To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

More and more software would just increase the number of tasks that the computer would help solve.

In most of these things our foundation is a co-funder, so I can say that a polio or an HIV vaccine, that I'm putting our resources behind it in a very big way and the U.S. government would be the best partner for those efforts.

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

What we're really after is simply that people acquire a legal license for Windows for each computer they own before they move on to Linux or Sun Solaris or BSD or OS/2 or whatever.