You know, development sometimes is viewed as a project in which you give people things and nothing much happens, which is perfectly valid, but if you just focus on that, then you'd also have to say that venture capital is pretty stupid, too. Its hit rate is pathetic. But occasionally, you get successes, you fund a Google or something, and suddenly venture capital is vaunted as the most amazing field of all time. Our hit rate in development is better than theirs, but we should strive to make it better.

The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.

When making choices, or setting policies about the economy, education or medicine, society is best served by electing people who are particularly hardworking, intelligent and interested in long-term thinking.

For Africa to move forward, you've really got to get rid of malaria.

This is something we're very committed to, it's something that I think people are underestimating right now as they've seen some of the dot-com promises not come through. I think they're missing the fact that the basic technology is moving forward, the new platforms are here and this vision of the digital decade will be a reality.

When I say "an energy miracle," I mean that there will be some form of energy whose 24 hour cost really is competitive with hydrocarbons given, say, 20 years of learning curve. You invent it, then you look at how much its costs go down over the next 20 years, that it really beats hydrocarbons.

Energy is very primal stuff and there are a lot of leads that are promising, still at a fairly risky stage, but over the next decade some of these breakthrough approaches are going to pay out, and U.S. research and U.S. leadership on this should be part of how it gets solved.