There are no road signs to help navigate. And, in fact, no one has yet determined which side of the road we're supposed to be on.

Bill sees and understands the possibilities of a connected world and has the expertise and the experience to help make it a reality, ... As more and more consumers want to take their connectivity with them beyond the desktop, Bill's vision will be critical in charting the company's future course and delivering on the promise of AOL Anywhere.

When I first got started in the late '70s, early '80s, and first was thinking about the interactive world, I believed so fervently that it was the next big thing, I thought it would happen quickly.

There are lots of cycles to markets - boom and bust - and also in perceptions of people. The conventional wisdom of Steve Case as genius or fool was highly cyclical. The truth was always in the middle.

It's stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have

So my degree was in political science, which I think was - the closest I could come to marketing is politics.

And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth.