When I started Netscape I was brand new out of college and all the aspects of building a business, like balance sheets and hiring people, were new to me.
Our combination of great research universities, a pro-risk business culture, deep pools of innovation-seeking equity capital and reliable business and contract law is unprecedented and unparalleled in the world.
Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon.
Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust - it has a business model that either works or it doesn't.
The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content.
Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.
One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it. What technologies tend to do is they tend to make a lot of mistakes... but then we go back and aggressively attack those mistakes - and fix them. And you usually recover pretty quickly.
And once you get instantaneous communication with everybody, you have economic activity that's far more advanced, far more liquid, far more distributed than ever before.
Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better.
People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you're like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.
Technology is like water it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use - not only text or media but processing power too - will be located remotely.
I need more raw experience. I've read and watched a lot of things, but I haven't done a lot of things.
Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.
These days, you have the option of staying home, blogging in your underwear, and not having your words mangled. I think I like the direction things are headed.
More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services - from movies to agriculture to national defense.