As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical.

I remember thinking quite logically that I didn't want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.

We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.

I'm certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.

I was a kind of hyper-intense person in my twenties and very impatient.

There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.

Playing bridge is a pretty old fashioned thing in a way that I really like.

I have a particular relationship with Vinod Khosla because he's got a lot of very interesting science-based energy startups.

If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was 'satisfactory,' I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?

Haiti should remind us all that there is an immediate need to invest in and promote long-term development projects that are sustainable, scalable, and proven to work.

I'm not a macroeconomics person.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

I am results-oriented.

By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.

The protestor I think will speak up for the world's poorest.

You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There's another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.

The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it's very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.

Whenever you have multiple devices including multiple PCs that you want to share information with, it's always been a bit complicated.

In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.

Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support - a significant problem in the software industry.

Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support - a significant problem in the software industry.

If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.

With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to gain market share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device. But a lot of those users are frustrated. They can't type. They can't create documents.

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.

Google's done a super good job on search; Apple's done a great job on the IPod.

The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best

The ability of a successful company to add functionality to its product has long been upheld.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance... you thrive on that.

China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.

I have a company that is not Microsoft, called Corbis. Corbis is the operation that merged with Bettman Archives. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. It was intentionally done outside of Microsoft because Microsoft isn't interested.

I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

I have a nice office. I have a nice house... So I'm not denying myself some great things. I just don't happen to have expensive hobbies.

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.

U.K. companies are in very international and very competitive markets. If you look at PC penetration in the U.K., it is very similar to the United States market.

It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, 'Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.'

Eventually, all companies are replaced.

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity - the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.

The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it's Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.