Trillions Quotes

“The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex—not that which never has divined it. —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR. There”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“We’ve spent a half-century believing that people should become computer literate. That’s precisely backward. Computing should become human literate.”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“There are three kinds of companies: companies that try to lead customers where they don’t want to go (these find the idea of being customer-led an insight); companies that listen to customers and then respond to their articulated needs (needs that are probably already being satisfied by more foresightful competitors); and companies that lead customers where they want to go but don’t know it yet. Companies that create the future do more than satisfy customers; they constantly amaze them. —GARY HAMEL AND COIMBATORE KRISHNARAO PRAHALAD So,”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“We have already said that many devices will have no need to be on the Internet. But, perhaps certain devices won’t be allowed to be on the Internet. Just as today’s electrical codes require a strict separation between 120 volt power circuits and low-voltage wiring such as doorbell circuits, it may be that strict rules about sequestering certain basic functions from the public information space will prove to be the ultimate protection against malicious remote tampering. Similarly, certain combinations of computational and physical power in the same device might be proscribed. One”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“Getting past the client-server model will be a long, slow slog. Technological inertia and backward-looking economic interests will conspire to ensure this. But slowly the barriers to progress will yield. The pressure will come from several sources. The already-common disasters associated with too-big-to-fail centralized services will become ever more common and serious. As a result, it will begin to dawn on the public that the vulnerabilities that these events expose are not growing pains but are inherent in the model.”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“The designer who aspires to build on the scale of an ecology must abandon the conceit of absolute control of her medium and instead seek the abstract understanding of the scientist, and then apply this understanding to natural processes with the force-subverting skill of the jujitsu master. We cannot specify an ecology, but nor are we powerless to affect its evolution.”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“Designs belong to individual designers; Architecture belongs to communities of practice. We”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“If “ship early, ship often” is interpreted as the willingness to expose not-quite-feature-complete but well-tested products to the healthy pressures of real users, everybody wins. But if it is used as an excuse for shipping half-baked, flaky products; using your customers as unpaid quality-assurance staff—and counting on ever-lowering expectations of quality in a slipshod marketplace numbed by crashing TVs and bug-filled software—it is another matter entirely. Even”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“Mycorrhizal networks have been shown to move water to areas of drought, confer resistance against toxic surroundings or disease, and even support interplant communication. The fungi often benefit by getting access to carbohydrates, while the plants are supplied with a greater store of water and minerals such as phosphorus that the fungi free up from the soil. Carbon has been shown to migrate, via mycorrhizal networks, from paper birch to Douglas fir trees.”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“Open source is characteristically about herd behavior and local hill climbing. There is such a thing as the wisdom of crowds, but it is an inherently conservative wisdom. A crowd can tread a meandering cowpath into a highway. What it will never do, however, is decide to dig a tunnel through the mountain to shorten the path, or to leave the mountain altogether for a better one. THE”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“The real agent of change is not computers per se but rather the computation that we are installing into even the most mundane constituents of our everyday surroundings. As we have seen, we are at the point that it is now often cheaper to manufacture digital information processing into an object than it to leave it out. Microelectronics permit even trivial products to be deeply complex and connectible—and that is both the promise and the problem. That”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“Abstraction can be a powerful tool, but it can also lead to heads buried in the sand. In”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“Today’s so-called cloud isn’t really a cloud at all. It’s a bunch of corporate dirigibles painted to look like clouds. You can tell they’re fake because they all have logos on them. The real cloud wouldn’t have a logo. Once”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it. . . . Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. —GEORGE ORWELL INFORMATION”
― Peter Lucas, Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology