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Accessible design is
good design.
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 don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.
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.
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.
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.
We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference.
We will make our products work out of the box.
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?'
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