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And the reason for focusing on that time frame is that it's going to take us a considerable period of time to develop the new capabilities, processes and organizations that will be needed.

Publishers give you deadlines for those last phases of production that are perfectly comfortable for them. So, to whatever extent I can, I like to push those to give me a little more time, and make it so that they're as uncomfortable as I am.

It's like this: The time between having an idea and its public launch is measured in days not months, weeks not years.

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.

Projects can take years to exhibit proof-of-concept and a few more years to be converted into commercial realities.

From the beginning... I wanted to build a company that could sustain not for two years or four years or even ten years but be something that really matters over time the way Amazon and Google and others have.

A development deal is where they're giving you recording time and money to record, but not promising that they'll put an album out.

In the early 1990s, when a lot of the developing world opened up to international capital flows... they ended up in very good long-term projects, but projects that weren't going to pay off for five or 10 or 20 years.

When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.