If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn't be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers.

There are a variety of techniques for breaking software down into pieces and making software development more efficient. Many of these techniques have been sort of... and everybody got excited about but very little benefit was actually derived once the thing was put into practice.

Today, we take the risk of nuclear war quite seriously, climate change not so much and epidemics least of all. But no single country, not even the United States, is well prepared. And even if one country is doing the right things to protect itself, it has to be a global thing.

Information work is thinking work.

There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.

We're very enthused about the idea that in the third trimester we actually give the mother a vaccine and her antibodies, the protective things that the immune system makes, actually pass through to the baby, both when the baby is born, and through the mother's milk. Because the baby's immune system is actually not very strong for that first few months, using the mother's immune system to do this - it's a very exciting idea and something that we're investing heavily in.

The trick generally is to break programs into pieces and have those pieces be individually testable and so then when you move on to the other pieces you treat it as a black box knowing that it either works or doesn't work.