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M&A at Microsoft is a team sport for the senior leadership group. They're all involved in it, and we all play different roles. My role is the first centralized business development role at Microsoft.
I think the idealism has always been marketing. Even back in the early days of Apple and the 'pirate' mentality, they were building a computer that they wanted to differentiate from IBM and Microsoft.
For instance, in 1999, Bill Gates not only published a new book on work at the speed of thought but also detailed how Microsoft's 'Falconview' software would enable the destruction of bridges in Kosovo.
The antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences.
In the first eight or so years at Microsoft, we were always chained to our terminals, and after I got sick the first time, I decided that I was going to be more adventurous and explore more of the world.
Microsoft could help Facebook with one of the biggest challenges, namely monetizing its traffic without reducing the user's experience. It's obvious that Microsoft needs traffic and Facebook needs search.
Our leadership [in Microsoft ] has that - "hey, we are the best in certain ways," and so we get the best people. That any kind of positive dynamic is quite good, so I love what's going on there, it's fun.
They said these North Korean missiles had enough range to hit Seattle, but residents in Seattle were not worried. Today Bill Gates said Microsoft has enough missiles to destroy North Korea ten times over.
Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success — I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.
I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change.
You think Bill Gates would have dropped out of Harvard and toiled away creating Microsoft if he thought the government was going to take most of the company? Or Steve Jobs - drop out of Stanford to create Apple?
It is impossible to count the blessings I have received over my years at Microsoft. I am humbled by the professionalism and generosity of everyone I have had the good fortune to work with at this awesome company.
The United States ran the table on Internet innovations, creating companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, and others. Europe and Japan scarcely contributed.
What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.
The Web is not a prize to be won, and Mr. Ballmer's attitude is deplorable in the light of what the Web means to the world, to users, to designers and developers, and - to put it into Microsoft parlance - customers.
Steve Ballmer never used to be someone who let facts speak for themselves. In the 1990s, he was the hyper-energetic Microsoft exec yelling 'Developers! Developers! Developers!' at an all-hands meeting in Safeco field.
Early versions of Microsoft Word left a lot to be desired. However, to the company's credit, it quickly learned where Word fell short, made the necessary changes, and repeatedly introduced new versions of the software.
As the leadership team, we're taking bold and decisive action to evolve our organization and culture. This includes difficult steps, but they are necessary to position Microsoft for future growth and industry leadership.
We have design capability, which everyone thought we sold to Microsoft, but we didn't sell it. We will maintain the Nokia feel in all our products. We can't have different products, each feeling different, in the market.
I was really worried about the Windows RT project and these other efforts where Microsoft was creating versions of Windows that would be locked down and could force you to only install software through the Microsoft store.
The vision, determination, stamina, hope, relentlessness, and sheer work that are involved in staying afloat, much less succeeding, are the same whether you are running a window on 47th Street or Miramax Films or Microsoft.
I've been using email since 1983. I started with MH and Rmail, then cc:Mail, then Microsoft Mail, with Compuserve mixed in. Eventually, I ended up using Pine for non-Windows stuff and Outlook for Windows stuff. For a while.
I enthuse about Scrivener to all of my friends. Some of them even listen to me and download it. This is often swiftly followed by an email complaining that it's all very confusing, and they'll stick to Microsoft Word, thanks.
Platforms are going to get bigger and bigger. Minecraft and Microsoft are just the tip of the iceberg. You're going to see more and more action in this space. Not just from Microsoft's Project Spark and Sony's LittleBigPlanet.
Globalised manufacturing and procurement mean that a lot of high-polluting, heavy duty jobs are transferred to China. We will ask major companies, such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft and IBM to put pressure on their Chinese suppliers.
Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user.
America glories in its tradition of the self-made individual. Political candidates compete to be a friend to entrepreneurs, and policymakers, imagining the next Microsoft or Google, design laws to back the innovator in the garage.
What drew me to this job is that Univision is a brand unlike any other in all of media. Univision has the highest brand affinity of any brand, and that includes Microsoft and Apple and some of the iconic brands in all of industry.
We're thrilled that our partnership with Adobe has now grown to span our three clouds - Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 - providing customers with the powerful integrations they need to navigate digital transformation.
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.
When you think about the guys who started Twitter, and the Google guys, and the Facebook guys and the Napster guys, and the Microsoft guys, and the Dell guys and the Instagram guys, it's all guys. The girls, they're being left behind.
Amazon has suffered quarters-long profit droughts. Alphabet has given its investors agita over profligate spending on non-core products. Microsoft's growth - if not its profit engine - stalled for years, causing its stock to idle, too.
Microsoft has been taking a series of steps for a while now to close down the Windows ecosystem. They can't do it all at once, because there would be an industry uproar. But one little step at a time, they're trying to take it all over.
First of all, we have infrastructure as a service, which Amazon has; we have platform as a service, which Microsoft has; we have software as a service; we have applications. Nobody has everything except us. We also have data as a service.
In some far-off distant time, when the twentieth century history of primitive computing is just a murky memory, someone is likely to suppose that devices known as logic gates were named after the famous co-founder of Microsoft Corporation
I'm a geek through and through. My last job at Microsoft was leading much of the search engine relevance work on Bing. There we got to play with huge amounts of data, with neural networks and other AI techniques, with massive server farms.
In 1986, Microsoft and Oracle went public within a day of each other, and I recall telling one of my colleagues that the software business will become big. So I started working with software companies in the mid-'80s and never turned back.
Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage.
In my view, it's irreverence, foolish confidence and naivety combined with persistence, open mindedness and a continual ability to learn that created Facebook, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, Apple, Juniper, AOL, Sun Microsystems and others.
Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y', so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food.' And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't.
I have been able to attend many technology conferences around the world over the years, including some of the largest, like Google I/O, Microsoft's Developer Conference, Apple's WorldWide Developers Conference, Oracle World, Le Web, and more.
I think we compete with lots of different players in different areas. So clearly, in our core business, which is search, Microsoft and Yahoo! are the big players, and they continue to compete. There are a lot of smaller search engines as well.
Microsoft's intentions must be judged by Microsoft's actions, not Microsoft's words. Their actions speak plainly enough: they are working to turn today's open-PC ecosystem into a closed, Microsoft-controlled distribution and commerce monopoly.
When I talk about that Apple ecosystem, the ability to get one application to run across those five platforms is very difficult. In the future of Microsoft, using HTML5, IE9 and 10, the scalable OS, the ability to do that gets much, much easier.
One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary.
Onstage at Build, Phil Spencer said the Xbox is an open platform - which surprises me, because you have to get your game concept approved before you start developing it. Then you have to get every update approved. Microsoft has absolute control.
I find that it's not the numbers but the quality of the audience. That's why it got to be such a big thing when I left Microsoft, because I had an interested audience; not huge, but passionate. The passionate ones are the ones who change society.
Along with Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, these companies are in a race to become our 'personal assistant.' They want to wake us in the morning, have their artificial intelligence software guide us through our days, and never quite leave our sides.
Well we have a good working relationship with Microsoft at the development level. But let's not kid ourselves, this is a company with enormous resources and talented people, and there is a certain pride that comes along with that for them and for us.