I’m sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn’t on our radar screen. We were just making great software.

Windows is probably the most important product in the entire PC industry. Everything we do in terms of supporting touch, new hardware, accessibility has incredible impact.

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

Who decides what’s in Windows? The customers who buy it.

Be willing to use yourself to get out there and put the company on the market. If you have to make a fool of yourself, make a fool of yourself, but make sure that you end up on the front pages, not the back pages. In time, it’s possible that your company will stand out from the crowd, and you’ll be successful.

There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.

When I was in my 40s, Microsoft was my primary activity.

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.

There’s no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.

There are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft.

I’m going to retain a lot of Microsoft’s stock.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

Windows 8 is key to the future, the Surface computer.

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.

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

I think a lot of the time there isn’t such a black-and-white difference between what’s a platform and what’s an app. It’s really just like the most important apps become platforms.

Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you’re good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well.

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

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.

When most people ask about a business growing, what they really mean is growing revenue, not just growing the number of people using a service. Traditional businesses would view people using your service that you don’t make money from as a cost.

One thing I’ve always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they’ll tell you, ‚We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.‘

I would say raising capital is one of the weakest things for most entrepreneurs.

The state of the economy is not the issue when it comes to growing a business. The relevant questions are always: ‚What business are you in? Furthermore, is it adapting to the times?‘

We have a rule that if you check in code, you have to maintain it. So I mostly code on the side. I don’t check in code anymore.

The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.

I don’t run restaurants that are out of control. We are about establishing phenomenal footholdings with talent.

I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.

I sent one e-mail in my life. I sent it to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft, and it ended up in court in Minneapolis, so I am one for one.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus‘ success in the spreadsheet – basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

People everywhere love Windows.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.

The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I’ll never be hands-on on anything except software.

Microsoft is not about greed. It’s about innovation and fairness.

For the first time we’re allowing developers who don’t work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That’s a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.

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

I suppose Virgin is an unusual brand in that I suspect we’re the only ‚way of life‘ brand in the world. We’re one of maybe the top 30 best known brands in the world, yet if you look at the other 29, they all specialize in one area. Whether it’s Google, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, etc., they all generally specialize in one area.

Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.

Many entrepreneurs do not realize that many of the problems their businesses face today began yesterday, long before there was a business.

Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.

The potential financial reward for building the ‚next Windows‘ is so great that there will never be a shortage of new technologies seeking to challenge it.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

I built a company at the same time I built a career.

I can be accused of trying to be commercial sometimes.

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It’s very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

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

My task over the last two years hasn’t just been to stop the bleeding. My task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft.

I’m never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

Bill Gates has always been a mentor and inspiration for me even before I knew him. Just growing up, I admired how Microsoft was mission-focused.

Certainly there’s a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

If we’re trying to build a world-class News Feed and a world-class messaging product and a world-class search product and a world-class ad system, and invent virtual reality and build drones, I can’t write every line of code. I can’t write any lines of code.