Bill Gates Quotes
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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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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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Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.
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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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Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.
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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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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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Billionaires should never be responsible for solving problems, because they're not the government.
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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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The challenge here is to design a system where market incentives, including profits and recognition, drive those principles to do more for the poor. I like to call this idea creative capitalism, an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities.
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Life is not a continuous process, there's some sort of finite number of achievements that defines your life.
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When you have a product that has zero sales, it is easy for people to say whatever they want about it and almost fantasize about it.
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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 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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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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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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To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.
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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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In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn't been the case for teaching.
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Only through focus can you do world-class things, no matter how capable you are.
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I want to make clear that we respect the role of government in our legal andeconomic system.
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The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it's very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.
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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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Looking at these issues as a businessman, I believe that investing in the world's poorest people is the smartest way that our government spends money.