I have drifted away from thinking about these philanthropic things. And it was only as the wealth got large enough and Melinda and I had talked about the view that wealth wasn't something that would be good to just pass to the children.

There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

Microsoft has long hired based on IQ and "intellectual bandwidth."

Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free?

As we have taken diarrhea and pneumonia down, even malaria down quite a bit, the portion of the days that are very early in that 5 years - the first month, the first day - it's about half now. Yet that's the part we understand the least.

I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.

Now we've got that [children's death rate] down to about 5 percent, so we've more than cut it in half, and that's because we're getting vaccines out, economic improvement also helps there, but the vaccines are why we've seen an acceleration in getting that down.