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“In its quest to organize the world’s information, Google has scoured vast troves of data to amass the greatest accumulation of information assets on the planet, including the billions of search queries on google.com and YouTube and the billions of interactions on Android, the dominant operating system for most mobile devices. Google also controls an ever-growing index of the world’s websites and the browsing history of more than 2 billion users, three types of maps of the Earth’s surface and traffic patterns, a real-time list of trending topics, the largest archive of discussions in Usenet groups, the entire contents of 20 million books, a huge collection of photographs, the largest collection of video on the planet, the largest online email repository, even the largest archive of DNA data.”
― Robert Tercek, Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World

“everyday life is about to get strange or amazing, depending upon how comfortable you are with devices that talk back.”
― Robert Tercek, Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World

“Apple has $194 billion in cash on hand. That’s enough to buy 483 of the S&P 500 companies.”
― Robert Tercek, Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World

“In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. So many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of the forces and the way they interact produce huge differences in outcomes. Not only that, but history is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system. Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system. Though it is influenced by myriad factors, we can build computer models that take more and more of them into consideration, and produce better and better weather forecasts. Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately. Markets, for example, are a level two chaotic system. What will happen if we develop a computer program that forecasts with 100 per cent accuracy the price of oil tomorrow? The price of oil will immediately react to the forecast, which would consequently fail to materialise. If the current price of oil is $90 a barrel, and the infallible computer program predicts that tomorrow it will be $100, traders will rush to buy oil so that they can profit from the predicted price rise. As a result, the price will shoot up to $100 a barrel today rather than tomorrow. Then what will happen tomorrow? Nobody knows.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Unlike traditional retailers, Amazon boasted what was called a negative operating cycle. Customers paid with their credit cards when their books shipped but Amazon settled its accounts with the book distributors only every few months. With every sale, Amazon put more cash in the bank, giving it a steady stream of capital to fund its operations and expansion.14 The company could also lay claim to a uniquely high return on invested capital. Unlike brick-and-mortar retailers, whose inventories were spread out across hundreds or thousands of stores around the country, Amazon had one website and, at that time, a single warehouse and inventory. Amazon’s ratio of fixed costs to revenue was considerably more favorable than that of its offline competitors. In other words, Bezos and Covey argued, a dollar that was plugged into Amazon’s infrastructure could lead to exponentially greater returns than a dollar that went into the infrastructure of any other retailer in the world.”
― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“Mr. Jobs’s next big thing is buttressed by mounting evidence of a post-PC era in which silicon, not software, will be king. That is likely to bring wrenching changes in the technology world, largely dominated by Microsoft for the last decade. Under Microsoft’s hegemony, hardware became a low-cost commodity. Now it may be software’s turn.”
― The New York Times, The Rise of Apple

“The spotlight really needs to shine on the creation and dissolution of markets rather than on the cheap or low-cost producer as the pivotal impact of disruption.”
― Haydn Shaughnessy, Platform Disruption Wave: A New Theory of Disruption and the Eclipse of American Power

“As Christensen’s work strongly implies, the basis of disruption is that competitors are creating new markets. The playing field is changing, not the product or service. And few incumbents can afford the breadth of imagination to envision a new playing field.”
― Haydn Shaughnessy, Platform Disruption Wave: A New Theory of Disruption and the Eclipse of American Power

“The US tire industry in the 1930s, TV manufacture in the 1960s, and autos in the 1970s all suffered the effects of decision processes that were unresponsive to change because of the range of obligations that went with quasi-monopoly. In all three cases, the attack came from the rise of cheaper sources of production in Asia.”
― Haydn Shaughnessy, Platform Disruption Wave: A New Theory of Disruption and the Eclipse of American Power

“There can be no question that the loss of TV manufacture in the United States was a disruption, but the loss had not been brought about by a disruptive technology or disruptive innovation. The key factor in disruption was the Asian approach to innovation, based primarily on process improvement and optimal design.”
― Haydn Shaughnessy, Platform Disruption Wave: A New Theory of Disruption and the Eclipse of American Power

“The familiar if sad tale of Apple Computer illustrates this crucial concept. Apple has suffered of late because positive feedback has fueled the competing system offered by Microsoft and Intel. As Wintel’s share of the personal computer market grew, users found the Wintel system more and more attractive. Success begat more success, which is the essence of positive feedback. With Apple’s share continuing to decline, many computer users now worry that the Apple Macintosh will shortly become the Sony Beta of computers, orphaned and doomed to a slow death as support from software producers gradually fades away. This worry is cutting into Apple’s sales, making it a potentially self-fulfilling forecast. Failure breeds failure: this, too, is the essence of positive feedback.”
― Carl Shapiro, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy

“In the case of Apple, there is effectively a network of Macintosh users, which is in danger of falling below critical mass.”
― Carl Shapiro, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy

“we’ve been redefining what it means to be human. Over the past 60 years, as mechanical processes have replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique to humans, we’ve had to change our minds about what sets us apart. As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. Each step of surrender—we are not the only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music, or invent a mathematical law—will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special? In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repair person, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“It became apparent that communications and computing served each other so intimately that they might actually become the same thing;”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

“Because if you’re going to make a small inexpensive computer you have to sell a lot of them to make a lot of money. And we intend to make a lot of money.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

“In the modern computer, software has developed in such a way as to fill this role of go-between. On one end you have the so-called end user who wants to be able to order up a piece of long division, say, simply by supplying two numbers to the machine and ordering it to divide them. At the other end stands the actual computer, which for all its complexity is something of a brute. It can perform only several hundred basic operations, and long division may not be one of them. The machine may have to be instructed to perform a sequence of several of its basic operations in order to accomplish a piece of long division. Software—a series of what are known as programs—translates the end user’s wish into specific, functional commands for the machine.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

“Folks would discuss whether the Antichrist was already alive and, if so, which world leader it might be.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“Systems thinking has been used to understand everything from the functioning of a city to the internal dynamics of a skin cell, and plays a key role in deciphering interdependence.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“emphasis on group success spurs cooperation, and fosters trust and purpose. But people cooperate only if they can see the interdependent reality of their environment.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Everyone knew the boat kept flipping, but without a clear view of what everyone else was doing, nobody could see why or how to change it.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“we needed to promote at the organizational level the kind of knowledge pool that arises within small teams.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“We wanted to fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“sharing information would help build relationships and the two together would kindle a new, coherent, adaptive entity that could win the fight.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“It is now a building in which individuals toil independently in accordance with top-down, need-to-know reductionist planning. They might as well be spread around the globe.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“physical space has for a century been used to facilitate and enforce efficiency and specialization. Along with factory assembly lines, the architectural frames of white-collar work have evolved to maximize efficiency.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“Today, a staggering 93 percent of those who work in cubicles say that they would prefer a different workspace.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“We knew that forging the neural network that would facilitate our emergent analysis of complex problems was vital for our long-term success, so we designed prepackaged communication bundles that our teams could take into the field, wherever they were in the world.”
― Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

“What happened to Samsung, as well as to HTC and Motorola before it, is illustrative. The evolution of the smartphone industry is a microcosm of what’s happening to the broader economic landscape. In this new world, platforms sit at the top of the economy. They have the most market power, the highest profits, and the most sustainable competitive advantage. As Samsung showed, it’s still possible to build a valuable linear business, but its competitive advantage often evaporates quickly as products get commoditized and competitors copy features—leaving the originator continually scrambling to replace those strengths. Features are easy to emulate; networks aren’t. Products get commoditized; platforms don’t.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy