At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.

I know that historically our foundation has had great relations with all the administrations.[Bill] Clinton administration did a lot of outreach. The greatest rise in U.S. foreign aid was under the [George] Bush administration, that's where we got the AIDS initiative, which is called PEPFAR.

It's the knowledge derived from information that gives you a competitive edge.

Online education is pretty special for two reasons. One is that you can get the very best lecture in the world and wherever you are, whenever you want, you can connect to that lecture. The other is this interactivity, where if you know a topic, you can kind of skip over it. Or if you're confused about it, [the area] where you're confused can be analyzed by software.

Once you embrace unpleasant news, not as a negative but as evidence of a need for change, you aren't defeated by it. You're learning from it.

In energy, you have to plan and do research way in advance, sometimes decades in advance to get a new system that's safer, doesn't require us to go around the world to get all our oil.

The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.