Bill Gates Quotes
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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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More and more software would just increase the number of tasks that the computer would help solve.
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I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least ten years.
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This is not about trade, no one is a stronger supporter of capitalism and trade than I am. This is about sovereignty and whether a country has the right to set its own public health policies.
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We'll have infinite bandwidth in a decade's time.
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When I was trying to figure out why lives have improved so much in the last 300 years, where we've gone from a third of kids dying before 5 to - by 1990 it was down to 10% - now it's down to 5%. And saying why, over all history, there were smart people, but that number didn't change. Average life span didn't change. What's magical about what's been deemed the Industrial Revolution? It's really energy intensity.
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Change the boundaries of business.
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When I was young I liked taking tests. I happened to be good at it. Certain subjects came easily, like math. All the science stuff. I would just read the textbooks in the first few days of class.
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I have drifted away from thinking about these philanthropic things. And it was only as the wealth got large enough and Melinda and I had talked about the view that wealth wasn't something that would be good to just pass to the children.
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A fundamental new rule for business is that the Internet changes everything.
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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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Software is definitely engineering. It's different in that we take on novel tasks every time. It's not like building a certain bridge that is virtually identical to some previous bridge or some previous building.
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I actually thought that it would be a little confusing during the same period of your life to be in one meeting when you're trying to make money, and then go to another meeting where you're giving it away. I mean is it gonna erode your ability, you know, to make money? Are you gonna somehow get confused about what you're trying to do?
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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 your goal is to make the world a better place, one thing you can do is pick a specific challenge that you really care about. Then, learn as much as you can about it and try to volunteer your time to help an organization that is working in this area. While you're doing that, look for creative new ways to use technology to tackle parts of the problem that you come in contact with.
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In 80% of the world, energy will be bought where it is economic. You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price.
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I definitely think leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favor to them.
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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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The mainstream is always under attack.
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If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that's a good discussion. Maybe that's the way to help close the deficit.
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The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.
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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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Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
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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.