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
There's really only one that they've done a leadership thing in, which is in search, and search today is very poor compared to what it will be even a year or two years from now -- their search, our search, everybody's search. So there's so much room to do better, to have that work well with the other offerings.
Microsoft is committed to playing its role by making a broad set of investments in the country. Just less than a year ago, when I met with the prime minister, we made some very concrete commitments about increased investment, and I'm pleased to see that all of those have come to pass and they've all been very successful.
We'll definitely have a big Office year this year,
Now the growth in the last year in Europe was very rapid and so you can say the gap is closing a bit. But I think it's still an issue of great concern. A lot of kids graduate from college in Europe without having the in-depth exposure that most U.S. students receive. So there's work to be done.
There are some things that we are always thinking about. For example, when will speech recognition be good enough for everybody to use that? And we have made a lot more progress this year on that. I think we will surprise people a bit on how well we will do on our speech recognition.
In fact, batteries haven't improved over the last 100 years as much as they would need to in order to make that happen. So I'm invested in a lot of battery companies - and there's a lot that exists I'm not in. They're all having a tough time achieving it.
The first five years have so much to do with how the next 80 turn out.
About three million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition. Your leading indicator of where you're going to be 20 years from now is how well you're doing in your education system.
Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that's associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to.
I have $100 billion… You realize I could spend $3 million a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't make another dime…
If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you'll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases.
So on the demand side [for energy], there have been a variety of policies that globally have been way over $50 billion a year of tax credits, raising the price of electricity through things like renewable portfolio standards, so the total amount of money that's gone into sending a price signal to push up demand versus what would happen without it has been gigantic.