There's life and death in every email.

Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.

You wish that you could move more rapidly and you have setbacks. You know, the AIDS epidemic was a huge setback for Africa, and it's only through generosity that we've avoided that just completely crippling an entire generation there.

The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.

Microsoft's philosophy is to 'do things better.' And Vista has given us lots of opportunity to do that.

I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don't just think, 'Yes, my country is doing well,' but you think about the world at large.

A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it's less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.