Bill Gates Quotes
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Well depending on the government, you either work through the government, which is ideal, because then you're strengthening their capabilities, or you work through the non-governmental organizations. It's never easy, and you know, it's just about the very basics of health. This is not hospitals. This is just primary health care [in Africa], the most simple things, and even so, getting the supplies out, getting the trained workers there.
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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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During the past two centuries, innovation has more than doubled our life span and given us cheap energy and more food. If we project what the world will be like 10 years from now without continuing innovation in health, energy or food, the picture is dark.
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We have two other countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan - again it's the instability that is a problem there. So over the next several years, we expect to drive the number of [polio] cases back down to zero because that is likely to be the second disease after smallpox that we completely eradicate.
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Online education is pretty special for two reasons. One is that you can get the very best lecture in the world and wherever you are, whenever you want, you can connect to that lecture. The other is this interactivity, where if you know a topic, you can kind of skip over it. Or if you're confused about it, [the area] where you're confused can be analyzed by software.
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People in business understand paying money to be more efficient. You can bootstrap markets where the devices are too expensive at first because these are so valuable to some people.
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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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The early personal computers were not very powerful so the idea of feeding their program into a small amount of memory requires immense skill.
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The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.
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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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Part of the magic of economic growth is how you educate people, and the leading economies have to stay in front of that. From an economic point of view, it affects competitiveness and creates jobs. Or from a social justice point of view, you can take someone in the bottom tier of income and let him compete to be a doctor or lawyer. The education system is the only reason the dream of equal opportunity has a chance of being delivered - and we're not running a good education system.
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The government is there day in and day out, if you want all kids to have education, if you want to run courts, if you want to have an army, if you want to have roads, you've got to have the taxation system that funds everything that you expect.
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Depending on how quickly you get ocean rise, you have people who live in river deltas at risk.
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Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.
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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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More and more software would just increase the number of tasks that the computer would help solve.
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A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it's less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.
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I'm certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes ... Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point. Its utility is entirely in building an organization and getting the resources out to the poorest in the world.
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The machines need to get faster. They need to get cheaper.
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Until we're educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.
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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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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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I could name about a dozen paths, and you'd like to have a whole bunch of research on all those paths, and then, eventually, at least four to five companies with really significant financing try and get to big scale, going down and really trying to prove it out.
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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.