Seibel: You said before that you thought you could make the world a better place with software. How did you think that was going to happen?

Deutsch: Part of it had nothing to do with software per se; it's just that seeing anything around me that's being done badly has always offended me mightily, so I thought I could do better. That's the way kids think. It all seems rather dreamlike now.

Certainly at the time that I started programming, and even up into the 1980s, computer technology was really associated with the corporate world. And my personal politics were quite anticorporate. The kind of computing that I've always worked on has been what today we would call personal computing, interactive computing. I think part of my motivation was the thought that if you could get computer power into the hands of a lot of people, that it might provide some counterweight to corporate power.

I never in my wildest dreams would have predicted the evolution of the Internet. And I never would've predicted the degree to which corporate influence over the Internet has changed its character over time. I would've thought that the Internet was inherently uncontrollable, and I no longer think that. China shows that you can do it pretty effectively.

And I think there's a good chance that if Microsoft plays its cards right, they will have a lock on the Internet. I'm sure they would love to, but I think they might be smart enough to see the path from where they are to having what effectively is control of essentially all the software that gets used on the Internet.

So I'm not really much of an optimist about the future of computing. To be perfectly honest, that's one of the reasons why it wasn't hard for me to get out. I mean, I saw a world that was completely dominated by an unethical monopolist, and I didn't see much of a place for me in it.