The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.
I give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, he's brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people.
Linden Lab's technological breakthroughs have made 'Second Life' a truly revolutionary experience.
There are excellent public interest grounds to have a search engine whose rankings are transparent.
When regulations restricting competition are relaxed, nobody's market share is protected. If telephone companies can offer video programming, cable revenue will surely drop.
Everyone has a subconscious and automatic preference of this over that. Once you're aware of that, you can take steps to change.
I've been around long enough to know that empires come and empires go, and I can't tell how long the Google empire is going to last - but I'm pretty convinced that the answer is less than forever.
If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that's a good thing.
Bulletin boards are sort of the garage bands of cyberspace.
Even though I had the talent, programming just didn't feel right. I never considered it very seriously. Some people get gratification from bending a machine to their will. I didn't.
Wikipedia has a way of compiling compendiums of information on subjects.
Every year we are greeted by a host of new apps that will 'change the way we think' about ordering takeout, 'fundamentally transform' our shoe purchases, or 'revolutionize' the way we edit photos.
I'm an inveterate note taker - I scribble all these things down on pieces of paper. I wanted to create some way of organizing all of them.
Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.
I'd always wanted to live in San Francisco, and my circumstances never permitted it. I'm so happy I made the move.
The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.
I tell people that the history of Mozilla and Firefox is so one of a kind that it should not be used - ever - as an example of what's possible.
There's an admirable belief about the virtues of meritocracy - that the best ideas prove the best results. It's a wrong and misguided belief by well-intentioned people.
Startups, in some sense, have gotten so easy to start that we are confusing two things. And what we are confusing, often, is, 'How far can you get in your first day of travel?' with, 'How long it is going to take to get up to the top of the mountain?'
There are a lot of similarities between cyberspace and the frontier. It's pretty raw and primitive. I mean, you have to churn your own butter in cyberspace. You can't go down to the 7-Eleven and buy a stick of butter because it's not that well developed.
I'm like George Lucas, bringing together a creative team that will come up with a unique, well-crafted product.
We are living in an era of anxiety produced by computer and communications technology.
In my case, having knocked around at different jobs helped me get a sense of what the world is actually like and also helped me get out of a cocoon.
Beware angel investors: they can be disruptive.
I think there is widespread agreement that there is a crisis in public education.
