 And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth. |
| I think it took us nine years to get one million subscribers to AOL, and then in the next nine years we went from one million to 35 million. |
| We don't want to turn the TV into a computer. |
| I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world. |
| I had an older brother who passed away recently, an older sister and a younger brother. |
| I was not an outstanding student. I did a reasonable amount of work. I got generally good - pretty good grades, but I was not that passionate about getting straight A's. |
| And I'd say one of the great lessons I've learned over the past couple of decades, from a management perspective, is that really when you come down to it, it really is all about people and all about leadership. |
| So my degree was in political science, which I think was - the closest I could come to marketing is politics. |
| Most of the people who had PCs did not have modems and could not use those PCs as communicating devices. They really were using them for spreadsheets or word processing or storing recipes or playing games or what have you. |
| It's stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have if they have the right passion, perspective and are able to align the interest of a great team. |
| So we believed that strategic alliances and partnerships were critical, and we did that for five years. |
| For better or worse, that is true with any new innovation, certainly any new technological innovation. There's many good things that come out of it, but also some bad things. All you can do is try to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff. |
| Nobody should have to be a systems integrator to make a convergence network work in their home. |
| I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. |
| Because I do think - not just in building AOL - but just the world in which we live is a very confusing, rapidly changing world where technology has accelerated. |
| There are no road signs to help navigate. And, in fact, no one has yet determined which side of the road we're supposed to be on. |
| When I first got started in the late '70s, early '80s, and first was thinking about the interactive world, I believed so fervently that it was the next big thing, I thought it would happen quickly. |
| My father and his brothers were all lawyers, so I think that the expectation was probably for me to grow up to be an attorney, but it never really fascinated me that much. I was more interested in building things. |
| I continue to have a special pride and passion for AOL, and I strongly believe that AOL - once the leading Internet company in the world - can return to its past greatness. |
| And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal. |
