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.

My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy

It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn't have written it!

The advantage of the consumer businesses is they tend to be much broader-based, much larger number of customers, that tend to over time be a lot more predictable. The advantage of the enterprise companies is they are not as subject to consumer trend, fad, behavior.

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

I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do.

Rule 1: All rules can be broken. Many (ex-legal and ethical) should be. Most people won't.