If your cash is about to run out, you have to cut your cash flow. CEOs have to make those decisions and live with them however painful they may be. You have to act and act now; and act in the best interest of the company as a whole, even if it means that some people in the company who are your best friends have to work somewhere else.

I greatly admire GE, their utterly ruthlessly focused management, to get the cost out and get this integration done.’ Okay, we may make a few mistakes along the way but we are not going to waste any time.' They make decisions; they are incredibly disciplined and focused.

If an innovative piece of software comes along, Microsoft copies it and makes it part of Windows. This is not innovation; this is the end of innovation.

It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."

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

If you do everything that everyone else does in business, you're going to lose. The only way to really be ahead, is to 'be different'.

I have had all the disadvantages required for success.