I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.
When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.
Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.
Philanthropy is fun and fulfilling.
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 close relationships we form between researchers and product groups have already shown we can move the great ideas as they come along, without a schedule, into the products.
I don’t have a magic formula for prioritizing the world’s problems.
Every new change forces all the companies in an industry to adapt their strategies to that change.
There will be two types of businesses in the next 5 years, those that are on the Internet, and those that are out of business.
Software is more important than hardware.
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.
Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.
The poor can’t wait. Philanthropists needed to carry on being generous.
Don’t let complexity stop you.
The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg’s press did the Middle Ages.
When you lose a customer, it can be tempting to tell each other, “That customer’s not very sharp. They just made the wrong decision”.
The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.
Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.
Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.
My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.