SATYA NADELLA

Everything is going to be connected to cloud and data... All of this will be mediated by software.

There were many influences on me while growing up. In the late Seventies and early Eighties when I was growing up in Hyderabad, it was a bit more laid-back, and that gave you time to think about things differently without perhaps being caught up in the narrow approach to one's journey through life.

I think reconceptualizing Microsoft as a devices and services company is absolutely what our vision is all about. Office 365 and Azure on the services side are representative of it.

Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don't learn. So the last part to me is the key, especially if you have had some initial success. It becomes even more critical that you have the learning 'bit' always switched on.

Businesses and users are going to use technology only if they can trust it.

I think the combination of graduate education in a field like Computer Science and the opportunity to apply this in a work environment like Microsoft is what drove me. The impact these opportunities create can lead to work that has broad, worldwide impact.

If you don't have a real stake in the new, then just surviving on the old - even if it is about efficiency - I don't think is a long-term game.

When I started at Microsoft, I was lucky enough to be part of the rise of the client-server paradigm.

From Xbox in the previous generation to Xbox One, it's fundamentally transformed.

The one thing that I would say that defines me is I love to learn. I get excited about new things. I buy more books than I read or finish.

You renew yourself every day. Sometimes you're successful, sometimes your not, but it's the average that counts.

The thing we learned the most with the Xbox is the Xbox Live experience.

One of the things that I'm fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything, from civilizations to families to companies.

To me, what Minecraft represents is more than a hit game franchise. It's this open-world platform. If you think about it, it's the one game parents want their kids to play.

The thing I'm most focused on today is, how am I maximizing the effectiveness of the leadership team, and what am I doing to nurture it?

I want everyone inside of Microsoft to take that responsibility. This is not about top-line growth. This is not about bottom-line growth. This is about us individually having a growth mindset.

There is something only a CEO uniquely can do, which is set that tone, which can then capture the soul of the collective.

Microsoft has no SQL Server developers. We have only Azure developers.

My ambition with connectivity is not to fly balloons in the national airspace of other countries, but my dream is to be able to enable the local entrepreneurs to have low-cost connectivity solutions.

We are really excited about being stewards to the community that is Minecraft.

Competition is not going to kill us.

To me, Microsoft is about empowerment... we are the original democratizing force, putting a PC in every home and every desk.

The more you live it, the more sustainable your business approach becomes.

We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.

In our business, things look like a failure until they're not. It's pretty binary transitions.