With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to gain market share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device. But a lot of those users are frustrated. They can't type. They can't create documents.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.

If you think of global public goods like polio eradication, the kind of risk-taking new approach, philanthropy really does have a role to play there, because government doesn't do R&D about new things naturally as much as it probably should, and so philanthropy's there.

Good stuff tends to happen gradually, whereas violence or catastrophes are deemed more newsworthy.

When you say that after World War I there was a pandemic that killed more people than the war itself, most will say: "Wait, are you kidding? I know World War I, but there was no World War 1.5, was there?" But people were traveling around after the war, and that meant the force of infection was much higher. And the problem is that the rate of travel back then was dramatically less than what we have nowadays.

People think about this idea that there's 122 million kids that are alive that would not be if that fatality rate had stayed at the 1990 level, that's 122 million families.

There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.