Competition is warfare. Mostly it is played by prescribed rules--there is a sort of Geneva Convention for competition--but it's thorough and often brutal.

By the late '90s, those who were paying attention perceived the Internet as a 20-foot tidal wave coming, and we are all in kayaks.

I don't see Merced appearing on a mainstream desktop inside of a decade.

There's a tendency at the senior and middle-manager level to be too big-picturish and too superficial. There is a phrase, "The devil is in the details." One can formulate brilliant global strategies whose executability is zero. It's only through familiarity with details - the capability of the individuals who have to execute, the marketplace, the timing - that a good strategy emerges. I like to work from details to big pictures.

The future is going to take care of itself, like it always has.

E-Commerce is happening the way all the hype said it would. Internet deployment is happening. Broadband is happening. Everything we ever said about the Internet is happening. And it is very, very early. We can't even glimpse it's potential in changing the way people work and live.

There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment - and you start to decline.