Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

(In response to Java) Anybody who thinks a little 9,000-line program that's distributed free and can be cloned by anyone is going to affect anything we do at Microsoft has his head screwed on wrong.

Microsoft has had many, many successful products. I'm committed to one company. This is the industry I've decided to work in.

As you get to the end of the project you want to run all the tests cases against one version and make sure that you know that that version passed everything. And so as you get late in the project you get a little more conservative about making radical changes to the software.

We need a malaria epidemic in the blogging community! Either that or we need people who have seen the malaria epidemic to start blogging.

We're creating this alliance, GAVI, that has helped buy the vaccines that were in the rich world but not getting to the poor kids, getting a very cheap price and figuring out the cold chain, getting the delivery right, and then funding research for new vaccines. A lot of them are coming along. We've got a meningitis vaccine out, got that through large parts of Africa. That has been a huge success.

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.