Take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft will become an unimportant company

Good developers like seeing their products sell in large quantities. They enjoy the competition of doing a better job than the other company, especially if the other company has more people on the project and they're entrenched and people are saying that we don't have a chance of getting in there and... and doing well.

This is something we're very committed to, it's something that I think people are underestimating right now as they've seen some of the dot-com promises not come through. I think they're missing the fact that the basic technology is moving forward, the new platforms are here and this vision of the digital decade will be a reality.

We win because we hire the smartest people. We improve our products based on feedback, until they're the best. We have retreats each year where we think about where the world is heading.

The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic.

I went public too soon. Stay private as long as you can.

With nuclear weapons, you'd think you would probably stop after killing 100million. Smallpox won't stop. Because the population is naïve, and there are no real preparations. That, if it got out and spread, would be a larger number.