Once you become an owner of a team, you get so much more into the sport and you can't help it. So I really love NFL football now to the degree of following it much more than I did previously.

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

In the computer industry, you've got an interdisciplinary team of people who can come together, attack the problem, and work in a collaborative style. You knock down one problem after another, cobble things together, and then hopefully turn the crank at some point.

Any crusade requires optimism and the ambition to aim high

We've had some tough times, but we've hung in there.

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.

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.