PART 14: Famous Quotes of Bill Gates -II
You've got to give great tools to small teams. Pick good people, use small teams, give them excellent tools...so that they are very productive in terms of what they are doing. Make it very clear what they can do to change the spec. Make them feel like they are very much in control of it.
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself.
Life is not fair; get used to it.
My job is about the most fun thing I do, but I have a broad set of interests, going places, reading things, doing things.
Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time.
Often you have to rely on intuition.
One thing people underestimate is how markets don't allow anyone to do anything except make better and better products.
There will be 'two societies' in the future: high-paid knowledge workers and low-paid service workers.
Our vision of what's important is exactly the same today, bringing together the best systems and the best
software to empower people with rich information solutions.
The vision is really that in the information age the microprocessor-based machine, the PC, along with great software, can become sort of the ultimate tool dealing with not just text, but numbers and pictures, and eventually, even difficult things like motion video.
Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
The frontiers were sort of wide open. It was that sense of excitement that we really wanted to spark in everybody else wherever we went.
The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people.
The message that personal computers can do neat things, that software is great stuff, that there's an exciting opportunity here and Microsoft is involved in it, that's a worthwhile message for Microsoft to get out.
The opportunity to engage people who are very far away from each other and yet might have interesting information is better here than has ever been possible.
The PC will continue to evolve. In fact, you'll think of it simply as a flat screen that will range from a wallet size device to a notebook, to a desktop, to a wall. And besides the size of the screen, the only other characteristic will be whether it is wired to an optic fiber or operating over a wireless connection. And those computers will be everywhere. You can find other people who have things that are in common. You can post messages. You can watch shows. The flexibility that this will provide is really quite incredible. And already there is the mania in discussing this so called 'Information Highway' which is the idea of connecting up these devices not only in business, but in home, and making sure that video feeds work very well across these new networks. So we've only come a small way. We haven't changed the way that markets are organized. We haven't changed the way people educate themselves, or socialize, or express their political opinions, in nearly the way that we will over the next ten years. And so the software is going to have to lead the way and provide the kind of ease of use, security, and richness that those applications demand.
The people who resist change will be confronted by the growing number of people who see that better ways...are available thanks to technology.
Kids are taking PCs and the Internet to new heights. They're the ones that are designing the cutting-edge web sites. They're the ones that are pushing forth things like digital music, digital photos, instant messaging; and they will take this tool in directions that we don't even expect.
Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.
Microsoft was actually the first one to go to AT&T and beg to get a nice high-volume commercial license for Unix.
The Internet can be compared to the arrival of the printing press, the telephone and the radio.
You could almost step back and imagine how you would like information to be available, and actually put together a system that delivers on that vision.
The overall digital nervous system message is one about helping developers seize opportunity by bringing together the different architectures, making things automatic and allowing this to be done in an evolutionary fashion.
"What would a Digital Nervous System for banking look like?... The first is to share all the information across all the different delivery channels.
I was thinking about all the reasons I love my PC, and I had to pick just a few and boil it down. And so I'm going to start with my top ten list of why I love my PC.
Every enterprise, whether it's large or small will need to have its information in digital form, and be able to take advantage of that to streamline decision processes to draw more people to make decisions, whether it's people inside the company, or partners, or suppliers.
I think it's great to finish school and I wanted to give you a little bit of my background and talk a little bit about where I see things going in the future.
When we get up in the morning, what we're thinking about is software that's reliable, software that has a natural interface, and all the feedback we're getting from customers about where they want our software to go. That is our total focus as a company.
I think it's fair to say with our focus making Windows NT great for publishing and Apple's renewed focus on publishing, the only clear winner is people who do publishing.
Sometime not too many years from now, new personal computers will come with the refinement of Windows NT, Version 5, in the same way they come with Windows 95 today.
The information age is just beginning and I think a lot of positive things going on in the economy reflect the efficiencies that these new technologies provide.
I really owe my success to several excellent teachers who gave me the self-confidence when I was very young to explore the world of knowledge.
Microsoft is a company that moves very rapidly, and we set priorities based on what our customers are asking for.
The amazing thing about computer science is that the hardware and software combination that's created is a tool, the best tool that's ever been created for leveraging human innovation.
Our program has a simple goal: make vaccines you and I take for granted available to children regardless of where they live.
Being able to create the ultimate information device, being able to understand the genome and the world's diseases, all of those are within our grasp within the next two decades.
As we look at the impact of the PC and what it's done to date, we find that we are nowhere near achieving the PC's true potential.
PCs are going beyond the desktop and becoming personal companions, giving people vast new capabilities.
The personal computer has emerged not just as a tool of the organization, but a tool of the individual. By connecting those machines together, we're creating a really incredible phenomena of a tool that empowers people to learn in very new ways.
In no way has the computer had even 10 percent of the impact that I expect in the years ahead. In the next 10 years, we'll see more change than we've seen in the last 25. So, it's a very exciting time.
I'm calling my remarks today, "Building Windows- based Applications for the Internet Age," because I think for all of us that's something where we're going to see incredible demand, really even beyond what the industry has seen so far.
It is now possible within your company or to your customers to have all the information there in a rich, electronic form. Paper invoices, paper billing, paper forms, these things are going to go away. And within only a few years, they'll be more the exception than the rule.
Most important was our business model, to be very specialized, not a services company, not a systems company, not even a vertical applications company, strictly a software platform company working with all the different hardware companies who came in with PC- type equipment.
This vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what's going on so they can do a lot more than they've done in the past.
By taking the latest in hardware and software technology, the cable industry will lead the way to providing information age services in all the homes throughout the world.
There was the belief that the hardware power would grow so rapidly that the key limiting factor would be the availability of a software platform. And it's been amazing to see how this exponential improvement has proceeded year by year.
I think the companies that do well in the information age will be the ones that think about the digital nervous system, and they think about the products from our companies as simply building blocks that allow you to get to the best digital nervous system.
Windows creates independence between the hardware changes and the software changes, and so you have total choice on the hardware side and total choice on the software side.
One of the areas that's the greatest challenge in these technology advances is making sure that, as we connect to the Internet, we have low-cost, high-speed connections.
We recognize that at least 80 percent of the jobs in today's market place require computer literacy.
Our framework for this is what I call the Web lifestyle. This is the idea that over the next decade most adults will be using the Web many times a day, without even thinking about it.
Our vision when we started the company was a computer on every desk and in every home. And in this setting, I think the word to emphasize there is 'every'.
We're taking video and audio and combining it with the richness of the Internet, so that it's easy to find things and it's easy to create whole new content experiences that draw on that interactivity.
Tonight I want to share how the advances in the PC, the advances in the Internet, and the advances in software are going to create an amazing new tool that brings together all the good things we think about in a new world of communication.
What we have to do is work with telecommunications providers so all your information -- business databases, files, contacts -- all of it shows up automatically as soon as you authenticate who you are, then your personalized desktop, that shows you the part of the Web or your mailbox that you care about, that immediately comes up on the screen, including adapting to the screen size of the device that you're looking at.
What we're trying to do is get all the pieces to work together, making it easy for Web sites to connect up to smart cards, making it easy for Windows login, making it easy for applications. Our efforts go way beyond just what we actually stick onto the card itself.
The PC is going to look very different than it does today. It will be that tablet, it will be the phone that you talk to, it will be your information stored out there on the Web and easy to access. It's a much broader view of what this platform looks like.
And so, in this new age of Internet applications, we're taking all of our developer pieces, and advancing them to make it as easy as possible to build these applications.
In all of our activities, we take a long-term view, whether it's R&D development on things like speech recognition, building a very efficient software development environment or nurturing the partnerships and the mutual relationships we have with customers.
The term I'm using today is 'workstations without limits,' without any limits for the kind of information you can get, no limits for performance you get. This is desktop supercomputing.
Today's students have access to powerful computers and a sea of information through the Internet that I could only dream of when I was a teenager.
The information age is opening up new possibilities for all of us, for our children and for the entire nation.
The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear.
You'll be able to send mail to anyone in the organization independent of what the hierarchy looks like, and a lot of information will flow, including tracking what's going on with every customer.
In virtually every country, whether it's a developing country or a developed country, politicians are talking about the kind of policies that they will create to empower the citizenry, deal with global competitiveness, and mitigate any issues that [the Internet] will provide.
We still want to preserve everything that's great about the PC, the flexibility to have applications, rich peripherals, and portability, yet give people the best of both worlds central management as well as PC capabilities.
Today we're taking on a whole new class of software problems because of the Internet, because of its role as the most revolutionary communications device of all time.
The most important class of partner for us, by far, is people like yourselves who build software on our platform.
Our great hope here is that there is a generation growing up where using a computer is second nature. Where browsing the Internet and using electronic mail is not some foreign thing. They will be the ones that lead the charge here.
I believe the rules of how a business works are going to be so different that only the companies that seize the opportunity to do things a new way will be the ones that are successful in the years ahead.
The ability to match buyers and sellers will be completely different because of the PC and because of the Internet.
The bottom line is that business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.
I think I've always admired scientists, people like Richard Feynman or scientists who made these incredible advances.
We work on a very leveraged basis training developers on the latest technologies. In Latin America, we trained over 55,000 developers and IT administrators in the last 12 months.
We want everybody who works on the Internet to think of Internet Explorer technologies as a platform that they can build on, a platform that they can take advantage of.
This is a product that not only provides messaging and PBX capability, but has the programming richness, because it uses the Windows platform that allows there to be lots of third-party applications.
We have been studying what kind of special products can we produce to grow the usage computers and the Internet.
I think there are more opportunities now to do business in a better way today than there have ever been.
E-commerce is a very exciting area. It's hard to pick up a magazine or a newspaper nowadays without reading about some milestone in electronic commerce.
With the Internet it's very easy to create a place that people go for any kind of product, and all the buyers and sellers can meet there.
The ideal is to give students a sense that there's a way of reaching out for knowledge whenever they want it, so they find it easy to be lifelong learners.
How well are we set up with our security infrastructure to make sure that even somebody who wanted to disrupt it wouldn't be able to do so?
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