A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.

Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.

Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs.

If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?

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

I've been studying how quickly we can get energy out to the poor countries - a lot of which are in Africa - and how little progress we've made there. There's no more electricity today in sub-Saharan Africa per person than there was 20 years ago.

There are a variety of techniques for breaking software down into pieces and making software development more efficient. Many of these techniques have been sort of... and everybody got excited about but very little benefit was actually derived once the thing was put into practice.