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.

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.

In short, software is eating the world.

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.

One of the big first computers was called SAGE, which was a missile defense, the first missile-defense computer, which was, like, one of the first computers in the history of the world which got sold to the Department of Defense for, I don't know, tens and tens of millions of dollars at the time.

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. Any time you stand in line at the DMV and look around, you're like, 'Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.'

The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

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.

Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle.

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

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.

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.

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services - from movies to agriculture to national defense.