Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.
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...
DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.
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.
Bitcoin is mostly about anonymous transactions, and I don't think over time that's a good way to go. I'm a huge believe in digital currency... but doing it on an anonymous basis I think that leads to some abuses, so I'm not involved in Bitcoin.
The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of. Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard.
Windows is probably the most important product in the entire PC industry. Everything we do in terms of supporting touch, new hardware, accessibility has incredible impact.
Typically, your corporate e-mail account is not, today, that spam-targeted. It's more the free e-mail accounts that are spam-targeted.
I believe the returns on investment in the poor are just as exciting as successes achieved in the business arena, and they are even more meaningful!
Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.
Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.
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.
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 my 40s, Microsoft was my primary activity.
Being able to see an activity log of where a kid has been going on the Internet is a good thing.
A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.
