Bill Gates Quotes
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We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they'll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.
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Melinda Gates is a lot of fun to work with. There's some of the people skills that she's better at and cares about more. It'd be a mistake not to think of her as very numerical and interested in the science. I enjoy, if I get ahead of her, say, understanding the immune system, then we can spend a few hours, where I'm going through how amazing it is and interesting, and how that affects our creating new products, so I've always had a partner.
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Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it "tap dancing to work."
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The interview process tests not what the applicant knows, but how well they can process tricky questions: If you wanted to figure out how many times on average you would have to flip the pages of the Manhattan phone book to find a specific name, how would you approach the problem? If a spider fell to the bottom of a 50-foot well, and each day climbed up 3 feet and slipped back 2, how many days would it take the spider to get out of the well?
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Warren Buffett met with all sorts of different groups about a lot of different things, but yes, he took the time, he listened and he wanted to understand about some of the different diseases and the strength of the American role in doing all these things.
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I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese.
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I don't think culture is something you can describe.
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Today, the issue isn’t quantity of food as much as it is quality-whether kids are getting enough protein and other nutrients to fully develop.
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In programming when you're making a change you have to know all the affected places, and you have to be able to model in your head what the performance impact will be.
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Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it's true.
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If your business is not on the Internet, then your business will be out of business.
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Government investment unlocks a huge amount of private sector activity, but the basic research that we put into IT work that led to the Internet and lots of great companies and jobs, the basic work we put into the health care sector, where it's over $30 billion a year in R&D that led the biotech and pharma jobs. And it creates jobs and it creates new technologies that will be productized. But the government has to prime the pump here. The basic ideas, as in those other industries, start with government investment.
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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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The returns from investing in poor people are just as great as the returns from investing in the business world... and have even more meaning
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We were young, but we had good advice and good ideas and lots of enthusiasm.
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Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told me about it and I said, "I don't know how to spell that." I said, "Yeah, I've got that on my list, so I'm okay." But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy.
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When AIDS emergency broke out and was killing millions in Africa, the Global Fund was created so that a level of generosity would show up and buy the medicines to save those lives.
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I went public too soon. Stay private as long as you can.
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Why do people benefit in inverse proportion to their need? Well, market incentives make that happen.
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Here at work we're all just trying to get a job done. My people have the confidence of their convictions and they know their skills. And that occupies most of my time.
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While we're all very dependent on technology, it doesn't always work.
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We'll have infinite bandwidth in a decade's time.
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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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Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness.