When you're dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn't, no matter how good of a salesman you are.

More and more major industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

At Microsoft, they all rock back and forth like Gates, they wear the same glasses, they have the same hair style. Maybe they grow them in tanks.

No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It's brutally difficult.

My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy

Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.

We have never lived in a time with the opportunity to put a computer in the pocket of 5 billion people.