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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.

It was very early, and we were still like beta or alpha stage, and so we started receiving a ton of download. The server became overloaded, and that's when I realized that this had a huge market.

Not to go too far, but Microsoft is probably used by most people out there.

I really think it is amazing that people actually buy software.

Whatever way that we have in our head that we expect people to use a software, they'll find other interesting ways to use it that we didn't expect.

Computers have become more friendly, understandable, and lots of years and thought have been put into developing software to convince people that they want and need a computer.

When Facebook acquired Oculus, the game changed immediately. You saw big companies jumping in. You saw people like Google getting fully committed, and then Microsoft came along with HoloLens - there was a lot of stuff that people were doing before, but now the space really ignited.

In short, software is eating the world.

No surprise that, as companies have adopted social media en masse, demand for software and applications to manage and monitor social use has exploded.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.