To get a big company moving fast, especially on a many-headed opportunity like the Internet, you have to have hundreds of people participating and coming up with ideas.

Thinking about impact on children meant adding to the agenda, both the R&D agenda and the delivery agenda, but it's amazing news, even in the scale of other tragedies.

Banking is necessary - banks are not.

Microsoft is involved in setting some fairly key standards and people are afraid of it because they think, Geez, they are quite capable. It's daunting, I suppose.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10 percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.

As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others. Capitalism harnesses self-interest in a helpful and sustainable way, but only on behalf of those who can pay. Government aid and philanthropy channel our caring for those who can't pay. But to provide rapid improvement for the poor we need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.

It's pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We're finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.