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You often talk about the importance of fostering innovation at Microsoft. What have you found to be the most effective ways to do that?
The most important thing any company can do is hire the smartest people possible and then give them the resources to transform their ideas into reality. As Microsoft has grown, we've worked to maintain that culture of innovation while ensuring that we have the processes and infrastructure to turn ideas into products on a very large scale. So we've been able to achieve a good balance between fundamental research, incremental development, and breakthrough products. Being a large company also gives us the ability to make big bets on the future. I believe the work we've done around Media Center PCs and Portable Media Centers, centered on our vision for digital entertainment anywhere, is a great example of how large companies can bring innovative ideas to market and deliver amazing new capabilities to consumers.
Which is more important, technological innovation or business innovation?
They're both equally important. The clear potential of personal computing inspired us to start Microsoft, and we chose to be one of the first companies to focus exclusively on software because we believed it was the best way to bring the benefits of the PC to as many people as possible. Our high-volume, low-cost business model has been the key to our success over the years, and it's the foundation for the technical innovations we're delivering to our customers. It's a virtuous cycle: The technology ecosystem that has evolved around our business model has helped generate some of the most exciting IT breakthroughs. And many of the technical innovations we deliver to businesses are the result of our focus on driving business innovations, and then building the software that uniquely enables these scenarios, like SharePoint, for instance, and all the other work we're doing around collaboration solutions.
