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.

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

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?

If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about reengineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity.

There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back to the company.

It's fantastic that Microsoft in the cloud space is one of very few companies that's got the critical mass, the particular emphasis on helping business customers get up to that cloud with all the unique requirements they have. It's very exciting.