It's not easy to remember, but IBM was the computer industry when I was growing up. You loved 'em. You hated 'em. You knew what they were doing. They had set a standard for mainframes. They also set a standard for great sales focus and heavy product R & D.

This [philanthropy] work is even more fascinating. It requires us to think harder about how we build partnerships, who we get behind. And yet we get to see progress that in some ways is even more profound than the great advances that digital technology has provided.

You always overestimate what you can get done in a year and underestimate what you can get done in 10 years.

It’s useful to compare our preparations for epidemics with our preparations for war.

The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it's very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.

So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on.

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