Quotes About Innovation

An international power supply is the device which means it doesn't matter what country you're in, or even if you know what country you're in (more of a problem than you might suspect) - you just plug your Mac in and it figures it out for itself. We call this principle Plug and Play. Or at least, Microsoft calls it that because it hasn't got it yet. In the Mac world we've had it for so long we didn't even think of giving it a name.

the rest of you... keep banging the rocks together

Where do you get inspiration for your books? I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I thought of an idea.

Look, why don't you sit yourself down over there and let me plug you in?" He gestured Arthur toward a chair which looked as if it had been made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus. "It was made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus," explained the old man

Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out rather than thinking of something new to put in.

For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope.

And now we have the World Wide Web (the only thing I know of whose shortened form—www—takes three times longer to say than what it's short for)

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.

Flying is learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Ese es el problema con los chiflados: se les ocurre una gran idea que funciona de verdad y luego esperan que les financies durante años mientras ellos se dedican a estudiar la topografía de su ombligo.

Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of each division of your company.

They were a double pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, which had been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.

He sat and tapped his teeth with a pencil again and watched his sofa slowly revolving on the screen of his computer.

The impossible did not bother him unduly. If it could not possibly be done, then obviously it had been done impossibly. The question was how?

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

We were wrong about trains, we were wrong about planes, we were wrong about radio, we were wrong about phones, we were wrong about . . . well, for a voluminous list of the things we have been wrong about, you could do worse than dig out a copy of a book called The Experts Speak by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky.

We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

Lots of people are not in the business you think they're in. Xerox, for instance, is in the business of selling toner cartridges. All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audience, they're in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers.

I guess when the novel started, most early novels were just sort of pornography: Apparently, most media actually started as pornography and sort of grew from there. This is not a pornographic CD-ROM, I hasten to add.

I think media are at their most interesting before anybody's thought of calling them art, when people still think they're just a load of junk.

Of course, the computer isn't any of these things. These are all things we were previously familiar with from the real world, which we have modelled in the computer so that we can use the damn thing. Which should tell us something interesting. The computer is actually a modelling device.

I've been talking about how electronic books will come, and how important they will be, and all of a sudden Stephen King publishes one. I feel a complete idiot, as it should have been me.

Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere.

It may not be terribly important that from five thousand miles away you can reach into a university corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can, but it's the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating. So that, I think, is the fourth age of sand.