There's nothing more frustrating than seeing cynics sit there and say, 'Well, nobody can make any more money because Microsoft and Intel own everything.' Is the software industry mature, or is it embryonic? I would say it's embryonic. There will be a hundred more Microsofts, not just one.
— Michael J. Saylor
We're in an inflection point where it's cheaper to learn to read on a tablet computer than it is to learn to read on paper. And that being the case, it's only a matter of time before every 6-year-old kid has a tablet computer, and we know for a fact, 3- to 4-year-old kids are using tablets and iPads, and 75 and 80 year olds are using them.
The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard.
I'm not so naive as to think that everybody always succeeds, right? I mean, half of Shakespeare's stories are tragedies - right?
You could call me on the phone and say, 'Someone blew up your entire house, Mike.' If it's not a person involved, I would sort of blink, whatever. That's all replaceable, right?
Instead of five hundred thousand average algebra teachers, we need one good algebra teacher. We need that teacher to create software, videotape themselves, answer questions, let your computer or the iPad teach algebra... The hallmark of any good technology is that it destroys jobs.
I've developed a much greater respect for our politicians and every high-tech CEO. It's very easy to read about the things they did that you, of course, would have avoided in hindsight.
Whenever teenage girls and corporate CEOs covet the same new technology, something extraordinary is happening.
Companies that make keys, credit card companies, any company in the service business - anything to do with a consumer is probably a software company.
What amplifies the transformational power ahead is the confluence of two major technological currents today: the universal access to mobile computing and the pervasive use of social networks.
The Saylor Foundation is meant to be a gadfly to encourage Google, Apple, MIT, Harvard, the United States government, and the Chinese government to aggressively pursue digital education.
My principal professional objective is to introduce intelligence as the ubiquitous utility. I'd like to be the Thomas Edison of intelligence.
The basis of the free market is anytime you can generate revenue or profit, you've created value in excess of the resources you consume in a society. That's probably the most unbiased utility function there is, as opposed to someone's opinion.
When you're building a company, you need to continually strengthen every component - finance, strategic partnerships, executive team, and relationships with every last constituency.
Nobody has really grasped yet the great wealth that can be made selling data over the Web. There are 100 million potential customers out there.
The industries that fall first are the industries that either produce electromechanical items that are now inferior to their software substitutes, or the industries that produce a mechanically created service that's now inferior.
It's easy to fall into the trap of assuming that a new technology is very similar to its predecessors. A new technology is often perceived as the linear extension of the previous one, and this leads us to believe the new technology will fill the same roles - just a little faster or a little smaller or a little lighter.
The old ways of teaching are slow and expensive. But with mobile, cost plummets, access broadens, and pedagogy rises.
I don't need a coach to tell me what to say. I need a coach to figure out what kind of shirt to wear and how to look at the camera and how to avoid, you know, picking your nose on camera.
I think my software is going to become so ubiquitous, so essential, that if it stops working, there will be riots.
I grew up in a family where no one had written a newspaper or magazine article about anybody in my family for a hundred years, right? Then, all of a sudden, we're getting one millennium's worth of media attention in six months.
I basically got an education in software on DuPont's money because they were too stubborn to admit that a recession was coming.
