We needed a few more weeks. We decided to optimize it for the entire industry.

It was decided he needed three to four weeks to stop it becoming a full-blown fracture.

Product quality was the first priority on the first day of Vista (development) and we won't compromise on that. We needed just a few more weeks and that put us in what we would call a bubble where some partners would be impacted more than others and we decided to optimize it for the entire industry.

There is no neat distinction between operating system software and the software that runs on top of it.

[That held true last week when the 15-year Microsoft veteran revealed he would retire at the end of next year.] If you want to make a difference, and you see something that can be improved, then don't talk--improve it, ... My dream is for a much more agile, quality-driven engineering organization with fewer roadblocks and more open highway to speed on. ... Now, let's ship, ship, ship!

I am a hard-core believer that the clean desktop is the way to go... At the same time, we told OEMs that if they were going to put a bunch of icons on the desktop, then so were we.