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
I have to admit that business-type thoughts do sneak into my head: I hope our customers pay us, I hope this stuff is decent, I hope we get it done on time. The little additions and subtractions that one has to do. Take sales, take costs and try to get that big positive number at the bottom.
I think given all the different imperatives - getting energy to Africa, security of energy, climate change, that we should be spending half as much as we spend on health, which will get you all the way up to $15 billion - the health people don't like it when things get compared to their number.
Innovation is often the hidden thing, because we can't put numbers to it. And yet it's the thing that defines the way we live, the things we'd like to have for everyone whether it's health or education.
More and more software would just increase the number of tasks that the computer would help solve.
My tax return in the United States has to be kept on a special computer because their normal computers can't deal with the numbers. So I am constantly getting these notices telling me I haven't paid something when really it is just on the wrong computer.
The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.
There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints.
I'm an investor in a number of biotech companies, partly because of my incredible enthusiasm for the great innovations they will bring.
The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.
Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you're glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.
When I was in college, for the games of that era, I was as hard core as anyone was. I wouldn't say I outgrew it, but you always have to have a finite number of addictions.
Life is not a continuous process, there's some sort of finite number of achievements that defines your life.
The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people.
There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.