For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.
According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.
The typical project design time for a large company like IBM – and they keep track of this – is a little over four years.
Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough.
Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.
The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of. Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard.
The future of Windows is to let the computer see, listen and even learn.
I’m going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.
Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.
Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.
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.
I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.
AIDS itself is subject to incredible stigma.
The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.
I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.
3D is a way of organizing things, particularly as we’re getting much more media information on the computer, a lot more choices, a lot more navigation than we’ve ever had before.
By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world. Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer.
There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.
A lot of the things that will really improve the world fortunately aren’t dependent on Washington doing something different.
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.
There’s 20 companies that I have investments in – some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.
I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.
Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.
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.
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.
Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.
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.
I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.
The ‘Billionaire’ song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It’s funny.
The protestor I think will speak up for the world’s poorest.
You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.
I’m an investor in a number of biotech companies, partly because of my incredible enthusiasm for the great innovations they will bring.
I like the idea of putting your Christmas wish list up and letting people share it.
Apple has always leveraged technologies that the PC industry has driven to critical mass – the bus structures, the graphics cards, the peripherals, the connection networks, things like that – so they’re kind of in the PC ecosystem and kind of not.
If you’re a person struggling to eat and stay healthy, you might have heard about Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, but you’ll never have heard of Bill Gates.
Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It’s basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it’s wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.
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.
Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.
Google’s done a super good job on search; Apple’s done a great job on the IPod.
Haiti should remind us all that there is an immediate need to invest in and promote long-term development projects that are sustainable, scalable, and proven to work.
Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.
Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.
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.
Well, no one gives aid to Zimbabwe through the Mugabe government.
Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.
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.
I have a particular relationship with Vinod Khosla because he’s got a lot of very interesting science-based energy startups.
Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it’s about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it’s less than one ton. It’s an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.
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.
There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.
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.
Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.
K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.
It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.
We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.
India has over 20 percent of the kids born in the world. And they move around a lot.
When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.
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.
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.
The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.
Teaching’s hard! You need different skills: positive reinforcement, keeping students from getting bored, commanding their attention in a certain way.
You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There’s another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.
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.
