Bill Gates Quotes
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My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don't want to get malaria.
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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.
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Software will get to be somewhat more mature, ah, but it will never be as predictable as most areas of engineering.
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Contrary to popular belief, I don't spend a whole lot of time following soccer. But as I have traveled around the world to better understand global development and health, I've learned that soccer is truly universal. No matter where I go, that's what kids are playing. That's what people are talking about.
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By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.
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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.
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Countries which receive aid do graduate. Within a generation, Korea went from being a big recipient to being a big aid donor. China used to get quite a bit of aid; now it's aid-neutral.
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Even for the diseases we don't focus on, cancer, heart disease, you're going to be way better off being sick 10 years from now than any time in the past.
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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."
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Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
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If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about reengineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity.
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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.
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Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.
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The most important 'speed' issue is often not technical but cultural. It's convincing everyone that the company's survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible.
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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.
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We're in a period of uncertainty about Donald Trump administration policies and the range of what might happen is particularly higher. I don't think that these R&D and innovation budgets will be substantially reduced.
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Anyway, the US, as in most issues, is the best, has the best capability to lead, and really needs to lead. It doesn't mean that other countries won't pick different tacks and emphasize different things. In aggregate, they're almost half of the energy R&D. Europe, China, Japan - it's very important that they come along and contribute to these things.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I set a rule that people weren't allowed to send good news unless they sent around an equal amount of bad news. We had to get a balanced picture. In fact, I kind of favored just hearing about the accounts we were losing because ... bad news is generally more actionable than good news.
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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.
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I hope someday what people can do with their lives depends on their talents and how hard they are willing to work, rather than on where they happen to be born.
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In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will.