"I don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me."

"We will make our products work out of the box."

"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."

"All companies of any size have to continue to push to make sure you get the right leaders, the right team, the right people to be fast acting, and fast moving in the marketplace. We've got great leaders, and we continue to attract and promote great new leaders."

"And then you take a look at Spaces, there is this great innovation that came out of nowhere. We have the number one blogging site in the world because of the innovation that's there."

"Certainly, we continue to bring in new people. We'll hire, net new, over 4,000 people this year, and attract great people into the company. I'm very bullish about the employee base and what it can accomplish."

"Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards."

"Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that."

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

"I come back to the same thing: We've got the greatest pipeline in the company's history in the next 12 months, and we've had the most amazing financial results possible over the last five years, and we're predicting being back at double-digit revenue growth in fiscal year '06."

"I have lots of sources of information about what's going on at the company. I think I have a pretty good pulse on where we are and what people are thinking."

"I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life."

"I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft."

"I think our leadership team is a highly accountable leadership team."

"I'm not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative."

"I'm very, very bullish about our prospects, and as I tell our board, as I tell our employees, this is the time to invest. There's so much opportunity. Let's just invest in that opportunity, and really get after it."

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."

"Look at the product pipeline, look at the fantastic financial results we've had for the last five years. You only get that kind of performance on the innovation side, on the financial side, if you're really listening and reacting to the best ideas of the people we have."

"My children - in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod."

"Our company has to be a company that enables its people."

"Our mail product, Hotmail, is the market leader globally."

"Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world."

"So, I think the output of our innovation is great. We have a culture of self-improvement. I know we can continue to improve. There is no issue. But at the same time, our absolute level of output is fantastic."

"Vista will be out next year. Vista has never been delayed. I mean, we had earlier conceptualizations, but the thing that is Vista is on its track."

"We've grown from 18% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry to 23% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry over the last five years. Profits are up over 70%, where the industry profit is up about 35%. Pretty good."

"What we've gone through in the last several years has caused some people to question 'Can we trust Microsoft?'"

"This agreement is a significant milestone for consumers and content owners, since it will greatly extend the reach and flexibility of digital entertainment in the home. By integrating our Windows Media(R) platform technologies with the DIRECTV service, we have created a pipeline for an incredible variety of premium digital entertainment to move seamlessly and securely throughout the home to anywhere a DIRECTV customer wants to enjoy it."

"By bringing together the software experience and the service experience, we will better address the changing needs of our customers' digital lifestyles and the new world of work."

"We have an incredible opportunity...to revolutionize the Internet user experience. We need to deliver our next generation services platform in order to do that. And we need Bill Gates 100 percent focused on helping architect that."

"Our customers have been intimately involved in the development process for Windows 2000 since its inception, and they expect nothing less than the highest-quality, most reliable platform on which to run their businesses."

"Given the excitement and enthusiasm from many of the game developing companies here in Japan, I expect us to do quite well,"

"Turner's experience as a proven leader of people in Wal-Mart's incredibly dynamic sales environment; his IT background as CIO of a world-class company and his familiarity with our products and technologies as a Microsoft customer for more than a decade uniquely qualify him to serve as our COO,"

"In general, 50 percent of searches do not lead to the desired outcome. Does anybody not believe that the search experience is going to be dramatically better 10 years from now? Does anybody deny it would be nice to search within the enterprise and outside the enterprise?"

"Today's announcements underscore our commitment to executing decisively and rapidly in the online services space by forming a seasoned management team that is dedicated to improving and facilitating commerce for consumers,"

"Bill brings to the company the idea that conflict can be a good thing,"

"offered far more choices and benefits to consumers."

"How are we going to go after the search market? The good old fashioned way, with innovation,"

"More than ever, Microsoft's growth opportunities abound as a result of our strong product innovation pipeline, ... Kevin's leadership of global technology, sales, marketing and services will help us ensure we harness this potential and fully realize the growth opportunities before us."

"There will be much closer relationships with telecom equipment makers, telecom service providers, software companies and PC companies occurring over the next few years, ... When we invested in AT&T, we invested in a partnership to secure the future of video services."

"Ford shared this vision. We are inviting more players to join in."

"In this world, it should be easy for me to tell my travel agent Web site to make sure to update my calendar with my trip and to page my mother if my flight is going to be more than an hour late."

"...obviously one of the keys for us in music and video is to make sure we have an integrated and strong portable device ... [shrugs] business."

"We need to deliver a breakthrough version of Windows that allows PCs and servers to support these next-generation services and host them out there on the Internet,"

"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."

"How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature."

"The future belongs to crowds."

"No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die."

"I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it."

"California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."

"Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave."