Bill Gates Quotes
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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.
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The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competitors, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose.
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Going out in the field, it's always enlightening to see what's working and what's not and to sit down and talk - I was with young girls in south Africa - understanding why our tools for prevention aren't being adopted, and what way may need to invent to help protect them.
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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.
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Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause - and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
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I think philanthropy is also growing and catching on. Figuring out how the philanthropy sector, which is quite small compared to the private sector, which is the biggest by far, and then the governments, you know, even in these poor countries over time has to take on these key responsibilities. How does philanthropy accelerate that? Drive the kind of innovations, make sure they get used well. So it plays this kind of special role.
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The most important people is to pick people who like to write software and who are good at... good developers like working with each other. And they... they reinforce each other's skills.
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Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.
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We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.
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We win because we hire the smartest people. We improve our products based on feedback, until they're the best. We have retreats each year where we think about where the world is heading.
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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.
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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.
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Microsoft has had many, many successful products. I'm committed to one company. This is the industry I've decided to work in.
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My broad sense of this is that authors like Smil really paint the clear picture, and once you see that, it's kind of Oh, of course. That's such a primal thing to all these physical services that we take for granted.
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R&D generally has been a bipartisan thing, because in the IT space, in the medical space, the U.S., the benefits to ourselves and the world and our economy have been very, very clear. I'm hopeful we can make a very strong case there. Energy is actually harder; it takes more time to get a product, but if you do it's a very, very big market and the constraints of doing that in a clean way are more obvious all the time.
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If you count E-mail, I'm on the Internet all day, every day.
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It is really gratifying, for example, to visit India now and see that because they've had good educational institutions, and they've had a focus on it, there are more and more people in India participating in the world economy.
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Music, even with these dial-up connections you have to the Internet, is very practical to download.
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Microsoft has long hired based on IQ and "intellectual bandwidth."
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By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.
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There is this thing called the GPL Gnu Public Licence, which we disagree with... nobody can ever improve the software.
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My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we've had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.
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One thing people underestimate is how markets don't allow anyone to do anything except make better and better products. There's not much leeway. The world is a lot more competitive than most people think, particularly in a high-technology area. If a company takes its eye off improving its products, if it tries to do anything that would be viewed as an exercise of power, it'll be displaced very rapidly.
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The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.