Businesspeople From The United States

"This leads to the paradox, that because the disease is only in the poor countries, there is not much investment. For example, there is more money put into baldness drugs, than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it is a terrible thing [audience laughter] and rich men are afflicted, so that is why that priority is set."

"One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity...We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world,""

"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers."

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."

"Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better."

"Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down."

"The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future."

"Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as great. Also, the opportunity to go back and really rewrite something isn't quite as great, because there's always a new set of features that you're adding on to the same program."

"We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing."

"The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree."

"You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong..."

"The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system."

"One of the best things I read was an 1889 essay by Andrew Carnegie called The Gospel of Wealth. It makes the case that the wealthy have a responsibility to return their resources to society, a radical idea at the time that laid the groundwork for philanthropy as we know it today."

"People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that "he died rich" will not be one of them."

"The picture of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one."

"Within 10 years, AI will replace many doctors and teachers—humans won’t be needed ‘for most things’. It’s very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,."

"India is an example of a country where there's plenty of things that are difficult there -- the health, education, nutrition is improving and they are stable enough and generating their own government revenue enough that it's very likely that 20 years from now people will be dramatically better off and it's kind of a laboratory to try things that then when you prove them out in India, you can take to other places. And so our biggest non-US office for the Foundation is in India and the most number of pilot roll out things we're doing anywhere in the world are with partners in India. If you go there and you've never been you might think whoa this is a chaotic place and you know you're not used to so many levels of income all being on the street at the same time but you will get a sense of vibrancy."

"So the idea of being able to explain something in a succinct form is such a cool thing, and it requires you to know a field so well."

"If you eventually get a society where you only have to work three days a week, that’s probably OK. If you free up human labor, you can help elder people better, have smaller class sizes – you know, the demand for labor to do good things is still there. And then if you ever get beyond that, you have a lot of leisure time and you’ll have to figure out what to do with it."

"The big concern is about the generations yet to come when [AI] gets way smarter than it is right now. And if a person with Mal intent was using that, say, for a cyberattack, or to make a deep fake that makes a politician look like they're doing something awful, or even one of your relatives saying, okay, I've been kidnapped."

"The climate is not the end of the planet. So the planet is going to be fine"

"You can make sure wind turbines can deal with the cold"

"Well, one thing that everybody may not be aware of is how fantastic the CDC has been historically. They're the best in the world. They train themselves in terms of how to communicate, including getting bad news out and getting people to take measures that protect themselves. And they've been muzzled."

"We always have to be serious about public health in a global sense and surveillance for "the next one", because we don't know where it will emerge."

"Usually, you'd expect the worst to be the "ground zero" country — in this case, China, then the next wave, which was all in Asia, and then in Europe, and then finally, the U.S. We had all this community spread. With a travel ban, where you actually force people to come back from China, you have to have a way to be able to either just assume they're infected and quarantine them, or test them. And then if they test positive, to have that enforced quarantine. We actually seeded a lot of infection by saying, 'Okay, everybody, residents and citizens come back (and not testing or quarantining).'"

"Most governments take advantage of their scientists and listen to them. They don't undermine them and attack them."

"The only way you can get to the very positive scenario [in the fight against climate change] is by great innovation. Innovation really does bend the curve."

"When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war. That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food and water. When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel. Today, the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this. Instead, it looks like this. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes."

"Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive."

"[I]t's not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, "Oh my God, Microsoft didn't aim high enough." It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, "Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.""

"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."

"If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. ... Let's be realistic, who came up with "File/Edit/View/Help"? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?"

"I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing."

"Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes."

"I wish I wasn't ... There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it."

"Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be."

"Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so irritating."

"We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence — presence is the most trivial notion, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something."

"Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that."

"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."

"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."

"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities."

"We've done some good work, but all of these products become obsolete so fast... It will be some finite number of years, and I don't know the number — before our doom comes."

"It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit."

"As soon as I learned about this miracle of chip making I thought, what is the key missing element? ... I'd been working on software so I decided that maybe that was what was necessary to bring all this power to life. I talked about that with a friend, Paul Allen, and we kept saying, "What can we do? Can we start our own software company?" It seemed impossible at the time because software was not done by independent companies. The companies that built the computers — IBM and DEC — they did all the software. And when we called them up and said, "We would like to do an operating system," they said, "who are you?" to which we said, "we're high-school students." That was s, uh — that was the end of that conversation."

"Any operating system without a browser is going to be fucking out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business?"

"Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning."

"What we're saying to people is that every idea about ease-of-use, we can develop in software, for the PC, without asking them to buy new hardware, without asking them to throw away their old applications."

"In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid."