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You were a visionary in software and a highly effective software company executive. The two aren't always the same, God knows. Have you had to adapt your management style to the exigencies of the nonprofit world and international development, and is energy funding different again? How has your experience as a software executive and visionary translated into your post-Microsoft career?
Well, I've had to learn a lot of new things, which I enjoy. I didn't understand much about vaccines or immunology or how they got delivered, or how they got funded. So I've gotten to meet a lot of people. There's a more political aspect to this in terms of the money that rich-world governments give and in terms of how well governed the recipient countries are and how they make things either easy or hard. We didn't have that complexity at Microsoft. The one thing we have that's great is that everybody has the same goal: saving the children's lives or improving their health. So you really don't have competitors in a sense. You get a level of cooperation when you can get everybody in the malaria community together and have them share their best ideas when there isn't a market for the vaccine. Same for TB. It's different from Microsoft. In some ways it's more like when Microsoft was 400 to 500 people. The foundation's about 700 people.
You and Charles Simonyi created a software factory, this multigenerational software enterprise, where nothing like that had ever really existed before. It was a place where big programs could be developed and launched and maintained and managed over many decades. You were a kind of meta program manager at the center of Microsoft. But now you have to work with enormous numbers of people over whom you have no direct authority. You have to convince people, you have to work by persuasion, by a whole variety of different techniques. How many of the management techniques you learned at Microsoft are still useful to you?
I think it's all useful. As Microsoft got larger, I couldn't threaten to code things over the weekend. I had to convince people and take the scenario I wanted them to do something with and articulate it in a very clear way, so I had to get good at doing that. I think over time I've gotten better at working with large groups and not being as impatient about cases where people only see part of the picture, and yet they're an important part of things. But it's very similar. It's working with smart people. Now, when I go up to northern Nigeria and meet with the Emir of Kano and enlist him in getting the religious authorities to promote the polio vaccine--now that's a different thing. At Microsoft, I didn't happen to go see the Emir of Kano for any software products. I view it as great preparation. If you said to me I could have any current advance that would expose me to a lot of things--failures, successes--I don't think I'd pick anything else.
How has being a philanthropist broadened you in a way that your career as a software engineer did not?
Well, I'm not trying to make any moral judgment about one versus the other. Believe me, when somebody's in their entrepreneurial mode--being fanatical, inventing new things--the value they're adding to the world is phenomenal. If they invent new technologies, that is an amazing thing. And they don't even have to know how it's going to help people. But it will: in education, medical research, you name it. So I was one of those fanatics in my 20s where I didn't know about poor people or even government budgets much at all. I worked night and day on software. I thought a lot about software. I said, "Hey, I'm a software fanatic. What is that about?" Even some of the marketing and sales things that I eventually learned, I said, "Hey, if the software's good enough, how far do you have to go?" Well, we certainly didn't build an IBM-style sales force; most of our customers we never met. We didn't duplicate the old model, but the truth of what we had to do was not quite as pure as I started out thinking. It wasn't "Hey, here's the software."
So that's a great mode to be in, but throughout the Microsoft experience, whether it was piracy or privacy, policy, or whatever would come up, I got down the learning curve because Microsoft was in a position to hire incredible people. I got to see how they did things. They wanted me along because they thought I would be paid attention to and could be articulate about the software. So in my 20s I was almost just a developer and a fanatic; in my 30s, I got exposure to management, although I was still writing some of the code; then in my 40s, the majority of what I was doing was large-organization management and picking some strategies, but I didn't write any code that shipped in products. Now, in my 50s, I'm in a role that's kind of like that. I like that my relationship to some of these development teams is like a smaller Microsoft, because for better or for worse, when you have all the TB experts in the world in the room, the room is not very full. That's about 10 or 12 people that you're sitting and talking to about the TB vaccine.
In charting a new energy policy, he focused on creating jobs and improving American competitiveness, instead of climate change.
Even without an economy-wide price on carbon, many businesses are going green both as a way to save money and as a hedge against the rising cost of fossil fuels.
A massive biogas facility will turn manure from dairy farms into electricity and fertilizer.
Hats off to Bill Gates.
If the rest of the world's billionaires had his mindset the world would be a decent place to live.
Bill Gates seems like an okay fellow, I think it's great what he's trying to do even if he doesn't always get it right.
Wow. What an amazing impact Gates has had. And quite a different interview then I would find on Fox or MSNBC.
Someone said if more millionaires were like Gates the world would be a better place. Ditto!!! Look at some other wealthy people Paul Allen, Bill Gates one time partner. What does he do with his money buy the football, basketball franchises, yachts, and try to start high tech companies that always fail. I don't mean to be a Paul Allen basher, but to point out how money can be used to help instead of play.
Bill,
If I may disagree with your contention that energy development cannot benefit by a government-led, blitzkrieg project approach. My dad was a co-inventor of radar at MIT's Rad Lab during WWII, a large project effort, and was later connected to large-scale nuclear defense (DEW Line). As a result of his entirely classified work I have kept personal lessons from such in the fore. I mention, too, on the micro scale I've designed and executed a highly successful solar hot water system for my home, running 5 years now, along with solar electricity. I have also developed proprietary insulation and installation systems for the retrofit of economical radiant heating, running here for years as well.
These are marvelous, beneficial energy toys, especially when not a member of the third world where my survival might depend on sunny days. As you correctly point out, none of these energy suppositions are easy, most especially the ultimate calculations of the end of oil.
From what I see with the crunching experts, final hope on a global basis lies solely in fusion energy. In a year where one of the primary labs, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, has been budget cut, and consequently depriving itself of vital young talent, it painful to believe that a Manhattan Project effort would clearly produce the amazing results the world requires. It is an incredibly complex, expensive subject.
Unfortunately, it is by that nature a boring, plodding, basic science effort; the labs themselves don't have a clue to spreading the good word, nor do the politicians planning our science, and least of all the general public and the media feeding them. Fusion is the only power source capable of replacing oil, the windmills, silicon, and batteries just don't add up. I hope you'll give this direction more thought.
Thanks for your joining the energy initiative, and I look to your future, productive efforts.
Douglas Hopkins
http://bit.ly/DHwikiBio
Mr. Gates says that we need a miracle in energy and he is right. But there is no need for a super expensive and iffy Manhattan Project approach in order to achieve controlled over unity fusion. I think that a miracle is not only possible but it will happen in the not too distant future and for a lot less money. And here is why.
A new understanding of the causality of motion reveals that we are swimming in energy, lots and lots of clean energy, many orders of magnitude more than we'll ever need. Essentially, Aristotle was right to insist that motion does not happen for no reason: it requires a cause for the entire duration of the motion. As a result, we are immersed in an immense lattice of energetic particles without which nothing could move. IOW, Newton's laws are incomplete. Soon, physicists will wake up from their self-imposed stupor and realize that their understanding of motion is fundamentally flawed. Then they'll learn how to tap into this energy field for extremely fast propulsion and clean energy production.
Imagine traveling from New York to Beijing in minutes or earth to Mars in hours. Imagine floating above the rings of Saturn, the icy plains of Europa or the craters of Jupiter's moon Iapetus. Imagine floating sky cities and vehicles that can move at tremendous speeds and that can negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring any damage due to inertial effects. That's the future of energy and travel. It will not take billions and decades. It will simply emerge from a radical new way of looking at nature.
Read Physics: The Problem with Motion to learn about the exciting future of energy and transportation. You don't understand motion even if you think you do.
When you have a DeLorean car powered by this clean source of energy, let us know will you?
Mr. Gates sir your efforts and Mr. Buffett's have placed you both as a part as these generation's founding fathers in this technical age as much or more than the crisis in the 1700's. I have every confidence that we have a great future ahead of us.
I am full of admiration for the man.
I to am impressed with Bill Gates.I need a Grant please look at what I am doing and maybe the Baby was at fault?
Yes, I went to college in Albuquerque Circa 1970,and I was just amazed at all the solar technology that was invented, but not developed. Bluntly, the Reaganites were hostile. I have personally witnessed technological redlining, where tech like solar cookers,solar hot water, large scale wind turbines, PV etc tech was deliberately suppressed, and discredited. Frankly, if it wasn't for the Chinese you would not see a lot of this tech today in mass production. Innovators of renewable energy have been targets of campaigns by established big interest, I know, I am an inventor myself.
There is one technology so far not in mass production. Solar Smelters (that make 10,000 degreesF). What is not new is smelting with sunlight, that has been done for decades with Fresnel lens, lens, curved parabolics. What is new is making it safe, understandable, and economic.
I set up a web page to discuss the topic at www.solarsmeltersinternational.org I am absolutely amazed at how little work is going on in this field, even the Chinese aren't doing much. Just small scale backyard people. This is one area that has huge potential. My patented invention can for example also make hot air,hot steam and hot water...adding to the economics.The trick is making the invention out of local materials like "adobe" that way solar technology is "dirt cheap". Lack of funding for inventions like this, is really hurting people, but then again there are those who don't want people "making their own energy".
Martin Nix Solar Inventor.
I'm glad Bill Gates funds nuclear energy research. Now build me a nuclear rocket!
9 billion people by 2050. Doesn't that scare any of the readers here? That's the problem we should be focussing on.
Even if i don't think Microsoft OS is the best in the world,i actually admire the man-Gates-for his vision,energy and drive to make the world a better place.
Gates Right on energy, Wrong on CO2
Although I find Gates view on energy alternatives very sound, ie- more investment in energy research for sustainable energy, I think his fears on CO2's effect on global warming are just buying into the mantra. Gates need to do more research on global warming as probably 95% is natural. He needs to crack open the physics and chemistry books.
Martin Nix
Ah yea, things where so optimistic in the 70's, and gas and other things where so cheap back then. If solar and wind energy is so viable how come Europe is admitting the lack of sustainability from it? How come Britain is now looking at more nuclear reactors? How come Germany is still building more coal plants and expanding bituminous fields. The reason solar and wind aren't taking off is it's over hyped as to ROI and affordability. Without massive subsidies, as Gate implied by:
"The irony is that if you actually look at the amount of money that's been spent on feed-in tariffs and you properly account for it--tax credits, feed-in credits in Spain, solar photovoltaic stuff in Germany--the world has spent a massive amount of money which, in terms of creating both jobs and knowledge, would have been far better spent on energy research."
The technology is back in the 1800's in viability. It has nitch applications and those who can afford to implement thermal and passive solar on their houses. But for grid power it's just a ponzi scheme for ENRON like companies. It needs affordable storage facilities to overcome intermittancey otherwise it has to be backed up by conventional more power. And expanding the grid is a huge, costly gamble to shuttle intermittent power around. At the rate solar and wind is coming on line, by the time the 20% farm comes online the farms built back at the 5% level are past their lifespan and must be replaced. And at subsidies levels the taxpayer gets only a 20% return on investment. Some energy bailout!
The solution is Thorium Reactors for now:
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/ThoriumSite/resources.html
And a mix of other fourth generation type reactors. then you'd probably have the power to derive gas from coal, wood methanol and perhaps biofuels from algae. Ethanol from cellulose may also become practical. i read where two auto companies are working on a flexfuel engine that is much more efficient then either a gas or diesel engine are.
So rather then messing with intermittent power that is labor intensive the mentioned above alternative look to be the immediate future. Fusion looks to be about 50 or more years away unfortunately.
Excellent Interview with Bill Gates
Interview with Bill Gates on wide issues is very interesting. Thanks for publishing this.
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore (AP), India
Wind Energy Expert
E-mail: anumakonda.jagadeesh@gmail.com
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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357 Comments
Very Nice
Excellent interview. Bravo.
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