Bill Gates Quotes
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We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.
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Contrary to Piketty’s rentier hypothesis, I don’t see anyone on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans whose ancestors bought a great parcel of land in 1780 and have been accumulating family wealth by collecting rents ever since. In America, that old money is long gone - through instability, inflation, taxes, philanthropy, and spending.
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We get Comfort from those who agree with us, but we get Growth from only those who don't agree with us !
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I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities...on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but your humanity.
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That way you can be certain to learn something you didn't know previously.
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By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can’t solve extreme poverty and disease isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful. That’s why in this year’s letter we take apart some of the myths that slow down the work. The next time you hear these myths, we hope you will do the same.
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Customers want high quality at low prices and they want it now.
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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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The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important. That your sense of justice says, why should rich kids - who barely get these diseases and almost never die of them - why should they get the vaccines, when poor kids, who actually do die from these diseases, don't get those things? It's an unbelievable inequity that there isn't that access.
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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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A company needs to have good business reflexes, to be able to marshal its forces in a crisis or in response to any unplanned event.
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A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is. And lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you'll go out of business.
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Investing in innovation, which was my broad theme talking to Warren Buffett, that included health vaccines, it included energy and education.
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The most important thing was the creation of a... a standard, where hundreds of companies build hardware that can all run the same software.
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Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.
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I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.
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You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to sell it.
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The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.
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In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn't been the case for teaching.
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With nuclear weapons, you'd think you would probably stop after killing 100million. Smallpox won't stop. Because the population is naïve, and there are no real preparations. That, if it got out and spread, would be a larger number.
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There's life and death in every email.
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Every day were saying, 'How can we keep this customer happy?' How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don't, somebody else will.
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Only through focus can you do world-class things, no matter how capable you are.
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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.