The opportunity ahead for Microsoft is vast, but to seize it, we must focus clearly, move faster and continue to transform. A big part of my job is to accelerate our ability to bring innovative products to our customers more quickly.

This is a software-powered world.

Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don't learn. So the last part to me is the key, especially if you have had some initial success. It becomes even more critical that you have the learning 'bit' always switched on.

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.

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?

If you are going to have a risk-taking culture, you can't really look at every failure as a failure, you've got to be able to look at the failure as a learning opportunity.

The opportunity ahead for Microsoft is vast, but to seize it, we must focus clearly, move faster and continue to transform. A big part of my job is to accelerate our ability to bring innovative products to our customers more quickly.