Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates IIIis an American business magnate, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and programmer. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates has authored and co-authored several books...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth28 October 1955
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
My dream is that every child has enough food to eat, good medical care, and the chance to go to school and even attend college.
Death is something we really understand extremely well.
One thing people underestimate is how markets don't allow anyone to do anything except make better and better products. There's not much leeway. The world is a lot more competitive than most people think, particularly in a high-technology area. If a company takes its eye off improving its products, if it tries to do anything that would be viewed as an exercise of power, it'll be displaced very rapidly.
I admire leaders in science, people who really figure things out like Richard Fineman or people who work on vaccines, tons of people working on [the] HIV vaccine. There's leaders in business, people like Warren Buffett, who've got a certain approach they take that are pretty amazing. There [are] product innovators like Steve Jobs was, where he gets behind a concept and does a fantastic job.
When you write a piece of software you assume a certain type of hardware. If you assume hardware that's too powerful then you can't sell many copies cause very few people have that machine. If you assume hardware that's too simple your product can't do as much.
Creating a piece of software is always complicated because you're doing something new. If you just wanted something that had been done before you'd just use that old piece of software. So there are no repetitive tasks.
The job was to put into a, a computer with only 4K of memory an entire basic full blown, floating point Basic and that's one of the greatest programming feats I've ever had a chance to work on.
The US really has to get out in front. We are the biggest per person, by a substantial amount, greenhouse emitters, and we give the most foreign aid, not per person but in absolute.
I went public too soon. Stay private as long as you can.
I remember in 1980 or 1981 looking at a list of people who had made a lot of money in the computer industry and thinking, Wow, that's amazing. But I never thought I'd be on that list. It's clear I was wrong. I'm on the list, at least temporarily.
If we [Microsoft Corporation] weren't still hiring great people and pushing ahead at full speed, it would be easy to fall behind and become a mediocre company. Fear should guide you, but it should be latent. I have some latent fear. I consider failure on a regular basis.
America and Japan are the two leading world economies in terms of technology and innovative products. And in software, information-age technology and biotechnology the U.S. has an amazing lead.
Married life is a simpler life. Who I spend my time with is established in advance.
Most innovations, unfortunately, actually increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There's a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer's, if you could avoid diabetes - those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn't favor them.