With nuclear weapons, you'd think you would probably stop after killing 100million. Smallpox won't stop. Because the population is naïve, and there are no real preparations. That, if it got out and spread, would be a larger number.

Government investment unlocks a huge amount of private sector activity, but the basic research that we put into IT work that led to the Internet and lots of great companies and jobs, the basic work we put into the health care sector, where it's over $30 billion a year in R&D that led the biotech and pharma jobs. And it creates jobs and it creates new technologies that will be productized. But the government has to prime the pump here. The basic ideas, as in those other industries, start with government investment.

Windows 2000 already contains features such as the human discipline component, where the PC can send an electric shock through the keyboard if the human does something that does not please Windows.

So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on.

In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars; there's a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that.