The only big companies that succeed will be those that obsolete their own products before somebody else does.

Strategically, a major function of the CEO is to look for bad news and encourage the organization to respond to it. Employees must be encouraged to share bad news as much as good news.

Investing in innovation, which was my broad theme talking to [Warren Buffett ], that included health vaccines, it included energy and education.

Nigeria has moved into low-middle-income, but their north is very poor, and the health care systems there have broken down.

Today, we take the risk of nuclear war quite seriously, climate change not so much and epidemics least of all. But no single country, not even the United States, is well prepared. And even if one country is doing the right things to protect itself, it has to be a global thing.

The world is very disparate, in terms of the US using the most energy per person, and then the other rich countries - Europe, Japan, New Zealand - using about half of what we do, and then the world average being about a fifth of what we use, with China just now surpassing the world average.

Windows 8 is key to the future, the Surface computer.