In my own work, I've tried to anticipate what's coming over the horizon, to hasten its arrival, and to apply it to people's lives in a meaningful way.

The only regrets I have are rather prosaic - like I wish I went for a swim in the Pacific.

For the most part, the best opportunities now lie where your competitors have yet to establish themselves, not where they're already entrenched. Microsoft is struggling to adapt to that new reality.

What should exist? To me, that's the most exciting question imaginable. What do we need that we don't have? How can we realize our potential?

In a company where tech decisions were still ultracentralized, the repercussions of a distracted CEO had to be damaging.

That would be such a life-changing thing, for us all to know that there are other beings out there who we could potentially communicate with, or maybe we are listening to a signal that they transmitted hundreds of millennia ago.

Even before I helped to co-found Microsoft, I saw a connected future . . . I called that future The Wired World.