Quotes About Technology

But he also threatened that if Google continued to develop Android and used any iPhone features, such as multi-touch, he would sue. At first Google avoided copying certain features, but in January 2010 HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted multi-touch and many other aspects of the iPhone's look and feel. That was the context for Jobs's pronouncement that Google's "Don't be evil" slogan was "bullshit.

Now kids get a MacBook and regard it as an appliance. They treat it like a refrigerator and expect it to be filled with good things, but they don't know how it works. They don't fully understand what I knew, and my parents knew, which was what you could do with a computer was limited only by your imagination."8

Sometimes innovation is a matter of timing. A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.

Steve had a TEAC reel-to-reel and massive quantities of Dylan bootlegs," Kottke recalled. "He was both really cool and high-tech.

The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them.

Wozniak would be the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that he would have been happy just to give away, and Jobs would figure out how to make it user-friendly, put it together in a package, market it, and make a few bucks.

Mauchly and Eckert should be at the top of the list of people who deserve credit for inventing the computer, not because the ideas were all their own but because they had the ability to draw ideas from multiple sources, add their own innovations, execute their vision by building a competent team, and have the most influence on the course of subsequent developments. The machine they built was the first general-purpose electronic computer.

In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches and even romance.

When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history's basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.

It was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection of the arts and technology. In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance.

It made it clear to me that Gates was not the kind of person that would understand or appreciate the elegance of a Macintosh.

He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of "trends" that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC's creed: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."60

Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were wrong.

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste," he said. "I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product.

He told us to go back to the roots of the original 1984 Macintosh, an all-in-one consumer appliance," recalled Schiller. "That meant design and engineering had to work together.

People don't invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.

freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

What's the difference between Apple and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.

One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other 'My little computer said such a funny thing this morning!' " he japed in 1951.

Many people suppose that computing machines are replacements for intelligence and have cut down the need for original thought," Wiener wrote. "This is not the case."14 The more powerful the computer, the greater the premium that will be placed on connecting it with imaginative, creative, high-level human thinking.

Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.

Life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity." J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, "The Computer as a Communication Device," Science and Technology , Apr. 1968.

The fifteenth century of Leonardo and Columbus and Gutenberg was a time of invention, exploration, and the spread of knowledge by new technologies. In short, it was a time like our own. That is why we have much to learn from Leonardo. His ability to combine art, science, technology, the humanities, and imagination remains an enduring recipe for creativity. So, too, was his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical.