“Why did Google, for example, recently decide to offer free 411 service? I haven'…” — Tim O'Reilly

I came up with the idea that I wanted to develop products because I saw services businesses being a dead end long term.

Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea.

A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.

Proprietary software grew up, starting really in the 1980s, as an alternative and that became the dominant model with the rise of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and the like.