Bill Gates Quotes

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.

I try to take large, general questions that are difficult to resolve and break them down into small, very specific questions that have clear answers.

However much a president wishes it, a national problem cannot be knocked out with a single punch. A president must work with the problem as much as against it, turn it into a solution if she can.

No solution can be more elegant than the problem at which it is aimed allows.

Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word "impossible" is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise. Between Barbicane's proposition and its realization no true Yankee would have allowed even the semblance of a difficulty to be possible. A thing with them is no sooner said than done.

You've got to be smart about tackling.

The primary goal of IoT is to solve business problems, not to deliver a cool project or new technology. Focus on a business-relevant problem, and work with your customer to solve it.

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

Our goal is to try to bring a calm and simplicity to what are incredibly complex problems so that you're not aware really of the solution.

You have to sometimes just run with the problem rather than trying to solve it with hi-tech wizardry and lots of planning.

Sometimes this high-tech world calls for low-tech solutions.

When a knot gets to tight, you can always cut the rope

You can't always come up with the optimal solution, but you can usually come up with a better solution.

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.

If the technology hadn't changed, they [newspapers] would still be great businesses. Network TV [in its heyday], anyone could run and do well. If Tom Murphy as running it, you'd do very well, but even your idiot nephew could do well. Fortunately, carbide cutting tools [such as those made by Iscar] don't have these types of substitutes.

How you run the race - your planning, preparation, practice, and performance - counts for everything. Winning or losing is a by-product, and aftereffect, of that effort.

You have to seek the simplest implementation of a problem solution in order to know when you've reached your limit in that regard. Then it's easy to make tradeoffs, to back off a little, for performance reasons. You can simplify and simplify and simplify yet still find other incredible ways to simplify further.

One rule is to not use complicated techniques unless they are necessary to achieve your goal. First, use simple movements, and if they don't work, then introduce the more complex ones.

Once a problem is solved, its simplicity is amazing.

When I encounter a problem - something that's not quite right with a product - I enjoy breaking it down in my mind and exploring possible alternative solutions: Why this? Why not that? I apply the latest in technology and design to reinvent that product and solve my frustrations.

He [John von Neumann] had the invaluable faculty of being able to take the most difficult problem and separate it into its components, whereupon everything looked brlliantly simple.

...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.

Divide each difficulty at hand into as many pieces as possible and as could be required to better solve them.

Science is starting to show that our brains are less able to detect calories in liquids. So, people in the know, including food industry executives, when they run into health trouble, the first thing they do is cut calories out of all the liquids that they drink as a way of maintaining their weight.