Bill Gates: Even in the early days, if you set a computer on every desk in every home, and you’d say, “Okay, how many homes are there in the world? How many desks are there in the world? Can I make $20 for every home, $20 for every desk?” you could get these big numbers. But part of the beauty of the whole thing was we were very focused on the here and now. Should we hire one more person? If our customers didn’t pay us, would we have enough cash to meet the payroll? We really were very practical about that next thing, and so involved in the deep engineering that we didn’t get ahead of ourselves. We never thought how big we’d be. I remember when one of the early lists of wealthy people came out and one of the Intel founders was there, the guy that ran Wang computers actually was still — Wang was still doing well — and we thought, “Hmm. Boy, if the software business does well, the value of Microsoft could be similar to that.” But it wasn’t a real focus. The everyday activity of just doing great software drew us in. And some decisions we made — like the quality of the people, the way we were very global, the vision of how we thought about software — that was very long term. But other than those things, we just came into work every day and wrote more code and hired more people. It wasn’t really until the IBM PC succeeded, and perhaps even until Windows succeeded, that there was a broad awareness that Microsoft was very unique as a software company, and that these other companies had been one-product companies, hadn’t hired people, couldn’t do a broad set of things, didn’t renew their excellence, didn’t do research. So we thought we were doing something very unique, but it was easily not until 1995, or even 1997, that there was this wide recognition that we were the company that had revolutionized software.