Quotes About Technology

there is something fundamentally different between a sale to an early adopter and a sale to the early majority, even

the company may be saying "state-of-the-art" when the pragmatist wants to hear "industry standard.

the key to getting beyond the enthusiasts and winning over a visionary is to show that the new technology enables some strategic leap forward, something never before possible, which has an intrinsic value and appeal to the nontechnologist.

By contrast, the early majority want to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations. They are looking to minimize the discontinuity with the old ways. They want evolution, not revolution. They want technology to enhance, not overthrow, the established ways of doing business. And above all, they do not want to debug somebody else's product. By the time they adopt it, they want it to work properly and to integrate appropriately with their existing technology base.

To get an early market started requires an entrepreneurial company with a breakthrough technology product that enables a new and compelling application, a technology enthusiast who can evaluate and appreciate the superiority of the product over current alternatives, and a well-heeled visionary who can foresee an order-of-magnitude improvement from implementing the new application.

the real news is the deep and dividing chasm that separates the early adopters from the early majority. This is by far the most formidable and unforgiving transition in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, and it is all the more dangerous because it typically goes unrecognized.

You simply cannot spend your way into the hearts and minds of technology enthusiasts and visionaries.

The First World War shook the scaffolding of progress because it was deadly and unexpectedly long: it showed that technology could be two-faced. The war delivered one other insidious attack on the idea of progress by raising a moral question which the believers in progress had taken for granted: had the morality of Europeans improved during the long era of 'progress'?

In the palace of glass and iron, the locomotive and telegraphic equipment were admired not only as mechanical wonders; they were also messengers of peace and instruments of unity.

We need to understand how the dynamics of innovation, technological advances, urbanization, financial markets, social networks, and population dynamics are interconnected and how their evolving interrelationships fuel growth and societal change—and, as manifestations of human endeavors, how they are all integrated into a holistic interacting systemic framework . . . and whether such a dynamically evolving system is ultimately sustainable.

We can devolve to develop smaller, or even rural, communities that are just as plugged in as living in the heart of a great metropolis.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from doubletalk.

They introduce some new technology and no matter how much good it does for most people, there's always a crazy son of a bitch who'll find something twisted to do with it.

When the computers developed, they would take over a good deal of the burden of the politicians, and sooner or later would also take over their power,

We want Google to be the third half of your brain," says Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

Web 2.0 is our code word for the analog increasingly supervening upon the digital—reversing how digital logic was embedded in analog components, sixty years ago. Search engines and social networks are just the beginning—the Precambrian phase. "If the only demerit of the digital expansion system were its greater logical complexity, nature would not, for this reason alone, have rejected it," von Neumann admitted in 1948.

ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life," von Neumann explained to Stan Ulam, "gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race.

Billions of dollars were sunk into cables spanning six continents and three oceans, and a web of optical fiber engulfed the world. When the operation peaked in 1991, fiber was being rolled out, globally, at over 5,000 miles per hour, or nine times the speed of sound: Mach 9.

We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket.

You show me something that doesn't cause cancer, and I'll show you something that isn't on the market yet.

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I'm sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.

If black boxes survive air crashes, why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?

There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky.

Sixty-some years ago, biochemical organisms began to assemble digital computers. Now digital computers are beginning to assemble biochemical organisms. Viewed from a distance, this looks like part of a life cycle. But which part? Are biochemical organisms the larval phase of digital computers? Or are digital computers the larval phase of biochemical organisms?