One thing people underestimate is how markets don't allow anyone to do anything except make better and better products. There's not much leeway. The world is a lot more competitive than most people think, particularly in a high-technology area. If a company takes its eye off improving its products, if it tries to do anything that would be viewed as an exercise of power, it'll be displaced very rapidly.

Microsoft has some assets like Office that have stayed strong and there's so much room for innovation in those.

We'll have infinite bandwidth in a decade's time.

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.

K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.

A company needs to have good business reflexes, to be able to marshal its forces in a crisis or in response to any unplanned event.

Innovation is often the hidden thing, because we can't put numbers to it. And yet it's the thing that defines the way we live, the things we'd like to have for everyone whether it's health or education.