When Ford sells a car, a dealer isn't allowed to take out the engine and put a different one in. When a newsstand sells the Washington Post, no one can go to the newsstand and pay them to rip out the classified section and put their own classified section in - if they could, they would do so.
For Africa to move forward, you've really got to get rid of malaria.
Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough.
Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.
There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.
K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.
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.
Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.
Most poor people live in the poorest countries.
I'm going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.
This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.
The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.
The only definition by which America's best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.
According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.
I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it's just such a dramatic success.
This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.
Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs.
Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.
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.
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.
Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines... There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.
I don't think culture is something you can describe.
We've got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.
Common Core is a big win for education.
The potential financial reward for building the 'next Windows' is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.
I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.
Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.
I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.
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.
This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.
I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software.
By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.
