Stock prices turn people's heads. When prices are high, we treat a company like gods, and if they drop, we treat them as fools.

My advice is don't use technology primarily to lower costs. Use technology to create new, effective ways of touching the market and creating new businesses and if you do that right, the cost savings will come.

As recently as the '70s, people were forced to see information that they didn't agree with in newspapers and the like. Now there is so much information you really can build your own walled garden that just has the stuff that reinforces your view. I think it applies to all of us. People are really going into these separate camps, and that's the big social challenge in this age of too much information. How do we crack that and create a common dialogue?

Microsoft is a big intellectual roach motel. All the big minds go in, and they don't come out.

More information and more communications foster world peace and understanding. But connecting extremist nut cases together on the Web - whatever flavor extremism they are - is a really bad thing. More information may not be a good thing, either.

I think the most important thing that a company can do, not just in the customer space but the employee space, is to be completely open and completely honest. Don't pretend that you're doing something that you can not do. There's an old saying in Silicon Valley, "It's not a bug. It's a feature."

I don't think information overload is a function of the volume of information. It's a derivative of the volume of information plus the sense-making tools you have.