How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of its corporate reflexes.
The most important 'speed' issue is often not technical but cultural. It's convincing everyone that the company's survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible.
... No one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year - if you check, you'll see that's more than most people make in a lifetime!
I find golf very relaxing. It's a way to get away from work and get outside. It's a lot of fun, and once you get going it's almost kind of addictive.
There is this thing called the GPL (Gnu Public Licence), which we disagree with... nobody can ever improve the software.
Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.
So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on.
Taxes are an investment in America.
Most innovations, unfortunately, actually increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There's a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer's, if you could avoid diabetes - those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn't favor them.
Someone in the society has to deal with the reality that there are finite resources and we're making trade-offs, and be explicit about that. When the car companies were found to have a memo that actually said, "This safety feature costs X and saved Y lives," the very existence of that memo was considered damning. Or when you made it reimbursable for a doctor to ask, "Do you want heroic care at the end-of-life," that was a death panel. No, it wasn't a death panel! It was asking somebody to make a decision.
The only big companies that succeed will be those that obsolete their own products before somebody else does.
There is no doubt PC prices will be coming down.
I don't think I would have spent time learning about the immune system if understanding vaccines weren't something I considered very important.
My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don't want to get malaria.
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.
When we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security.
In order to deal with all the medical cost demands and other challenges in the U.S., as we look to raise that revenue, the rich will have to pay slightly more. That's quite clear.
I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars; there's a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that.
When I was in college, for the games of that era, I was as hard core as anyone was. I wouldn't say I outgrew it, but you always have to have a finite number of addictions.
If you think of global public goods like polio eradication, the kind of risk-taking new approach, philanthropy really does have a role to play there, because government doesn't do R&D about new things naturally as much as it probably should, and so philanthropy's there.
[We in Microsoft] are not the only software company but we are a great software company doing some unique work.
Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.
I know there's a farmer out there somewhere who never wants a PC and that's fine with me.
My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases.
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.
