Nokia and Research in Motion needed a modern operating system. They could have bought Palm or Android before Google did, but they didn't. Today, it's probably too late, and at the time they would have been criticized for overpaying, but as they say - shift happens.
Whatever you're selling, storage or networking or security, you're going head to head with the incumbent players.
When I talk to entrepreneurs today, I feel like the grandfather who was in the Civil War.
Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle.
Working for a big company is, I believe, much risker than it looks.
Innovation accelerates and compounds.
TV and the press have always functioned according to the same sets of rules and technical standards. But the Internet is based on software. And anybody can write a new piece of software on the Internet that years later a billion people are using.
The good news is we had this idea of cloud computing. The bad news is we were 10 years too early.
Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as 'all of Estonia.'
I know where I'm putting my money.
Great CEOs are not just born with shiny hair and a tie.
Rule 1: All rules can be broken. Many (ex-legal and ethical) should be. Most people won't.
So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection.
Once you understand that everybody's going to get connected, a lot of things follow from that. If everybody gets the Internet, they end up with a browser, so they look at web pages - but they can also leave comments, create web pages. They can even host their own server! So not only is everybody consuming, they can also produce.
I think 2012 is the year when consumers all around the world start saying no to feature phones and start saying yes to smartphones.
I enjoy not being a public company.
I think that every technology company that's more than 20 years old will break up
I don't think objectively we are in a tech bubble when tech stocks are at a 30 year low.
In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.
There was a point in the late '90s where all the graduating M.B.A.'s wanted to start companies in Silicon Valley, and for the most part they were not actually qualified to do it.
Only two people have been on the cover of Time Magazine in bare feet. I'm one, the other is Gandhi.
At a certain point in your career - I mean, part of the answer is a personal answer, which is that at a certain point in your career, it becomes more satisfying to help entrepreneurs than to be one.
I always had the old-school model that I'm going to work for as long as I'm relevant and focus on for-profit activities and someday when I retire I'm going to learn about philanthropy.
At Microsoft, they all rock back and forth like Gates, they wear the same glasses, they have the same hair style. Maybe they grow them in tanks.
If I want to get work done, that's usually about 3 in the morning.
