Quote collection
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"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."
"We have over 60 million machines that can take the same diskette, plug it in and immediately ah, that that software's working. And so it's created the worldwide software industry that... that is so very competitive and moving so quickly."
"There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer."
"In the decade ahead I can predict that we will provide over twice the productivity improvement that we provided in the '90s."
"So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on."
"There is this thing called the GPL (Gnu Public Licence), which we disagree with... nobody can ever improve the software."
"I find golf very relaxing. It's a way to get away from work and get outside. It's a lot of fun, and once you get going it's almost kind of addictive."
"... No one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year - if you check, you'll see that's more than most people make in a lifetime!"
"The most important 'speed' issue is often not technical but cultural. It's convincing everyone that the company's survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible."
"How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of its corporate reflexes."
"Customers want high quality at low prices and they want it now."
"You know, development sometimes is viewed as a project in which you give people things and nothing much happens, which is perfectly valid, but if you just focus on that, then you'd also have to say that venture capital is pretty stupid, too. Its hit rate is pathetic. But occasionally, you get successes, you fund a Google or something, and suddenly venture capital is vaunted as the most amazing field of all time. Our hit rate in development is better than theirs, but we should strive to make it better."
"Philanthropy should be voluntary."
"There is a certain responsibility that accrued to me when I got to this unexpected position."
"I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don't just think, 'Yes, my country is doing well,' but you think about the world at large."
"I have always loved the competitive forces in this business. You know I certainly have meetings where I spur people on by saying, "Hey, we can do better than this. How come we are not out ahead on that?" Thats what keeps my job one of the most interesting in the world."
"Microsoft Products are Generally Bug Free"
"The only big companies that succeed will be those that obsolete their own products before somebody else does."
"Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace."
"Someone in the society has to deal with the reality that there are finite resources and we're making trade-offs, and be explicit about that. When the car companies were found to have a memo that actually said, "This safety feature costs X and saved Y lives," the very existence of that memo was considered damning. Or when you made it reimbursable for a doctor to ask, "Do you want heroic care at the end-of-life," that was a death panel. No, it wasn't a death panel! It was asking somebody to make a decision."