What new technology does is create new opportunities to do a job that customers want done.
Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money.
Empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts.
There is a possibility of fresh talent coming to work for the government. Millennials are the most public-spirited generation since the 1960s. There is an opportunity to harness that generation and make government service cool again.
I have to say there are a lot of me-too products and companies. Yet another social network, of the 15th flavor - that's common in every new technology revolution. There are imitators who have marginal improvements.
A short, glorious life in service of a greater good - say, the life of the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the pilots in the Battle of Britain, of whom Winston Churchill said 'Never have so many owed so much to so few,' - that is worth praising. But for glory alone? I think not.
We were the first people to do advertising on the Web. I actually saw in 1993 that the ad could be the content, the destination.
I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change.
So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time, they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time, the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in.
The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.
One of the big changes at the heart of Web 2.0 is the shift from the creation of software artifacts, which is what the PC revolution was about, to the creation of software services. These are services that ultimately, if they are successful, will require competencies of operation, of scale, and the like.
We want to show how technology can be applied to fix our problems. We need to celebrate not just success but to celebrate people who make a difference. It starts with people who do things for love, with no expectation of return. Some of that turns into enormous financial success, and then some of it goes back into doing it for love.
I guess I would just say that in general, one of my weaknesses is that I love everything. There's too much of everything to keep up with it all. I get bored with Silicon Valley technology a lot. I've always had much more of a draw to the people who are doing things for love than the people who are doing things for money.
There are a lot of lousy conferences that pander to sponsors. They end up creating an opportunity for boring speakers who are paid shills for their companies. We still get a few of those, but we really try to police it. Think about who the audience is and what works for them, and deliver high-quality content.
If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.