Quotes About Innovation

In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form.

Mothers, wrote Bellamy, would no longer have "to make themselves hoarse telling the children stories on rainy days to keep them out of mischief." The kids would all have their own indispensables.

The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment.

We'll know that Google has truly fulfilled its vision when the Googleplex no longer needs toilets at all.

it has become almost impossible for us to imagine what life was like before electricity began to flow through the sockets in our walls.

good ideas are embraced whether they come from a senior executive or the company cook.

Technology is amoral, and inventions are routinely deployed in ways their creators neither intend nor sanction.

To hold inventors liable for the misuse of their inventions is to indict progress itself. That's

Along Maine's Kennebec River alone, thirty-six companies operated fifty-three icehouses with a total capacity of a million tons. But over the next few decades, cheap electricity devastated the business, first by making the artificial production of ice more economical and then by spurring homeowners to replace their iceboxes with electric refrigerators. As Gavin Weightman writes in The Frozen-Water Trade, the "huge industry simply melted away.

as a utility served more customers, it would become more efficient, allowing it to cut the cost of power further and in turn attract even more customers.

Drawings are not just end products: they are part of the thought process

our longstanding idea of a computer is obsolete.

In 1930, it hit 80 percent. Soon, it was over 90 percent. Only a handful of manufacturers, mainly those running big factories in remote locations, continued to produce their own current. Thanks to Samuel Insull, the age of the private power plant was over. The utility had triumphed.

That same year, the futurist Edward Bellamy suggested, in a Harper's article, that people would come to read "with the eyes shut." They would carry around a tiny audio player, called an "indispensable," which would contain all their books, newspapers, and magazines.

All technological change is generational change.

Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google," he said in a 2000 interview, long before his company's name had become a household word. "We're nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.

selling things to early adopters is wise.

In the end, Adams believes, we "may come to regard tactical warfare as properly the business of machines and not appropriate for people at all."7

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Technology shapes economics, and economics shapes society.

We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. —John M. Culkin

A hundred years ago, we arrived at such as moment with technologies that extend man's physical powers. We are at another such moment today with technologies that extend our intellectual power

because Beethoven did not know where it was going to end up. That, of course, is the point of sketching.

By digitizing a traditionally analog business model or process, we're effectively turning it into bits and atoms and enabling an infinite variety of possibilities.