We learn more about how human brains work. And that leads us to ideas about how to make human brains work better.

High fidelity is a rich experience, and you'll put up with terrible convenience to get it - maybe it's high cost, waiting in line, jumping through hoops. High convenience is the opposite - it's a commodity, but it's cheap and easy and ubiquitous. A great exclusive boutique shop is high fidelity; Wal-Mart is high convenience. Both are hard to establish in their own way. The thing to remember about sustaining either is that you can't sit still. Some other entity will always find a way to challenge your fidelity position or your convenience position.

I'm that tech writer who gets on stage and plays funny tech songs. I wouldn't want that to be all I'm known for, but it's a bit of a differentiator.

Super fidelity requires constant investment and discipline, but great companies know how to do that.

Eventually, we need to have computers that work differently from the way they do today and have for the past 60-plus years. We're capturing and generating increasingly massive amounts of data, but we can't make computers that keep up with it. One of the most promising solutions is to make computers that work more the way brains work.

Talented people can predict with great accuracy what's about to happen just a tiny bit ahead of their competitors. It might be two seconds ahead, or two hundredths of a second, or two days. Napoleon on an eighteenth century battlefield had something more like a two-day advantage. Wayne Gretzky in a hockey game was probably a second ahead of everyone else on the ice.

The explosion of the Web and digital media from 1995 to 2000 shook companies more profoundly in a shorter time than anything since the end of World War II.