Quotes About Technology

almost every technology that has connected people who live apart has also created new barriers between people who live close together.

Now we must ask whether the internet has created an asymmetric technology risk for democracies that authoritarian governments can counteract more readily than the republican form of government that Franklin's words urge us to protect. The answer is probably yes. Digital technology has created a different world, and not always a better one.

Amazon isn't happening to the book business," he likes to say to authors and journalists. "The future is happening to the book business.")

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it." —Alan Kay

Steve Jobs was known for the clarity of his insights about what customers wanted, but he was also known for his volatility with coworkers. Apple's founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs.

Bezos is a fan of e-mail newsletters such as VSL.com, a daily assortment of cultural tidbits from the Web, and Cool Tools, a compendium of technology tips and product reviews written by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired. Both e-mails are short, well written, and informative.

The high-tech community was getting a lesson in the dynamics of network effects—products or services become increasingly valuable as more people use them.

AWS helped introduce the ethereal concept known as the cloud, and it is viewed as so vital to the future fortunes of technology startups that venture capitalists often give gift certificates for it to their new entrepreneurs.

IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress.

Over time it became clear that the humans couldn't compete. PEOPLE FORGET THAT JOHN HENRY DIED IN THE END, read a sign on the wall of the P13N office, a reference to the folktale of the steel driver who raced to dig a hole in competition with a steam-powered drilling machine; he won the contest but died immediately afterward.

There is so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way. Jeff Bezos

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini in a speech at Stanford's Graduate School of Business a few years later. "We didn't want to be Kodak." The reference was to the century-old photography giant whose engineers had invented digital cameras in the 1970s but whose profit margins were so healthy that its executives couldn't bear to risk it all on an unproven venture in a less profitable frontier.

Nevertheless, Blecharczyk came through with a new version of a site on March 3, a week before the annual conference in Austin, Texas. The new slogan was "A friend, not a front desk.

But then he offered this: 'The things that people are going to feel are still to come. The kind of impact this is going to have on our cities -ninety-five or ninety-eight percent of it is still yet to happen. What if I said there's still going to be no traffic in any major city in the U.S. in five years?

Let's give them credit," Schmidt says. "The book guys got computer science, they figured out the analytics, and they built something significant.

Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.

For the first time, Amazon was spoken in the same breath as Google and Apple—not as an afterthought, but as an equal. It had blasted off into high orbit.

maximizing the Internet's ability to provide a superior selection of products as compared to those available at traditional retail stores.

You've built this lovely castle, and now all the barbarians are going to come riding on horses to attack the castle," Bezos said, according to a former AWS exec who reports hearing the comment. "You need a moat; what is the moat around the castle?" (Amazon denied that Bezos said this.)

Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: "Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.

In 2017, Amazon spent $22.6 billion on R&D, compared to Alphabet ($16.6 billion), Intel ($13.1 billion), and Microsoft ($12.3 billion).

Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.

The confluence of those three initiatives—in the fulfillment centers, and with AWS and the Kindle—vaulted Amazon back into the graces of Wall Street. In 2008, Amazon surpassed eBay in market capitalization and was beginning to be mentioned in the same breath as Google, Apple, and a new Silicon Valley upstart, Facebook.

Thus did Jeff Bezos become one of the original investors in Google, his company's future rival,