Freedom, Meaningful Freedom, That Comes With That.

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.

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.

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

Started From The Chair Hop Now We Here.

Long-term Vision And Product Strategy.

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

The Dreams Of The Past - Whether It Was Public Tv Being Rolled Into The Classroom To Teach Spanish, Or The Film Projectors Or The Videotapes Or The Computer-aided Instruction Drill Systems - The Hopes Have Been Dashed In Terms Of Technology Having Some Big Impact. The Foundation, I Think Can Play A Unique Role There. Now, Our Money Is More To The Teacher-effectiveness Thing, And Technology Is No. 2, But I'll Probably Spend More Money On The Technology Things.

I Want To Admit That I Am An Optimist. Any Tough Problem, I Think It Can Be Solved.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The World Needs Banking But It Does Not Need Banks.

The Key Thing You Can Do To Reduce Population Growth Is Actually Improve Health.

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

Legacy Is A Stupid Thing! I Don't Want A Legacy.

Convert Bad News To Good News.

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.

The Computer Was Born To Solve Problems That Did Not Exist Before.

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.

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.

It's Really Kind Of Cool To Have Solar Panels On Your Roof.

We Work With Whoever Is Elected. Some Will Bring A More Generous, Open View Of The World Than Others.

I Failed In Some Subjects In Exam, But My Friend Passed In All. Now He Is An Engineer In Microsoft And I Am The Owner Of Microsoft.

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

Digital Reading Will Completely Take Over. It's Lightweight And It's Fantastic For Sharing. Over Time It Will Take Over.

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.

There's Life And Death In Every Email.

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

So We Can Simulate Richter-10 Earthquakes. We Simulate 70-foot Waves Coming Into These Things. Very Cool. We Basically Say No Human Should Ever Be Required To Do Anything, Because If You Judge By Chernobyl And Fukushima, The Human Element Is Not On Your Side.

The Microprocessor Is A Miracle.

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

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 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.

Two Years From Now, Spam Will Be Solved.

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

I Get More Spam Than Anyone I Know.

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

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.

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

The Obvious Mathematical Breakthrough Would Be Development Of An Easy Way To Factor Large Prime Numbers.

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.

Treatment Without Prevention Is Simply Unsustainable.

Exposure From A Young Age To The Realities Of The World Is A Super-big Thing.

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.

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

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

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’ve Been Waiting More Than 30 Years To Say This: “dad, I Always Told You I’d Come Back And Get My Degree.” I Want To Thank Harvard For This Timely Honor. I’ll Be Changing My Job Next Year … And It Will Be Nice To Finally Have A College Degree On My Resume.

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

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

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

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

My Grade Point Average Went From A 2.2 To A 4.0 Over The Summer. I Wanted To Get Straight A's. I Decided To Get Straight A's. I Didn't Want People To Think I Was Dumb. And When You Get Straight A's Once, Its Easier.

Philanthropy Should Be Taking Much Bigger Risks That Business. If These Are Easy Problems, Business And Government Can Come In And Solve Them.

We've Got To Put A Lot Of Money Into Changing Behavior.

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

Ninety Percent Of The Cases Of Polio Are In Security-vulnerable Areas.

The Year I Was Born, 1955, The First Big Disease-eradication Program In The World Was Declared For Malaria. After About A Decade Of Work, They Realized That, At Least In The Tropical Areas, They Did Not Have The Tools To Get It Done.

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

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

Public Education

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

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

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

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.

Often You Have To Rely On Intuition.

President [george] Bush Made The U.s. Absolutely The Leader, Between Its Own Pepfar, And It's Been By Far The Biggest Global Fund Donor. That's A Legacy.

For All These Infectious Diseases, The Goal Is To Eventually Get Rid Of Them. And To Do That We Need To Invent New Tools, But Nobody Was Doing That Because There Was No Money To Buy On Behalf Of The Poorest, Even The Existing Tools.

It’s Useful To Compare Our Preparations For Epidemics With Our Preparations For War.

Sometimes We Do Get Taken By Surprise. For Example, When The Internet Came Along, We Had It As A Fifth Or Sixth Priority.

Microsoft Has Had Many, Many Successful Products. I'm Committed To One Company. This Is The Industry I've Decided To Work In.

Our Vision, Which Has Not Changed Since The Day The Company Was Founded.

There's A Basic Philosophy Here That By Empowering...workers You'll Make Their Jobs Far More Interesting, And They'll Be Able To Work At A Higher Level Than They Would Have Without All That Information Just A Few Clicks Away.

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.

Who In Their Right Mind Would Ever Need More Than 640k Of Ram!?

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

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

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.

We Had Planned To Integrate A Web Browser With Our Operating System As Far Back As 1993( Filing Its First Court Responses To Federal Antitrust)

If You're Taking Care Of Your Family And Society And Are Comfortable You Can Start To Think About Helping Those Most In Need Globally. That's How We Became Engaged In Those Things.

The Trick Generally Is To Break Programs Into Pieces And Have Those Pieces Be Individually Testable And So Then When You Move On To The Other Pieces You Treat It As A Black Box Knowing That It Either Works Or Doesn't Work.

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

Kids Are Taking Pcs And The Internet To New Heights. They're The Ones That Are Designing The Cutting-edge Web Sites.

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.

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

By The Time We See That Climate Change Is Really Bad, Your Ability To Fix It Is Extremely Limited... The Carbon Gets Up There, But The Heating Effect Is Delayed. And Then The Effect Of That Heat On The Species And Ecosystem Is Delayed. That Means That Even When You Turn Virtuous, Things Are Actually Going To Get Worse For Quite A While.

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.

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

This Is Something We're Very Committed To, It's Something That I Think People Are Underestimating Right Now As They've Seen Some Of The Dot-com Promises Not Come Through. I Think They're Missing The Fact That The Basic Technology Is Moving Forward, The New Platforms Are Here And This Vision Of The Digital Decade Will Be A Reality.

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

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.

You Can Be A Business Thinker.

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.

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

There Are More People Dying Of Malaria Than Any Specific Cancer.

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.

Some People, Through Luck And Skill, End Up With A Lot Of Assets. If You're Good At Kicking A Ball, Writing Software, Investing In Stocks, It Pays Extremely Well.

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

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

The Genius Of Capitalism Lies In Its Ability To Make Self-interest Serve The Wider Interest. The Potential Of A Big Financial Return For Innovation Unleashes A Broad Set Of Talented People In Pursuit Of Many Different Discoveries. This System, Driven By Self-interest, Is Responsible For The Incredible Innovations That Have Improved So Many Lives.

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

Dna Is Like A Computer Program But Far, Far More Advanced Than Any Software Ever Created.

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.

A Breakthrough In Machine Learning Would Be Worth Ten Microsofts.

The Market Does Not Drive The Scientists, The Communicators, The Thinkers, The Government To Do The Right Things.

The Mainstream Is Always Under Attack.

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

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

The 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.

Most Of Our Competitors Were One-product Wonders... They Would Do Their One Product, But Never Get Their Engineering Sorted Out.

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

Bridge Is The King Of All Card Games.

In Low-income Countries, The Main Problems You Have Is Infectious Diseases.

The Future Of Advertising Is The Internet.

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.

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

The Machines Need To Get Faster. They Need To Get Cheaper.

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?

I Feel Certain That The Personal Computer Is As Revolutionary In Terms Of The Way It Will Change The Way We Work, Learn, And Entertain Ourselves As Any Of These Previous Advances.

I Studied Every Thing But Never Topped.... But Today The Toppers Of The Best Universities Are My Employees

We Paired This Announcement Of The R&d [commitment] With The So-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, Which Is 27 [major Investors] Saying, "hey, We'll Put Significant Money Into [energy Innovations] When They're Ready To Spin Out Probably Into Startup Companies."

In A System Of Capitalism, As People's Wealth Rises, The Financial Incentive To Serve Them Rises. As Their Wealth Falls, The Financial Incentive To Serve Them Falls, Until It Becomes Zero. We Have To Find A Way To Make The Aspects Of Capitalism That Serve Wealthier People Serve Poorer People As Well.

The 'billionaire' Song Is What My Kids Tease Me With. They Sing It To Me. It's Funny.

Expectations Are A Form Of First-class Truth: If People Believe It, It's True.

Eventually You Won't Think Of 'the Internet Business.' You'll Think Of It More Like News, Weather, Sports, But Even That Taxonomy Isn't Clear.

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

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

The Vision Is Really About Empowering Workers, Giving Them All The

Success Is A Lousy Teacher.

It Is A High Bar To Say That It's More Fun Than Working On Software Because The Work At Microsoft That Both Melinda [gates] And I Did Was Thrilling. We Were Making Breakthroughs And Empowering People.

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

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

I'm Sorry That We Have To Have A Washington Presence. We Thrived During Our First 16 Years Without Any Of This. I Never Made A Political Visit To Washington And We Had No People Here. It Wasn't On Our Radar Screen. We Were Just Making Great Software.

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.

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

The End Of The Day

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

We Have Completely Eradicated Smallpox; We Have Almost Eradicated Polio. That's The Miracle Of Vaccines, Which Is Even Greater Than That Of Antibiotics.

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.

The Leader Needs To Create An Environment In Which People Can Analyze The Situation And Develop A Good Response.

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.

Life Is Not Fair Get Used To Used To It

Good High School Graduation

In American Math Classes, We Teach A Lot Of Concepts Poorly Over Many Years. In The Asian Systems They Teach You Very Few Concepts Very Well Over A Few Years.

The Next Generation Of Interesting Software Will Be Done On The Macintosh, Not The Ibm Pc.

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

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

Think Of Business As A Good Game. Lots Of Competition And A Minimum Of Rules. You Keep Score With Money.

If People Had Understood How Patents Would Be Granted When Most Of Today's Ideas Were Invented, And Had Taken Out Patents, The Industry Would Be At A Complete Standstill Today.

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

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.

At Microsoft There Are Lots Of Brilliant Ideas But The Image Is That They All Come From The Top - I'm Afraid That's Not Quite Right.

Bridge Is One Of The Last Games In Which The Computer Is Not Better.

We Are Seeing Pioneers Moving Out To The Internet, Banks That Are Taking Transactions, Retail Shopping On The Internet, And Although It's Going To Take Most Of A Decade Before Most Adults Are Turning To The Internet For A High Percentage Of Their Act

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

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.

During The Past Two Centuries, Innovation Has More Than Doubled Our Life Span And Given Us Cheap Energy And More Food. If We Project What The World Will Be Like 10 Years From Now Without Continuing Innovation In Health, Energy Or Food, The Picture Is Dark.

The Death Of A Child Is An Incredible Tragedy All Over The World. Back In 1990, About 12 Percent Of Children Were Dying Before They Reached The Age Of 5.

I Didn't Used To Wear A Watch. Now I Have A Spot Watch, Which I Wear All The Time.

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

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

I'm Never Fully Satisfied With Any Microsoft Product.

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

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.

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

If Somebody Is Considering Being Willing To Go Out And Work In The Field In Global Health, Those Are A Particular Class Of Heroes Because It's Hard To Work In Those Places. Our Foundation Gets So Many Of Our Learnings From People Who've Been Out There And Seen, "this Tool Is Not Going To Work There, There's More Of A Problem Here Than You Know." You Should Really Get Involved In That.

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.

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

My Mom Was On The United Way Group That Decides How To Allocate The Money And Looks At All The Different Charities And Makes The Very Hard Decisions About Where That Pool Of Funds Is Going To Go.

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

Every New Change Forces All The Companies In An Industry To Adapt Their Strategies To That Change.

If I Think Something's A Waste Of Time Or Inappropriate I Don't Wait To Point It Out. I Say It Right Away. It's Real Time. So You Might Hear Me Say 'that's The Dumbest Idea I Have Ever Heard' Many Times During A Meeting.

If You're A Guest [at My $113 Million House], You'll Be Able To Call Up On Screens Throughout The House Almost Any Image You Like - Presidential Portraits, Reproductions Of High Renaissance Paintings, Pictures Of Sunsets, Airplanes, Skiers In The Andes, A Rare French Stamp, The Beatles In 1965.

Reward Worthy Failure - Experimentation.

Making Mistakes

Leaders Are Those Who Empower Others.

By 2018, An Estimated 63 Percent Of All New U.s. Jobs Will Require Workers With An Education Beyond High School. For Our Young People To Get Those Jobs, They First Need To Graduate From High School Ready To Start A Postsecondary Education.

There's No Such Thing As Going To A Soapbox And Saying, 'the Government's Corrupt,' And Not Having The Intelligence Service See Your Face. In The Digital World, That Can Be Done.

Intelligence Services

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.

A Fundamental New Rule For Business Is That The Internet Changes Everything.

And Knowledge Management Is A Means, Not An End.

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

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.

Of My Mental Cycles, I Devote Maybe 10 Percent To Business Thinking. Business Isn't That Complicated. I Wouldn't Want To Put It On My Business Card.

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