Any thinking person is qualified to be a forecaster, and in fact, everybody does it every day.

I think it was Samuel Johnson who said, "There are two kinds of information in this world: that what you know and that what you know where to get." The tools help the latter, and that's what keeps us from going nuts. The sense of overload comes from the gap between that sudden jump in volume (of information) and the tools we have to make sense of it.

I'm not sure the notion of employee or job is going to survive the transition over the next couple of decades. The very notion of a fulltime job will seem as quaint in 20 years as the notion of someone getting a gold watch at their retirement in the 1950s.

Microsoft is a big intellectual roach motel. All the big minds go in, and they don't come out.

Every new thing upsets people. We all know someone that has a teenage kid who sits in the room and the television is on, their iPod is on, they have the computer on and at least three other electronic devices going while they're doing their homework. It drives the dad nuts, but he can't complain because the kid's a 4.1 (GPA) student.

The best way to let people go is to let them know when they're hired that it's an uncertain environment and that their job is always at risk and even if you let them go, it's not that you don't love them.

More information and more communications foster world peace and understanding. But connecting extremist nut cases together on the Web - whatever flavor extremism they are - is a really bad thing. More information may not be a good thing, either.