A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.
There's a fundamental problem with how the software business does things. We're asking people who are masters of hard-edged technology to design the soft, human side of software as well. As a result, they make products that are really cool - if you happen to be a software engineer.
Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer, I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.
I know one business, and that's how to make software.
In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.
People can criticize Microsoft for supporting this TV thing for the past eight years, but it is a long-term bet, There is not any other software business that is as dedicated to the vision of the TV and the PDA [personal digital assistant] as we are.
I concluded that I know how to start and grow software companies. The worthwhile thing I could do was create livelihoods for people.
Because software is all about scale. The larger you are, the more profitable you are. If we sell twice as much as software, it doesn't cost us twice as much to build that software. So the more customers you have, the more scale you have. The larger you are, the more profitable you are.
For whatever reason somebody can be convinced to buy a PC, it opens up a whole new market for all of us in the software business.
Companies that make keys, credit card companies, any company in the service business - anything to do with a consumer is probably a software company.
In 1986, Microsoft and Oracle went public within a day of each other, and I recall telling one of my colleagues that the software business will become big. So I started working with software companies in the mid-'80s and never turned back.
We are focusing on four vertical markets - utilities, public sector, large enterprises, and transportation. And, we are building a software business as well that includes analytics, security, IOT platforms, and AI.
