Quotes About Technology

Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You're not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.

Instead of trying to use your technology and expertise to make a better product for your users' standard behavior, experiment with inviting the users to change their behavior to make the product work dramatically better.

Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (iron ore or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of the companies on the list do that. The rest make unseemly profits by trafficking in ideas.

Marketing, more than a lake or a forest, is the landscape of our modern lives.

Where did your art go while you were tweeting?

Bloggers around the world are discovering that it's cheaper and faster and more effective to build their own media channels than it is to waste time arguing with the old ones.

Fact is, the first 100 years of our country's history were about who could build the biggest, most efficient farm. And the second century focused on the race to build factories. Welcome to the third century, folks. The third century is about ideas.

Have you ever heard of Gmail? Ever used it? If so, it's not because Gmail ran a lot of TV ads (they didn't). It's because the manifesto of free email got to you.

if we canceled the shuttle, we'd create an urgent need for a replacement. The lack of a way to get to space would force us to invent a new, better, cheaper alternative.

The book publishing business is also run by people with this affliction. They love their industry, their product, their systems, and the joy it brings them. New technologies and business systems undermine that vision, and publishers often dismiss them because of simple nostalgia. The same thing happened to Kodak and to the big accounting

Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, told me, "We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd make a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.

FileMaker Pro

The organization gets extremely efficient at producing a certain output a certain way . . . and then competition or change or technology arrives and the old rules aren't particularly useful, the old efficiencies not so profitable.

Customer development is the act of gaining traction with customers, of finding a fit between what you make and what they want. This traction is worth far more than fancy technology or expensive marketing.

Shipping an idea went from taking a month by boat to a few days by plane to overnight by Federal Express to a few minutes by fax to a moment by e-mail to instantaneous by Twitter. Now what? Will it arrive yesterday? So, what's left is to make—to give—art. What's left is the generosity and humanity worth paying for. What's left is to take that resistance (the very same resistance we embraced and rewarded for decades) and destroy it.

It's hard to imagine Tim Cook blurbing a Samsung phone. That's because Apple seeks to corner the market, not to spread an idea or create a positive change. They're in the business of raising their stock price, and everything else is merely a tactic.

Now, though, the proletariat owns the means of production. Now, the workers are self-organized online.

William Gibson has said, "The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed.

Universities no longer spend as much time bragging about the size of their libraries. The

People have been indoctrinated so completely by their jobs that they don't want to know how something works, they're willing to accept that perhaps the laws of nature don't work as they expect, and by the way, can I have the remote?

We have swallowed technology and are struggling to avoid the shackles that make it work: rules and laws.

A classical computation is like a solo voice—one line of pure tones succeeding each other. A quantum computation is like a symphony—many lines of tones interfering with one another.

Moore's law is a law not of nature, but of human ingenuity.

Perhaps love in the digital age is more like Netflix binge-watching: we enjoy bursts of fantasy, and then move on to something else when it's done. Like browsing for a new series on Netflix, if the relationship doesn't fit perfectly, you can trade it in for something new with the click of a button or a swipe on your phone.