When you are serious about selling a company you approach likely buyers in a non-public manner. The history of these kinds of announcements is that they rarely lead to a definite transaction.

If you think about the history of the PC industry, the PC industry has essentially been nothing but acquisitions by one company or another. Dell is the outlier. Dell built its own culture. They automated themselves to be the most efficient manufacturer.

If I were running a company involved in this research, and I knew I could support that research myself, I'm not sure I'd want the competition of NIH [the National Institutes of Health] and others working in the field.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

It became apparent we were going to lose a lot of history. We didn't want that to happen.

I think the whole thing is unfortunate. It's always been a great company with a great tradition and history, and that's why we owned it. But the thing that sticks out, a really stupid strategic decision, is acquiring The Learning Company.