Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Back to what you're saying, it's a really, really important point. To make this dynamic work, you need to be able to afford the investment in the fixed cost for the software, for the technology to make it that little bit superior, like Bill's talking about, the slight advantage over the competitors. At this moment in time, the industry is completely brand new. The software industry is brand new. The amount that that fixed costs takes, the cost is quite low. Really, it's just Bill and Paul's time and dedication to this industry that nobody else is making that investment. You can't run this playbook today because in any market, even a brand new market, even a speculative market, the minimum viable fixed cost is billions of dollars. Right. Yeah, that's interesting. I also think this moment galvanized something important, which is Bill and Paul could look around and see that there is going to be so much value created by microcomputers and by software. They really found religion around software is magic. The things that people can create now that we've done this BASIC interpreter and these machines are cheap and plentiful. The magic will take care of itself as long as we ensure this industry can just exist and do its thing. They flipped from this mode of we need to bite and scratch and claw, and make sure that we win in deals to, huh, how can we enable software as a thing to thrive? I'm sure we can position ourselves well to capture some or a lot of that. I think they became almost stewards of the software industry and evangelists from this point forward. Yes. They also do another really prescient thing the next year in 1978, which is they go global.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.