Michael J. Saylor

My principal professional objective is to introduce intelligence as the ubiquitous utility. I'd like to be the Thomas Edison of intelligence.

Nobody has really grasped yet the great wealth that can be made selling data over the Web. There are 100 million potential customers out there.

I'm not so naive as to think that everybody always succeeds, right? I mean, half of Shakespeare's stories are tragedies - right?

The industries that fall first are the industries that either produce electromechanical items that are now inferior to their software substitutes, or the industries that produce a mechanically created service that's now inferior.

We're in an inflection point where it's cheaper to learn to read on a tablet computer than it is to learn to read on paper. And that being the case, it's only a matter of time before every 6-year-old kid has a tablet computer, and we know for a fact, 3- to 4-year-old kids are using tablets and iPads, and 75 and 80 year olds are using them.

There's nothing more frustrating than seeing cynics sit there and say, 'Well, nobody can make any more money because Microsoft and Intel own everything.' Is the software industry mature, or is it embryonic? I would say it's embryonic. There will be a hundred more Microsofts, not just one.

When you're building a company, you need to continually strengthen every component - finance, strategic partnerships, executive team, and relationships with every last constituency.

Companies that make keys, credit card companies, any company in the service business - anything to do with a consumer is probably a software company.

What amplifies the transformational power ahead is the confluence of two major technological currents today: the universal access to mobile computing and the pervasive use of social networks.

I grew up in a family where no one had written a newspaper or magazine article about anybody in my family for a hundred years, right? Then, all of a sudden, we're getting one millennium's worth of media attention in six months.

The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard.

I basically got an education in software on DuPont's money because they were too stubborn to admit that a recession was coming.