Chairman, Founder and Managing Partner of TCG Advisors


Venture Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures



Author:
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling

Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate Through Every Phase of their Evolution — to be published in January, 2006.

The Adoption of Distributed Computing
30 June 1999
Understand the Opportunities of the Emerging Integrated Collaboration Market
29 April 2005
Understanding Gartner's Hype Cycles, 2005
23 June 2005



Geoffrey Moore is the Chairman, Founder and Managing Partner of TCG Advisors (TCG-A), a consulting practice that provides marketing strategy and organizational services for many leading high-technology companies as well as to those in other sectors. Moore is also a Venture Partner with Mohr, Davidow Ventures, a California-based venture capital firm specializing in specific technology markets, including e-commerce, internet, enterprise software, networking and semiconductors.

Moore is also a best-selling author, best known for the classic high tech marketing bible, Crossing the Chasm. Moore was recently a keynote presenter at a Gartner conference in Los Angeles. Gartner Fellow David Mitchell Smith and Distinguished Analyst Gene Phifer sat with Moore to discuss his latest views on business and technology.


Interview conducted 18 April 2005


David Mitchell Smith:

Geoff, in your latest book, "Living on the Fault Line," you write a lot about core and context. How do those principles apply to the IT industry?

Geoffrey Moore:

“Core” is whatever creates sustainable differentiation for your company to create competitive advantage. It's particularly important in commoditizing markets to not only gain the sale, but also gain it at a margin that's attractive. We work with our clients to isolate whatever is core in their environment. “Context” is used as the catchall description for everything that is not core.

There are two other uses of the word “core” that are perfectly good but not what I mean. One of them is your core business. Your core business is where you get the most revenue. But you can have a situation where your core business is no longer core in the sense of being highly differentiated. This can create serious margin problems for large companies.

The other way “core” gets used is in the phrase “core competence.” Again, core competence is what you are very good at. But, over time, if other people get good at it, too, it might no longer be differentiating, either.

People are investing in core. When they say that they invest in their core business or competences and neither of them is competitively differentiated, they're making a strategic mistake. It's not an easy mistake to see, but it's a very serious one.

If you apply that to IT, IT is an investment category where you can either invest to create core, in which case, your goal is differentiation, or you can invest to manage context, in which case, it is productivity.

Smith:

The example of investing money to take advantage of core or to manage context isn't an “either/or” situation. You can do both, right?

Moore:

Absolutely. But what tends to happen in many companies is that “context” masquerades as “core” to get extra investment or to get a more privileged kind of treatment than it really warrants.

If it's context, then you should apply stringent standards to it. You want to extract resources from it to fund the core. In large companies, particularly if you are, for example, the revenue cash cow of the company, it's natural for organizations to resist that process.

Gene Phifer:

Do you have any guidelines for enterprises in a particular vertical, such as retail or CPG [consumer packaged goods], such as, “You should be spending X percent on core versus Y percent on context”?

Moore:

No, but there are two principles that would help. One principle is that the more mature the category, the higher proportion of the work in it that will be context. In other words, at the beginning of a category, there are lots of opportunities to differentiate. Over time, those become less and less, which tees up the second principle, which is that it is critical that you get separation from your competitor. Therefore, when you invest in innovation, you're investing to create differentiation. In a very mature category, the only remaining differentiation is to be the last man standing - hence the interest in acquisition for the purpose of consolidation.

The mistake many companies make is investing part way. By so doing, they do differentiate. People say, "Yes, you know, I really like that better." But they do not go far enough to gain competitive separation - meaning that the customer says, "I have to have this vendor's product; I don't want the other vendor's product." So they still have to duke it out on price.

The sad thing is that they've raised the cost of their product. They've increased customer satisfaction with the product. But they're not going to get paid for it. In an increasingly commoditizing market, "getting paid for it" is the operative phrase.


Smith:

Innovation and commoditization seem to be the main themes here. One of the big trends in the industry today is open source, particularly in software. How do you think that plays into this, especially since a lot of people don't think innovation and open source go together?

Moore
Moore:

Open source is an incredibly exciting business model for dealing with context - not for dealing with core. Open source asks: "Why should we continue to reinvent, at great expense, the software to run a set of processes that we all agree are relatively standardized and non-differentiated? Why should we continue to pay tax to a proprietary technology that has staked out that turf and 'owns' it - whether that be an IBM mainframe, a Microsoft operating system or an Oracle database?"

The open-source community is trying to ask, at least for the next generation, "Why don't we level the playing field and just standardize that on open source?" That works for everything that is not core. So, it's not about innovation - it's about productivity.

What is important for open source - or any context technology - to do is to have open APIs so that whatever it is that's core can draw on the resources of the context system and integrate them into their core. The idea would be to keep the core secret and not make it open. That would be proprietary. But context would be open.

Phifer:

You state that you should build software for core and buy software for context. And open-source software allows us to buy software for little to no cost and then build extensions with the provided source code. But, if I buy big packages from SAP and Oracle, this will take millions of dollars and, perhaps, years of effort and services to make that work. Is a solid business driver still needed to justify that kind of potential disruption and cost?

Moore:

You bet. However, I would argue that that driver is not core. It's not creating core; it's managing context. The idea is, as expensive as those systems are to license, implement and service, what's probably more expensive is not having them, because what they're intended to do is manage an enormous amount of context work relatively efficiently.

The business case for buying them is the case of saying: "If I don't buy them, what will the status quo cost me? And can I cost-reduce it?" So, the first justification of a context project is cost reduction. The more-strategic justification is the second one, which is liberating time or talent or management attention from context to spend it on core.

Phifer:

You have to take a really long-term view of the problem, right? Because if you're spending millions of dollars on lots of services over multiple years, the payback there is going to take years.

Moore:

No. In talking with some of our clients, the big-bang project has fallen way out of favor. One big mistake IT organizations make is when they say: "We're going to take the next three years to get our act together, and then we'll do all this core stuff because all our data will be cleaned up. Everything will be ready. We can do everything we want." Well, you never get there. What IT organizations have to say is: "I have a core budget, and I have a context budget. And I have to oscillate between them so I continue to deliver on both every year that I'm in charge of the systems."

Smith:

Do some of the things you say, like customization enables differentiation for core, and standard systems enable productivity for context, have any implications about specific opportunities for vendors or whom IT organizations should look to for leadership?

For example, should the companies big in services - like IBM - be more on the custom side? And should those that are more packaged - like Microsoft and SAP - be more on the standard size?

Moore:

I think all vendor relationships, with the exception of some very intimate partnerships, should be focused on context and not core. The reason is that, when you work with a vendor, there's an implicit agreement that the work it does with you can be leveraged into the work it does with your direct competitors. That's how they can keep the price down. It's how you get the maintenance cost down, etc. So, if what you're working on is truly core, you don't want your competitors to get it, which means that you should not work with a vendor under any such implicit contract.

Whether it's a highly services-oriented situation like IBM deals with or a more-packaged thing that Microsoft deals with, you're looking at context. Microsoft solves context problems at the edge. I would argue that IBM should help you solve context problems at the heart of your data center and network.

Phifer

Again, the idea is to move resources from context to core. Do you have any guidelines for how to determine the core investment? I know you said that you couldn't give percentages, but if I'm trying to lay out a budget, I need to start to determine how much productivity I'm going to try to instill so I can fund things. And some of those things are innovation activities, which I have no clue how much I'm going to spend fostering them.

Moore:

What's interesting is that we've always thought of it as a two-part problem. But we now have a three-part model for it. Optimization for productivity is on the right. On the left is the innovation for new core. But there's a linking function we call deployment. The deployment function specializes in mission-critical work. Whether it's core or context, it's mission-critical, meaning that it's got to be done on time, to spec and on budget, with high quality rates and low failure rates.

The challenge that IT managers have is to determine where they are going to allocate their deployment resources. They've got a productivity objective; they've got an optimization resource. Great. They have an innovation objective, but they don't know quite what it is. But they've got a number of innovators and some ideas about what to focus them on, and they're going to make it work.

What happens to companies is that when this innovation begins to percolate, they need to scale it to become a mission-critical part of the system. They're going to take this interesting innovation and turn it into a full-blown product offered at scale across their entire market and customer base.

They need deployment experts to do that. And those deployment experts are often trapped in mission-critical context work. Therefore, a lot of our work now is helping people deconstruct these mission-critical context processes to free up deployment guys to get back over on the innovation side of the ledger.

Moore


Smith

I see a lot of IT focused on mission-critical management. Do you think that's focusing on the wrong thing?

Moore:

No. If it's mission-critical, it has to get focus. But the mistake that people make is confusing core with mission-critical. In fact, that's a huge barrier to their disposing of context work because they look at the work and say: "You can't outsource it. It's core." You ask, "Hang on, do we really differentiate with this work?" And they say, "Well, no, but it's mission-critical." You say: "Great. It's mission-critical, but it's not core." In fact, the single greatest resource sink or hog in the corporation is mission-critical context, mission-critical work that is not core.

In such work, there's a high degree of failure if you do it badly - and no degree of reward if you do it well. There's a tendency for mission-critical work to accumulate lots of resources because people don't want to get punished. They don't want to get the downside. But, those are the same resources that you need to deploy the next generation of innovation to get upside.

So, taking risk with mission-critical context sounds like an illogical thing to do. But in fact, it is the critical success factor in IT. You just have to be very thoughtful about how you take that risk because it is mission-critical.

Phifer:

Innovation is a central theme of your books. Do businesses get it today?

Moore:

The thing about innovation is that it gets back to this issue of separation. Businesses absolutely get that they need to innovate. Moreover, individual people love to innovate. So, the problem is not lack of interest or enthusiasm for innovation. The problem is lack of separation and the resulting lack of pricing power.

In other words, there's a lot of innovation put in. But at the end of the day, the market does not acknowledge separation. iPod has genuine separation. When your kid says, "I want an iPod" and you show up with a cheaper Zen, you are a bad dad. So, Apple got separation.

But if you show up with a Gateway or an HP instead of a Dell, you're not likely to get the same kind of separation issues. Certainly, General Motors has no separation differentiation from Ford, though Chrysler's new designs are gaining it some separation from these other two.

The issue becomes, why don't they get separation? When you look at the way they're deploying innovation, they're taking a smorgasbord approach. They're not sure which innovation types to pursue. So they try three or four things to reduce their risk and hedge their bets. But in fact, this takes their success rate to zero because when you diffuse your innovation bets across multiple types of innovation, the chance that any one of them will get to separation is reduced. Because it's already hard to get to separation, you effectively take yourself out of the game. The people having success are the people who are the really bold innovators. That's why they get written up in BusinessWeek and Fortune magazine.

Phifer:

But, if you put all your eggs in one basket and innovation doesn't pan out, you're in big trouble.

Moore:

I would argue right now that most people are in that condition and just not acknowledging it. In other words, if you put all your eggs in one basket, in some disruptive innovation, then it's like a venture capital bet. And those bets are relatively high stakes and long odds. What venture capitalists do is have a portfolio of 25 companies.

If you look at established companies and the kinds of innovations that they should be spending money on, a lot of them are not that risky or that unpredictable, such as marketing innovations, value engineering innovations, process innovations, line extensions and enhancements.

The idea behind this is to take something and push the envelope far enough that your competitors look at it and say it's not worth it for them to chase you.

Phifer:

Does that also assume, to a degree, that there's a fairly big barrier to entry for those kinds of innovations?

Moore:

The problem is, the way most people innovate, there isn't that big a barrier to entry, which is why other people follow them. And their innovation is wasted. But if you overdeliver intensely on a given type of innovation, it becomes much harder for the herd to follow. Now your chances of separation are much better. We do an exercise where we talk about allocating your innovation budget among four categories: achieving differentiation; catching up to somebody else's differentiation (which is worth doing); improving productivity (when you're working on context); and trying for differentiation but not getting far enough - which, from a strategic and investor point of view, is waste. Nobody has any stats on this, obviously. But think about a lot of companies; think about how much of HP's innovation is waste. It's not that it's not innovating. It is. But it's not getting separation. In fact, Dell would argue that HP's innovations are its R&D. Dell just copies the ones that it likes the best.

Phifer:

How is the trend toward low-cost offshore manufacturing impacting the ability to invest in these kinds of innovations? Are we going to see a lot more importance on cost-cutting and marketing innovations, as opposed to technology innovations?

Moore:

Yes. For a while, we thought there was going to be low-cost offshore manufacturing, which was going to create a budget by which we could spend more on design innovations. What's happened with the migration from contract manufacturing to original device manufacturing is that the design innovations are being commoditized. Increasingly, that drives you from the more-concrete parts of the product toward the more-abstract parts, such as the marketing and the user interface. But now offshore companies are getting smarter about branding, design and styling. What you're seeing is an erosion of our highly-protected position with our home marketplace, which is becoming increasingly exposed, and going forward we're going to have a lot of work trying to figure out where can we find margins. The problem is that our standard of living is so high relative to the rest of the world that it's not clear that we have any right to the kind of margins we need. And so we're left wondering what we are going to do now.


Smith:

What about the role of technology and software in promoting innovation and making it work for you?

Moore:

Software is one of the places in IT where, for the foreseeable future, we have the opportunity to create significant competitive advantage. We are very sophisticated in our understanding of systems and software in this country.

There was this book awhile back by Nicholas G. Carr, "Does IT Matter?" The main point was that IT doesn't matter. But, my contention now would be that IT had better matter because it's one of the few levers we've got left.

IT is powerful on both sides of the core/context divide. It's extremely powerful in allowing you to deconstruct processes and to make them increasingly more productive through outsourcing, automating, streamlining or eliminating all those kinds of things. But it's also an enabler of core, depending on what kind of core you want to do. If you're a consumer products company or a firm that deals in high volumes and you have a customer intimacy strategy, the only practical way to do customer intimacy at scale is through an IT system. Amazon can do it at scale with its "Hi Geoffrey" approach to things. So if you're going to use customer intimacy as a tactic that's in the consumer market, I think IT is important.

In complex system markets, IT is increasingly getting interesting in the area of collaboration. There, it's not so much about computing as communicating and creating these high-bandwidth collaborative work environments that enable people to get time-to-market closure on increasingly tougher problems faster and faster.

Phifer:

We talked about software enablement of innovation and the collaborative thing, but there's more to it than software. What do you see as some of the critical success factors to foster innovation, especially in large, multinational kinds of companies? What do you also see as some of the biggest barriers to innovation in such companies?

Moore:

One of the code phrases we have these days is "focusing innovation" - don't dabble, pick one and go. When you do that, you start working with every department and function within the company, saying: "This is where we're heading. This is what we want to do. I don't care if you're in accounting, if you're in human resources, if you're in engineering, if you're in sales - we're trying to do this with our customers. So, what can you do in your department that would add synergy to that effort?" Getting the entire company focused on a particular form of innovation is pretty important.

We also see a lot of companies that invest in innovations and are good at incubating. But they're not good at getting things into their mainstream. They generate a lot of innovation that they can't capitalize on. One of the problems they have is that they have people who are very bright and very innovative. But they're not entrepreneurial. One of the things we're working with some of our clients on is taking entrepreneurs and putting them in the lab. Put them in charge of these key projects as temporary general manager of this business when it comes out of the lab. Then it's their job to get it to scale. Once it gets to scale, you're probably going to surgically implant it in one of your other divisions. At this point, the entrepreneur might stay with the work. Or he or she might decide to go back and do the innovation thing all over again as a serial entrepreneur.

What we've been doing in the past is trying to make a hand-off from our research group to a division. The economics don't work. If you're a division manager, you have an economic quota that you've got to return to the corporation. You look at these products coming out of the lab, and they're just not ready for you. You're not going to put salespeople on it. If you do put salespeople on it, they're not going to sell. This thing, whatever it is, is unproven. So, that's why you need the entrepreneur to drive it all the way out. That's one innovation practice that we're trying to help our clients with.

Smith:

When you take that approach, do you typically have a timeline in mind where the people who carry entrepreneurial business into production do move on?

Moore:

It is the same model. And I think about $10 million in revenue is not a bad target to aim for. Prior to that, it probably isn't economically interesting to the host division. If you got to $10 million and you were a growing concern, and you could see that there was at least $100 million downstream, that's worth spending some time on, if you're a division person. What you're doing is taking the entrepreneur and sending him or her back into the invention zone. You're allowing a deployment person to pick it up and say: "I'm not going to deploy this thing at scale. That handoff between the invention zone and the deployment zone is a critical handoff."

Phifer:

Do any innovations of the past few years stand out to you as really good examples of things that might have changed the world?

Moore:

In our lifetime, the Internet. It's like watching the earth wire itself a nervous system. I can remember prior to the Internet that things like CNN were changing the world anyway. The fact that you could see warfare happen live was changing the way people acted with each other.

But the Internet is just so much stronger than that. Because the Internet serves as a work transport mechanism, work is now migrating very rapidly from developed economies to underdeveloped economies. In the short term, that's going to be painful for the U.S. But it's clearly good for the world. And it probably increases the chance for world peace.

Smith:

The Internet was not any one particular innovation. It's one of those things that just kind of happened. Is that a special case? Or is there something we can learn from what happened there? And it comes back to the question about open source and innovation because a lot of open source came from the Internet way of thinking, too. Yet, most people, including yourself, didn't associate open source with innovation.

Moore:

That's true. Clearly, open source is innovative in the sense that it was unprecedented. So, it was absolutely innovative. It's also innovative as a response to proprietary technology and the control of the technology sector.

From an investor's point of view, however, it's not as attractive because investors are trying to get proprietary returns on their investment. That being said, there are companies like Red Hat that have figured out ways to say, "Well, the products are open, but the services are still required, and we can get good returns there."

But you're right about this notion of how, at some point, innovation is a response of the ecosystem to stress. So, if an ecosystem is not under stress, it doesn't innovate. It just expands. It breeds. And it'll breed until it consumes the available free resources in the system. But after that, breeding puts it increasingly under stress.

So, as a system comes under more and more stress, the DNA of its organisms starts to mutate faster and faster, which causes a lot of failed mutations. But it accelerates the change. Therefore, natural selection has more genetic choices to choose from and often finds a dramatic mutation - what they call punctuated equilibrium in evolution, where you go from one state of evolution to a much higher state of evolution.

There's an analogy in IT where you get a lot of expansion within the same paradigm. I would argue that we're still at the end of the client/server paradigm right now. But we're beginning to run up against the contradictions of it, particularly as we try to do more interenterprise commerce. Client/server is a crappy architecture because you're going between companies. It's not too bad inside a corporation, but it's pretty hard to go between.
The contradictions in the marketplace start building up, and the pressures start building up. The demands for service-oriented architecture [SOA]now are coming out. Now, will one person invent SOA? Almost certainly not. Will one company get a disproportionate advantage from it? Probably. But I don't know which one.

Smith:

Do you think SOA is the end of innovation in IT?

Moore:

What SOA will do is allow you to deconstruct legacy processes and put them in service to a higher-order system. But, it's like saying the alphabet is the end of knowledge. Basically, what SOA allows you to do is kind of alphabetize your system to make it into a repurposable, reusable set of services. Now you can write plays and encyclopedias. The need to modularize the infrastructure to make it more fungible, flexible, adaptable and agile is critical. But there are very few people who feel they have to do it right now.

As the commoditization of world business gets more and more forcefully brought home to people, and as IT becomes increasingly more plausible as one of the few differentiating zones left, then the notion that you're going to live with an inflexible legacy infrastructure is just intolerable. I think that by the end of the decade, it will become intolerable. Then we'll see very rapid mutation - even with highly conservative legacy institutions, because you'll look at the thing and realize you are dead in the water if you don't get this stuff restructured. The visionaries are doing it now, but I don't think the pragmatists are.

Phifer:

Do you think SOA is the horse to ride from this point forward to enable people to get their context as good as they can with the least cost to repurpose over to the core but still consume services out of those context applications?

Moore:

Yes. You said the horse, but SOA right now looks to me more like a herd of horses and maybe some turtles in there as well. At 50,000 feet, I would say yes. I think we know enough about it to say yes, it is SOA. Now, what version of SOA and with which vendors and which positions - we've got to work it out. But if I were a CIO right now, I would have my best people saying: "We need to get up to the front of this. We don't want to be behind it." You can do that. What that's going to create demand for is architects, because before you encode the SOA you have to determine how to parse your processes. How do you parse your systems and your modules so that you have a reasonable taxonomy of objects that isn't too granular and isn't too aggregated? That's an architectural discipline, a kind of a systems analysis discipline, but it's got to have a view toward competitive advantage.

And so if you were given that assignment, you'd like the management of the company to say: "This is what we're going to try to do for core going forward. In the next 10 years, we're going to be product leadership people." Or, "We're going to go down this customer intimacy path" or "We're going to be the operational excellence leaders."

One of the things we say when we spend time with people who are very interested in increasing context productivity is, "Great, what's it for?" And they don't know. They don't have a good answer. So, if you don't know what's core, you don't know what context.

Phifer:

Are there any particular vertical industries that stand out as having a better handle on innovation, how to foster it or maybe how to apply SOA to it that stand out from the crowd?

Moore:

The consumer packaged goods and the entertainment industries have done a lot in terms of using line extensions. The entertainment industry has transformed itself from being a movie or a song business to being an intellectual property business where you license a cartoon character to make a toy and those kinds of things. There's a bunch of stuff there.

Consumer packaged goods - the Procter & Gambles of the world - with line extensions and enhancement innovations have been doing a lot of leading best practices for a long time.

The financial services industry has reinvented itself around innovating different classes of risk-management transactions. It's created a lot of wealth, and I don't think it's accidental. The ability to diffuse risk has created an opportunity for taking risk that's much greater than in prior eras of this planet. That's pretty interesting.

The education industry is horribly stuck. Healthcare, though scientifically progressive, is not very productive from a systems point of view. Both situations involve a social contract where the consumers of healthcare and the consumers of education believe they're entitled to a service that's much more expensive than what society is willing to fund. So, there's a kind of inherent mismatch that makes those industries behind in information technology innovation.

Retail is doing some exciting things. Financial services is doing some exciting things. My guess is that, eventually, telecommunications will get back into the act, but it's still working its way out of the penalty box. Entertainment is doing some very exciting things.

Smith:

Some industries, like government and insurance, have been out in front in Web services. Do you see a correlation there? Or are they different industries for different reasons?

Moore:

What's interesting about both of those is where they're using Web services to provide customer-intimate experiences at scale. So, it's like the ATM or home banking at scale. So, if I'm doing claims processing in an insurance situation or I'm trying to get a driver's license or pay a traffic ticket, what's exciting about that is it's all context. It's not core. And they're not competing. If you're paying a ticket in Boston, New York can't bid for that ticket. They're doing it presumably out of the altruistic motives of government. But they are creating better government and better service. Therefore, I do think Web services for information transactions at scale is particularly interesting. I would personally like to see it used more in education. But that's still a little ways away.

Smith:

It sounds as though it's going to take a lot more than just supporting technology and SOA to fix these problems in healthcare and education.

Moore:

In both cases, it would be great to do a core context analysis and to ask what is really core. Part of the problem is that the teaching establishment and the medical establishment are both somewhat threatened by productivity initiatives. That's because the productivity initiatives are not being very thoughtful about distinguishing between context and core.

So the initiative attacking context is actually interfering with core. The teacher or the doctor rebels, saying, "You can't do that." If there were a more thoughtful way of parsing the problem, you'd get the teachers and the doctors on your side. There are some ways to use these mental models to get a more precise form of public policy that could get better alignment around it.

Part of the issue, though, is that there's a fair amount of demagoguery with both healthcare and education. And when demagoguery is present, then the motives are not innocent. And therefore, the process gets corrupted and fails.

Smith:

I want to ask about what you're most well-known for - "Crossing the Chasm." Do you see connections between the themes of that and your current book on core and context?

Moore:

"Crossing the Chasm" and the book that followed it, "Inside the Tornado," were about innovating in growth markets early - that is, right after a disruptive innovation. "Crossing the Chasm" was about getting from a disruptive innovation into the mainstream. And "Inside the Tornado" was about going from being in the mainstream to gaining worldwide deployment through a category.

Those innovation types got a ton of attention. Part of what we did in technology was that we ignored all other forms of innovation. So, we don't need processes. We don't need branding. We just need Moore's Law driving down the price/performance of chips relentlessly. And we're just going to ride Moore's Law like Pecos Bill rode tornadoes.

As long as you were in a sector that had those dynamics, most of the traditional rules of business just didn't apply. Then Y2K brought a lot of that even further into a state of acceleration. But in the wake of the downturn thereafter, the technology sector converted from being an adolescent to being a member of the adult economy.
So all of a sudden, we don't have automatic double-digit growth. Things aren't growing at 20 or 30 percent. They're growing at 6 and 8 and 9 percent. Now, Silicon Valley is acknowledging that it better get a hand in federal policy, such as stock options and investing in the Internet. It's been a coming of age. And my books are sort of tracing a coming of age.

Smith:

Looking to the future, what can you tell us about what you might be writing about 10 years from now?

Moore:

At the end of this decade, my intention will be to refocus my efforts outside the tech sector and on education, in particular. I'm particularly interested in the intersection of education and Internet-enabled technology - private school. Many private schools are a good example of that. But how you would do it at scale is a tough problem, and I'd like to work on that. I have a degree in medieval English literature. I want to get back to some work that I set out to do about 40 years ago. So I'm going to do a bunch of things, but they're not going to be about technology. Ten years from now, whatever I'm writing about will not be about technology.