When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.

In some ways, getting away from the headquarters and having a little time to reflect allows you to find errors in your strategy. You get to rethink things. Often, that helps me correct a mistake that I made or someone else is about to make.

You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand your own mortality can change and how quickly things could change.

I saw that we needed to grow but our top line wasn't growing, so we had to find other ways to grow the business. We had to reshape our business and acquire share in a non conventional way. But most tech leaders don't come out of a business background. They really have a parochial point of view. All they know are the go-go years of Silicon Valley. That's the environment in which they were raised.

There's a wonderful saying that's dead wrong. 'Why did you climb the mountain?' 'I climbed the mountain because it was there.' That's utter nonsense...You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.

Microsoft is already the most powerful company on earth but you ain't seen nothing yet.

What can a sales person say to somebody to get them to buy a product that they already use every day if they don't like it? Nothing.