About three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn't cool.

If I had one dollar left, I'd spend it on PR

It was really phenomenal [Warren Buffett donation]. It grew out of the friendship that we had and the fact that his plan to have his wife run the foundation and give things away changed when she tragically died.

Personally, I'd like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?

Take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft will become an unimportant company