In the post-Snowden world, you need to enable others to build their own cloud and have mobility of applications. That’s both because of the physicality of computing–where the speed of light still matters–and because of geopolitics.

You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry.

The way I measure my life is 'Am I better than I was last year?'

Technologies will come and go, so you need to be able to both ask and answer the question: What do you do as a company, why do you exist?

This notion of universal Windows apps is a very powerful concept because we're now aggregating the 300-plus-million-socket run rate of Windows into one opportunity for our developers.

You renew yourself every day. Sometimes you're successful, sometimes your not, but it's the average that counts.

Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don't learn.