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Microsoft is very clearly in the midst of an enormous push into consumer software solutions but its business sales remain its primary source of revenues. And from a mile-high view, all of Microsoft's IT-related businesses are profitable or highly profitable, with the exception of Windows Mobile, which Ballmer described as "somewhat unprofitable." Microsoft's consumer-oriented businesses, meanwhile, are doing notably poorly, almost across the board.

From a competition perspective, however, Windows has no real competition today beyond pirated copies of Windows. Even on netbooks, over 90 percent of installs are Windows. But Microsoft sees Linux being more competitive on the PC desktop going forward because it believes that Google will port its Android mobile OS to the PC.

People have always misconstrued the real market forces that are eating away at Windows. This has nothing to do with the Mac, which remains a niche player in yesterday's market. The future of computing is online, and as the box you use to get there becomes less important--or becomes a smart phone--Windows matters less. Netbooks, of course, are a real issue for Microsoft. It's strength in this market is key for the future. But it's a smaller future, from a revenues perspective. That's true across the board, and not unique for Windows.

I listened intently sure that the secret formula for creating a TEDster would be revealed to me. And I listened with a sense of urgency because my future TEDsters are, at this very moment, sleeping in back row of Life Science class, skipping third period Algebra, and lighting fires in the second floor bathroom.

They are students for whom school is devoid of relevance, assignments lack purpose, and grades fail to motivate. Students who slide by or fail out develop a preservational mode called I don't care – an especially effective meme prevalent in under-served urban schools.

My future TEDsters need instead to be active participants co-creating their learning experiences around global issues that lend real-world relevance to their schooling.

Schmidt called netbooks the "next generation" of the low-cost machines produced by Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. "Products today are not completely done. Things are missing.

Such devices could rule the world, Schmidt said, because cloud online apps are the future. "Cloud computing is one of those changes that are going to happen - regardless of whether or not companies in the ecosystem want it to," he said. "IT systems today are so slow in the way that they evolve...We now have an opportunity to build a whole new generation of applications that cycle much faster."

Just as predictably, Schmidt began his Morgan Stanley Q&A by insisting that Google's search monopoly could vanish at any moment. He pointed to a recent snafu where Google's search engine blocked access to the entire internet.

Even though the data is public, it is very expensive today. The Copyright Database, for example, costs $86,625 for the retrospective and a one-year feed (we harvested this in 2007 as you reported, but this would be much easier if they simply provided an FTP server and rsync!)

The Congressional Research Service is such a no-brainer. With the exception of classified information, who can afford the luxury of paying for some of the best research in the world and then just bury it! Taxpayer dollars paid for CRS reports and they need to be available.

In this day and age, you can't say a committee hearing is public if you can't access it on the Internet. Itty-bitty streaming video using some proprietary client/format just doesn't cut it any more. We ran a pilot with 4 house committees to show that this is very doable and makes a huge difference