One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching.

Stealing music is not right, and I can understand people being very upset about their intellectual property being stolen.

You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.

The customer is the final inspector.

When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from process. They try to use processes to substitute content.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem.