We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we're in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There's no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either.

Not only because the product wasn't a great product, but remember it took us five or six years to ship it. Then we had to sort of fix it. That was what I might call Windows 7.

I love the fact that Satya Nadella's checked the checkbox for cross-platform for a number of our services. I still think it's very important to do the right kind of innovative integration across Windows and our hardware platforms with our cloud services. I think the company's doing a lot of good stuff. Real competition in AWS. Real competition in terms of the clients, particularly from a hardware perspective, there's also [competition] from Chrome. But all in all pretty good.

You get some success. You run into some walls...it's how tenacious you are, how irrepressible, how ultimately optimistic and tenacious you are about it that will determine your success.

At Microsoft, we're investing heavily in security because we want customers to be able to trust their computing experiences, so they can realize the full benefits of the interconnected world we live in.

I don't have a lot of experience running basketball teams.I'm just trying to get smart enough even to understand everything going on. As much of a fan as I am, I haven't played the game since ninth-grade. If you told me when I bought the team that there were 12 kinds of pick and rolls, I would've told you I have no frickin' clue about that.

Great companies with the way they work, first start with great leaders.