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.
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.
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.
The gulf between what the press and many regular people believe Bitcoin is, and what a growing critical mass of technologists believe Bitcoin is, remains enormous.
Around ’93, ’94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.
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’ve been an entrepreneur three times. I started three companies.
More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services – from movies to agriculture to national defense.
An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.
A very large percentage of economic activity is shifting online and it makes sense that there are more services that are going to charge. It also means there are going to be more people willing to pay.
If you’re unhappy, you should change what you’re doing.
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.
There is a constant need for new systems and new software.
You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
I know where I’m putting my money.
No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It’s brutally difficult.
There’s always more demands than there’s time to meet them, so it’s constantly a matter of trying to balance them.
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.
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.
Today’s leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition.
If we’re in a bubble, it’s the weirdest bubble I’ve ever seen, where everybody hates everything.