It's interesting to see the lament of each generation overwhelmed by the next new tool. I can show you passages from scholars of Germany in the 1480s lamenting the fact that they are overloaded with all this stuff to read because of the printing press.

We invent our technologies and then we turn around and use our technologies to reinvent ourselves as individuals, communities and cultures.

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.

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

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?

Any thinking person is qualified to be a forecaster, and in fact, everybody does it every day.

Sometimes I think we're on this world for three reasons: to be useful, to tell each other stories and to collect stuff. It's the only explanation for eBay. We love to collect stuff, and at least if we're collecting stuff in cyberspace we're not deforesting the Sierra Nevada.