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When Ford Sells A Car, A Dealer Isn't Allowed To Take Out The Engine And Put A Different One In. When A Newsstand Sells The Washington Post, No One Can Go To The Newsstand And Pay Them To Rip Out The Classified Section And Put Their Own Classified Section In - If They Could, They Would Do So.

-Bill Gates

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When Ford Sells A

Bill Gates

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When Ford Sells A Car, A Dealer Isn't Allowed To Take Out The Engine And Put A Different One In. When A Newsstand Sells The Washington Post, No One Can Go To The Newsstand And Pay Them To Rip Out The Classified Section And Put Their Own Classified Section In - If They Could, They Would Do So.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Definitely Think Leaving Kids Massive Amounts Of Money Is Not A Favor To Them.

If You Think Of Global Public Goods Like Polio Eradication, The Kind Of Risk-taking New Approach, Philanthropy Really Does Have A Role To Play There, Because Government Doesn't Do R&d About New Things Naturally As Much As It Probably Should, And So Philanthropy's There.

If You Believe That Every Life Has Equal Value, It’s Revolting To Learn That Some Lives Are Seen As Worth Saving And Others Are Not. We Said To Ourselves: “this Can’t Be True. But If It Is True, It Deserves To Be The Priority Of Our Giving.”

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

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

The Internet Is The Easiest Thing To Get Into. To Be An Internet Retailer, You Just Get That Url.

I Believe Os/2 Is Destined To Be The Most Important Operating System, And Possibly Program, Of All Time. As The Successor To Dos, Which Has Over 10,000,000 Systems In Use, It Creates Incredible Opportunities For Everyone Involved With Pcs.

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

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

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.

The Internet? We Are Not Interested In It

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

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.

Getting The Word Out That, Yes Vaccines Are Great, The Safety Data's Very, Very Clear, Including Any Of These Specific Concerns, That's Very Important To Our Foundation.

On My Desk I Have Three Screens, Synchronized To Form A Single Desktop. I Can Drag Items From One Screen To The Next. Once You Have That Large Display Area, You'll Never Go Back, Because It Has A Direct Impact On Productivity.

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 First Big Effects Will Be Farmers That Live On The Edge. Today's Weather, They Barely Get By. Their Kids, A High Percentage Are Malnourished, And So If You Impose More Variable Weather And More Heat, You're Getting More Floods, More Droughts, And During The Germination Time, The High Heat, Most Crops...do Poorly When There's More Heat.

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.

The Ideal Thing Would Be To Have A 100 Percent Effective Aids Vaccine. And To Have Broad Usage Of That Vaccine. That Would Literally Break The Epidemic.

As For Drugs - Well, Gates Was Certainly Not Unusual There. Marijuana Was The Pharmaceutical Of Choice.

When I Was Trying To Figure Out Why Lives Have Improved So Much In The Last 300 Years, Where We've Gone From A Third Of Kids Dying Before 5 To - By 1990 It Was Down To 10% - Now It's Down To 5%. And Saying Why, Over All History, There Were Smart People, But That Number Didn't Change. Average Life Span Didn't Change. What's Magical About What's Been Deemed The Industrial Revolution? It's Really Energy Intensity.

India Has Over 20 Percent Of The Kids Born In The World. And They Move Around A Lot.

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.

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

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.

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.

Innovation Is Often The Hidden Thing, Because We Can't Put Numbers To It. And Yet It's The Thing That Defines The Way We Live, The Things We'd Like To Have For Everyone Whether It's Health Or Education.

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.

If I Had One Dollar Left, I'd Spend It On Pr

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.

The Only Role Other Than Paying Their Taxes, Whatever Those Are, The Only Role For Philanthropy Broadly - Of Which The Rich Should Give Disproportionately - The More, The Better - And I Think There Is A Positive Trend In That Direction - There Are Certain Risk-taking Things, Like Trying Out A New Type Of Charter School Or Funding A New Kind Of Medicine.

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

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

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)

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

I Have Drifted Away From Thinking About These Philanthropic Things. And It Was Only As The Wealth Got Large Enough And Melinda And I Had Talked About The View That Wealth Wasn't Something That Would Be Good To Just Pass To The Children.

I Believe Os/2 Is Destined To Be The Most Important Operating System, And Possibly Program, Of All Time.

I Don't Generally Read A Lot Of Fiction.

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

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

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.

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

Unemployment Rates Among Americans Who Never Went To College Are About Double That Of Those Who Have A Postsecondary Education.

Aids Itself Is Subject To Incredible Stigma.

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

Vision Without Execution Is Daydreaming.

U.k. Companies Are In Very International And Very Competitive Markets. If You Look At Pc Penetration In The U.k., It Is Very Similar To The United States Market.

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.

I Considered Law And Math. My Dad Was A Lawyer. I Think Though I Would Have Ended Up In Physics If I Didn't End Up In Computer Science.

The Term, Information At Your Fingertips, Is To Remind People What A Broad Role The Personal Computer Will Be Playing. It's Not A Computation Device, It's Not A Word Processing Or A Spreadsheet Device. It's A Window Onto The World Of Information.

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.

A First-generation Fortune Is The Most Likely To Be Given Away, But Once A Fortune Is Inherited It's Less Likely That A Very High Percentage Will Go Back To Society.

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

Change The Boundaries Of Business.

Bitcoin Is A Technological Tour De Force

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Human Condition

Today, We're Very Dependent On Cheap Energy. We Just Take It For Granted - All The Things You Have In The House, The Way Industry Works.

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

I Have A Nice Office. I Have A Nice House... So I'm Not Denying Myself Some Great Things. I Just Don't Happen To Have Expensive Hobbies.

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

So It's An Absolute Lie That Has Killed Thousands Of Kids. Because The Mothers Who Heard That Lie, Many Of Them Didn't Have Their Kids Take Either Pertussis Or Measles Vaccine, And Their Children Are Dead Today. And So The People Who Go And Engage In Those Anti-vaccine Efforts -- You Know, They, They Kill Children. It's A Very Sad Thing, Because These Vaccines Are Important.

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.

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

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.

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.

Hey, Size Works Against Excellence.

There Is Competition, .. Can Any Microsoft Endure Future Competition Without Innovation? The Answer Is No. We've Got To Keep Changing.

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

Your Most Unhappy Customers Are Your Greatest Source Of Learning.

With Windows 8, Microsoft Is Trying To Gain Market Share In What Has Been Dominated By The Ipad-type Device. But A Lot Of Those Users Are Frustrated. They Can't Type. They Can't Create Documents.

I Think There's Even A Chance That [r&d And Innovation Budgets] Might Be Increased [during Donald Trump Administration] And We Should Go And Make That Case To The Executive Branch, To The Congress.

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.

The Fact That There Was No Catastrophic Pandemic In Recent History Does Not Mean There Won't Be Another One. And We Are Certainly Not Prepared For The Next Pandemic.

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.

Playing Bridge Is A Pretty Old Fashioned Thing In A Way That I Really Like... I Do The Dishes Every Night - Other People Volunteer But I Like The Way I Do It.

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

Death Is Something We Really Understand Extremely Well.

Security Is, I Would Say, Our Top Priority Because For All The Exciting Things You Will Be Able To Do With Computers - Organizing Your Lives, Staying In Touch With People, Being Creative - If We Don't Solve These Security Problems, Then People Will Hold Back.

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

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

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

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

The Potential Financial Reward For Building The 'next Windows' Is So Great That There Will Never Be A Shortage Of New Technologies Seeking To Challenge It.

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.

Really Advanced Civilization Is Based On Advances In Energy.

Advanced Civilization

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

This [philanthropy] Work Is Even More Fascinating. It Requires Us To Think Harder About How We Build Partnerships, Who We Get Behind. And Yet We Get To See Progress That In Some Ways Is Even More Profound Than The Great Advances That Digital Technology Has Provided.

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.

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

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

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

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.

We're Creating This Alliance, Gavi, That Has Helped Buy The Vaccines That Were In The Rich World But Not Getting To The Poor Kids, Getting A Very Cheap Price And Figuring Out The Cold Chain, Getting The Delivery Right, And Then Funding Research For New Vaccines. A Lot Of Them Are Coming Along. We've Got A Meningitis Vaccine Out, Got That Through Large Parts Of Africa. That Has Been A Huge Success.

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

Well, It's Taken Time To Get This Going, But He Was Right. If You Give People A Chance To Associate Themselves With A Cause They Care About, While Buying A Great Product, They Will. That Was How The Red Campaign Was Born, Here In Davos.

China Has Many Successful Entrepreneurs And Business People. I Hope That More People Of Insight Will Put Their Talents To Work To Improve The Lives Of Poor People In China And Around The World, And Seek Solutions For Them.

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

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

We Get Comfort From Those Who Agree With Us, But We Get Growth From Only Those Who Don't Agree With Us !

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

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.

Don't Let Complexity Stop You. Be Activists. Take On The Big Inequities. It Will Be One Of The Great Experiences Of Your Lives.

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

Well Depending On The Government, You Either Work Through The Government, Which Is Ideal, Because Then You're Strengthening Their Capabilities, Or You Work Through The Non-governmental Organizations. It's Never Easy, And You Know, It's Just About The Very Basics Of Health. This Is Not Hospitals. This Is Just Primary Health Care [in Africa], The Most Simple Things, And Even So, Getting The Supplies Out, Getting The Trained Workers There.

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

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

Computers Are Great Because When You're Working With Them You Get Immediate Results That Let You Know If Your Program Works. It's Feedback You Don't Get From Many Other Things.

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

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.

The Uk Is A Very International Country.

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

Software Is More Important Than Hardware.

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.

Depending On How Quickly You Get Ocean Rise, You Have People Who Live In River Deltas [at Risk].

I Believe That Every Life Is Valuable. That We Can Make Things Better. That Innovation Is The Key To A Bright Future. That We're Just Getting Started.

Life Is A Lot More Fun If You Treat Its Challenges In Creative Ways.

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.

Eradications Are Special. Zero Is A Magic Number. You Either Do What It Takes To Get To Zero And You're Glad You Did It; Or You Get Close, Give Up And It Goes Back To Where It Was Before, In Which Case You Wasted All That Credibility, Activity, Money That Could Have Been Applied To Other Things.

With The States Release Today Of A Set Of Clear And Consistent Academic Standards, Our Nation Is One Step Closer To Supporting Effective Teaching In Every Classroom, Charting A Path To College And Careers For All Students, And Developing The Tools To Help All Children Stay Motivated And Engaged In Their Own Education. The More States That Adopt These College And Career Based Standards, The Closer We Will Be To Sharing Innovation Across State Borders And Becoming More Competitive As A Country.

The Greatest Thing You Can Do For Your Competition - Hire Poorly.

I Am Not In Competition With Anyone But Myself. My Goal Is To Improve Myself Continuously.

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

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 Meet People Overseas That Know Five Languages - That The Only Language I'm Comfortable In Is English.

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

In Almost Every Area Of Human Endeavor, The Practice Improves Over Time. That Hasn't Been The Case For Teaching.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Vision Is That People Should Have The Ultimate In Convenience. Being Able To Get The Things They Care About On The Appropriate Device.

The Nuclear Approach I'm Involved In Is Called A Traveling-wave Reactor, Which Uses Waste Uranium For Fuel. There's A Lot Of Things That Have To Go Right For That Dream To Come True - Many Decades Of Building Demo Plants, Proving The Economics Are Right. But If It Does, You Could Have Cheaper Energy With No Co2 Emissions.

The Phenomenal Generosity Of The United States In Its Aid Budget Towards Health Issues Is The Best In The World. You Can Look At That Broadly, You Can Look At It In Terms Of Hiv, The Pepfar Money Which Came Together In A Republican Administration With Bipartisan Support.

There's No Magic Line Between An Application And An Operating System That Some Bureaucrat In Washington Should Draw.

Other Paths Would Include Making Nuclear Fission Cheap Enough And Safe Enough That People Broadly Embrace It, So That Could Be Scaled Up.

Your Customers Get Better When You Do.

Service Culture

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.

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

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

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

I Admire Leaders In Science, People Who Really Figure Things Out Like Richard Fineman Or People Who Work On Vaccines, Tons Of People Working On [the] Hiv Vaccine. There's Leaders In Business, People Like Warren Buffett, Who've Got A Certain Approach They Take That Are Pretty Amazing. There [are] Product Innovators Like Steve Jobs Was, Where He Gets Behind A Concept And Does A Fantastic Job.

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.

I Could Name About A Dozen Paths, And You'd Like To Have A Whole Bunch Of Research On All Those Paths, And Then, Eventually, At Least Four To Five Companies With Really Significant Financing Try And Get To Big Scale, Going Down And Really Trying To Prove It Out.

Take Agriculture, Where We Haven't Done Much, Or Sanitation; Saying, "okay, We Will Be Able To Make A Really Huge Effort There." It Really Energized The Foundation And Half Of What We've Gotten Done In This Last Decade Is Because Warren [buffett] Trusted Us.

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.

Whether It's Google Or Apple Or Free Software, We've Got Some Fantastic Competitors And It Keeps Us On Our Toes.

If You Have 50 Different Plug Types, Appliances Wouldn't Be Available And Would Be Very Expensive. But Once An Electric Outlet Becomes Standardized, Many Companies Can Design Appliances, And Competition Ensues, Creating Variety And Better Prices For Consumers.

Energy Is Very Primal Stuff And There Are A Lot Of Leads That Are Promising, Still At A Fairly Risky Stage, But Over The Next Decade Some Of These Breakthrough Approaches Are Going To Pay Out, And U.s. Research And U.s. Leadership On This Should Be Part Of How It Gets Solved.

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

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

I Spend A Lot Of Time Reading.

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

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

Positive Thinking

Microsoft Has Had Clear Competitors In The Past. It's A Good Thing We Have Museums To Document That.

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

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.

50 Years From Now We Won't Need As Much Human Labour To Do What Manual Workers Do, So We Should Be Able To Take That Extra Productivity And Put It To Better Use.

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.

Nobody Spends Any Money On Smallpox Unless They Worry About A Bio-terrorist Recreating It.

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

Strategically, A Major Function Of The Ceo Is To Look For Bad News And Encourage The Organization To Respond To It. Employees Must Be Encouraged To Share Bad News As Much As Good News.

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

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

I've Been Very Lucky, And Therefore I Owe It To Try And Reduce The Inequity In The World. And That's Kind Of A Religious Belief. I Mean, It's At Least A Moral Belief.

Banking Is Necessary - Banks Are Not.

I Really Do Think Cancer Will Largely Be A Solved Problem. I Think Most Of The Infectious Diseases Like Malaria - Our Foundation Is Very Involved - Once We're Finishing Polio Eradication, Then Starting Up This Malaria Eradication, And Getting That Done As Fast As We Can.

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

In Fact, Batteries Haven't Improved Over The Last 100 Years As Much As They Would Need To In Order To Make That Happen. So I'm Invested In A Lot Of Battery Companies - And There's A Lot That Exists I'm Not In. They're All Having A Tough Time Achieving It.

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

I Do Normal Kind Of Contributions, Particularly For People Who Are Going Over To Africa And Help Highlighting Global Health, And That's Tended To Be Pretty Bipartisan In Nature Because Of The Coalition There Exists Fortunately Around These Global Health Issues. But I Don't Think My Backing, Putting A Lot Of Money Into Political Contributions Is A Way I'm Going To Try And Help Improve The World.

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

If You Go Back To 1800, Everybody Was Poor. I Mean Everybody. The Industrial Revolution Kicked In, And A Lot Of Countries Benefited, But By No Means Everyone.

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

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

Philanthropy Is Fun And Fulfilling.

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.

Microsoft Is Always Two Years Away From Failure.

The Nuclear Industry Has This Amazing Record, Even Equipment From Generations One And Two. But Nuclear Mishaps Tend To Come In These Big Events - Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, And Now Fukushima - So It's More Visible.

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.

Learn From Your Unhappy Customers.

The Best Teacher Is Very Interactive.

In Programming When You're Making A Change You Have To Know All The Affected Places, And You Have To Be Able To Model In Your Head What The Performance Impact Will Be.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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