Bill Gates Done Quotations

The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done.

The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.

Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

I have a company that is not Microsoft, called Corbis. Corbis is the operation that merged with Bettman Archives. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. It was intentionally done outside of Microsoft because Microsoft isn't interested.

Good programmers stay open minded to that even though there is no obvious way to improve what they've done they... they keep looking and they listen to what other people have to say.

what are the top 20 universities in the world that do good materials research that might create carbon fibers to do jet stream kites or new magnets that will allow [energy] generation to be done up there and you just bring the electricity down. You either have to bring down rotational energy, which is hard, or you have to have the generator up there and bring down the electricity. Well, putting the generator up there is hard to do because it's too heavy.

The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.

You always overestimate what you can get done in a year and underestimate what you can get done in 10 years.

Even for the very best programmers ah, sometimes you'll see someone else's program or somebody will come along and they'll show you what can be done in a simpler way.

In software you can't really add people and expect to get more done, because their ability to understand the program and what's going on it would require so much investment and all their work would require so much review that you'd be more likely to slow things down.

If you're smart, you often want a feedback loop so you know if what you've done is... is right.

Creating a piece of software is always complicated because you're doing something new. If you just wanted something that had been done before you'd just use that old piece of software. So there are no repetitive tasks.

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.