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

We will make our products work out of the box.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn't think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Accessible design is good design.

If we see an opportunity in the software/hardware seam, we're going to take it.

The NBA has made it clear they want fan bases to be able to keep their teams.

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.

It's how tenacious you are that will determine your success.

We have a tenacity and a persistence and patience to stay after it and stay after it and stay after it.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing.

You can always make a film somehow. You can beg, borrow, steal the equipment, use credit cards, use your friends' goodwill, wheedle your way into this or that situation. The real problem is, how do you get people to see it once it is made?

I decided that I would be one of the biggest new names; and I actually had some little fancy business cards printed up to announce it, 'Count Basie. Beware, the Count is Here.'

Sometimes a 3-1 favorite loses. That's why they call it gambling, and that's why they keep flipping over the cards.

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

If I'm playing cards for pennies, I want to win.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

Some people with awful cards can be successful because of how they deal with the tragedies they're handed, and that seems courageous to me.

Several times we were stranded in strange places without any money and with our credit cards cancelled - trapped in a hotel that we couldn't check out of because we had no money to check out.

Identity theft involving these cards is a growing form of white collar crime, facilitating illegal immigration, banking and accounting fraud, tax evasion, and other nefarious activities.

You know, it was just another presentation of my work, and a funny one, because the cards are quite different from the normal Tarot deck, no?

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

Social Security Number Cards by themselves were never intended to be personal identity documents because they cannot confirm that a person presenting a card is actually the person whose name appears on the card.