Bill Gates Quotes
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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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In order for the United States to do the right things for the long term, it appears to be helpful for us to have the prospect of humiliation. Sputnik helped us fund good science - really good science: the semiconductor came out of it.
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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.
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What are the top 20 universities in the world that do good materials research that might create carbon fibers to do jet stream kites or new magnets that will allow energy generation to be done up there and you just bring the electricity down. You either have to bring down rotational energy, which is hard, or you have to have the generator up there and bring down the electricity. Well, putting the generator up there is hard to do because it's too heavy.
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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.
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My guideline has always been to avoid a focus on me personally. Not because of any deep, dark secrets. Rather just a sense of privacy.
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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.
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You know capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down.
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Me and my dad are the biggest promoters of an estate tax in the US. It's not a popular position.
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The only definition by which Americas best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.
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The more you learn, the more you have a framework that the knowledge fits into.
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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.
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Most innovations, unfortunately, actually increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There's a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer's, if you could avoid diabetes - those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn't favor them.
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When you say that after World War I there was a pandemic that killed more people than the war itself, most will say: "Wait, are you kidding? I know World War I, but there was no World War 1.5, was there?" But people were traveling around after the war, and that meant the force of infection was much higher. And the problem is that the rate of travel back then was dramatically less than what we have nowadays.
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So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on.
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Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.
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Intermittency in availability for wind and solar changes the economics, particularly this requirement that the power company at all times be able to require power. That's large.
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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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In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.
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The idea of explaining why free trade is good, why immigration is good, why the world is so connected, that we need to think in terms of humanity and being generous to each other, you know, that's proving to be a challenge.
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The US spends more on energy R&D than all other countries put together, and I personally consider it quite inadequate. In fact, I would have said we should more than double it, if I thought the absorptive capacity could scale up and if it was actually possible to get to that level.
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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.
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Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs.
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People who feel the world is tilted against them will spawn the kind of hatred that is very dangerous for all of us. I think it's a healthy sign that there are demonstrators in the streets. They are raising the question of 'is the rich world giving back enough?'