Social media is not going away and we're not all going to leave our phones for good. But we can make sure we don't look at our phones in the morning and the evening, which is better for our lifestyle.
So I'm leaving Sony, a free agent, owning half of Sony. I own half of Sony's Publishing. I'm leaving them, and they're very angry at me, because I just did good business, you know.
Android phones are sold by dozens of hardware makers, the biggest being Samsung, Motorola, and HTC. There are lots of different form factors. Slider phones. Phones with keyboards. Big screens, small screens, midsize screens.
You can have an Apple in the phone business, or a RIM, and they can do very well, but when 1.3 billion phones a year are all smart, the software that's gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that's sold by somebody who doesn't make their own phones.
I was MCing in the playground, spitting lyrics over mobile phones - Sony Ericsson, Walkmans, W810s, the Teardrop Nokia phones, all of that. Vital equipment! I never even had a DJ set where a DJ's playing vinyl, and I'm spitting.
The reality is, the way we've used phones and the amount that we've used phones has changed radically in the past five years. When phones were first marketed in the 1990s, it cost, for car phones, $3000 to buy a phone and the average person did not use it that much. They were very, very expensive.
I sold 2 million records on Loud, which was one-tenth of the size of Sony.
Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn't have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They're going to adopt e-books much faster than we do.
We'll get a chance to go through this [Apple versus Microsoft debate] again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.
Sony has canceled the big Seth Rogen movie, 'The Interview.' North Koreans hacked their email so Sony said, 'Now we can't show anybody the movie.' I'm disappointed. I think this is the wrong thing to do. And I hear in the film Meryl Streep is great as Kim Jong Un.
Once you capitulate to one dictator, does that mean that the next dictator or the next terrorist that says you're not going to make a comedy about - or a film at all about ISIS. All of us in public life have a responsibility right now to speak out and to say, 'No, Sony, you did the wrong thing' and to say to Hollywood, come behind - the other studios should come behind Sony and offer their support.
We're a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones - apart from the iPhone - can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we'd only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn't do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into 'Facebook phones.' That's what Facebook Home is.
After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.
By the time I was 14, my most burning ambition was to leave my home, leave my neighborhood, leave my city. I kept it a secret wish. It was easier done than said. It wasn't only that I wanted to leave Chicago - I wanted to live in New York City. And I did - for a time.
The doctor said, 'He can't last a week.' And I did. And they said, 'There's no way this kid's going to last a month.' And I did. And so they said, 'Two years. He's not going to make it.' Two years. 'Five years. He can't do that.' I lived to be five years. 'He's never going to hit double digits.' And here I am, a new teenager.
One of my favorite things was I got to work with Avi Arad on a movie for Sony, and we don't realize this, but he's the reason toys were sold off of cartoons, more or less. He created the Gobots!