As much as I think smartphones are great tools, I would rather have running water. Water that runs makes me happy and less thirsty and less likely to die in the short run. And if the running water is clean and doesn’t contain fecal matter, and I won’t get cholera, wow, cool. Let’s bottle it and call it iWater. Though, sure, a smartphone would be nice, too. 

From Marc Andreessen’s responses to a word-association segment of an interview conducted by Ruchi Sanghvi at the she++ conference, as reported by Billy Gallagher at TechCrunch:

“Mobile: under-hyped

Social: extremely powerful, and people underestimate how powerful it is

Enterprise: being reinvented

Silicon Valley: the world would be much better if we had 50 more Silicon Valleys but we don’t and we probably won’t for a long time

Genomics: largely a disappointment

Big Data: lots of social, cultural, political implications, not yet figured out

Aaron Swartz: tragedy. Absolute tragedy. Hopefully a future inspiration

2020: more people on the planet with smartphones than running water”