- All Quotes
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An important re-engineering principle is that companies should focus on their core competence and outsource everything else.
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Giving money effectively is almost as hard as earning it in the first place.
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It's fantastic that Microsoft in the cloud space is one of very few companies that's got the critical mass, the particular emphasis on helping business customers get up to that cloud with all the unique requirements they have. It's very exciting.
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It's not easy to remember, but IBM was the computer industry when I was growing up. You loved 'em. You hated 'em. You knew what they were doing. They had set a standard for mainframes. They also set a standard for great sales focus and heavy product R & D.
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Training the workforce of tomorrow with today's high schools is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe.
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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.
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Certain teams are more careful in what they write. They generate less bugs. You can know that but it still doesn't mean there might be there might not be one bug that would be bad to ship the product with.
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Polio's pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it's just there as a gift for the rest of time.
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There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
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Analytical software enables you to shift human resources from rote data collection to value-added customer service and support where the human touch makes a profound difference.
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How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of its corporate reflexes.
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Microsoft went into orbit because it had a booster rocket attached to it called IBM.
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Microsoft looks at new ideas, they don't evaluate whether the idea will move the industry forward, they ask, 'how will it help us sell more copies of Windows?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.
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Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary education.
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Someone in the society has to deal with the reality that there are finite resources and we're making trade-offs, and be explicit about that. When the car companies were found to have a memo that actually said, "This safety feature costs X and saved Y lives," the very existence of that memo was considered damning. Or when you made it reimbursable for a doctor to ask, "Do you want heroic care at the end-of-life," that was a death panel. No, it wasn't a death panel! It was asking somebody to make a decision.
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The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.
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A breakthrough in machine learning would be worth ten Microsofts.
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In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases.
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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.
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The more you learn, the more you have a framework that the knowledge fits into.