Nathan Myhrvold
Nathan Myhrvold
Nathan Paul Myhrvold, formerly Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, is co-founder of Intellectual Ventures and the principal author of Modernist Cuisine. Myhrvold was listed as co-inventor on 17 patents at Microsoft and has since co-sponsored applications for over 500 other patents for which his corporation is funding the patent monetization effort...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth3 August 1959
CountryUnited States of America
zero two people
If I say I've got two versions of Word - that old one from 1982 that's perfect, with zero defects; or the new one that's got all this cool new stuff, but there might be a few bugs in it - people always want the new one. But I wouldn't want them to operate a plane I was on with software that happened to be the latest greatest release!
rights people next-level
If people don't get paid for their inventions, that's not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren't in a position to take them to the next level. If you don't enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.
moving book numbers
Anybody who can afford a box of business cards can afford a Web site. Any company with an 800 number can move its services to the Web for peanuts by comparison. The extreme case of corporate promotion is to strip away all other aspects of your business and sell goods or services via the Net alone, as amazon.com has done with books.
real people random-things
Another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie 'Contact,' which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way.
technology night wind
If you had a really good - battery, it wouldn't matter that the sun goes down at night and the wind stops blowing sometimes. But at the moment, battery technology is nowhere near good enough to use at utility scale.
home touching use
A blowtorch is a wonderful thing. You can get one of those for about 25 bucks at Home Depot. And there's a ton of things that you can use a blowtorch for, in browning a steak or touching up the browning of a chicken or making creme brulee.
law oil understanding
Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice - or, in other words, make mayonnaise - you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better.
apples next too-late
The NeXT purchase is too little too late. Apple is already dead.
running wall microsoft
In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.
people half sticks
I have a very pragmatic approach to diets. Ones you can't stick to don't do you any good. Some people say, 'Just eat half of what's on your plate,' but I can't do that!
two cooking way
The new revolution in cooking can be viewed in two ways. One is that you can take any traditional food and apply modern techniques. The other approach is to create food that is quite different than anything that has existed before.
skills knowing cooking
Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef.
patents would-be may
I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it... Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business.
grandma water interesting
Pressure cookers are relatively inexpensive, they're in every kitchen store, your grandma probably had one, but a lot of people don't. A pressure cooker is interesting because by pressurizing the vessel, you're able to cook much hotter than the boiling point of water, and still have water be present.