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 most important people is to pick people who like to write software and who are good at... good developers like working with each other. And they... they reinforce each other's skills.

Microsoft looks at new ideas, they don't evaluate whether the idea will move the industry forward, they ask, 'how will it help us sell more copies of Windows?

There was a magical breakthrough when the computer became cheap and we could see that everyone could afford a computer.

I really do think cancer will largely be a solved problem. I think most of the infectious diseases like malaria - our foundation is very involved - once we're finishing polio eradication, then starting up this malaria eradication, and getting that done as fast as we can.

When AIDS emergency broke out and was killing millions in Africa, the Global Fund was created so that a level of generosity would show up and buy the medicines to save those lives.

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.