In the tech world, you can reel off great products in several ways. You can have the once-in-a-lifetime gut instincts of a Steve Jobs. You can have the brainiac coding skills of a Bill Gates, Larry Page, or Sergey Brin. Or, I learned, you can have the deep intellectual curiosity and stubbornness of a Jeff Bezos.

It was a June day when I began my career as a national journalist. I stepped into the Detroit Bureau of the 'Wall Street Journal' and started on what would be a long, varied, rewarding career. I was 23 years old, and the year was 1970.

I simply believe that people who respect their customers and have faith in their own technology products should welcome competition and that consumer choice should be a paramount value in retailing.

Email is a senior citizen. It's been around since at least the 1960s in one form or another. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a hot competition among consumer email services like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Gmail.