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.

The joke about SAP has always been, it's making '50s German manufacturing methodology, implemented in 1960s software technology, delivered to 1970-style manufacturing organizations, like, it's really - yeah, the incumbency - they are still the lingering hangover from the dot-com crash.

In high school, I actually thought I was going to have to learn Japanese to work in technology. My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the '80s, and I got here too late. But then, I'm maybe the most optimistic person I know. I mean, I'm incredibly optimistic.

With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired-the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.

If the Net becomes the center of the universe, which is what seems to be happening, then the dizzying array of machines that will be plugged into it will virtually guarantee that the specifics of which chip and which operating system you've got will be irrelevant.

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.

So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection.

Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies.

Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.

An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in. Microsoft started with programming tools, but came out with an operating system. Oracle started doing contracts for the CIA. AOL started out as an online video gaming network.

Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.

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