President Bok， former President Rudenstine， incoming President Faust， members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers， members of the faculty， parents， and especially， the graduates：
I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this： “Dad， I always told you I‘d come back and get my degree.”
I want to thank Harvard for this timely honour. I’ll be changing my job next year... and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.
I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part， I‘m just happy that the Crimson has called me“Harvard’s most successful dropout.”I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class... I did the best of everyone who failed.
But I also want to be recognised as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I‘m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation， fewer of you might be here today.
Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn‘t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe， in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things， because everyone knew I didn’t worry about getting up in the morning. That‘s how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.
Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there， and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds， if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.
One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975， when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world‘s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.
I worried that they would realise I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said：“We’re not quite ready， come see us in a month，” which was a good thing， because we hadn‘t written the software yet. From that moment， I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.