The Innovators Quotes

“the ideal chief executive as an outside person, an inside person, and a person of action.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“As [the company] has grown larger and larger, I have enjoyed my daily work less and less,”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year,”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“McCarthy’s vision was prescient, but it differed in one major way from Kay’s vision, and from the networked world that we have today. It was not based on personal computers with their own memory and processing power.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“One aspect of innovation is inventing new devices; another is inventing popular ways to use these devices.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“You’re better off to go out and start your own company and fail than it is to stick at one company for thirty years.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Sometimes the difference between geniuses and jerks hinges on whether their ideas turn out to be right.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“One useful leadership talent is knowing when to push ahead against doubters and when to heed them.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“somewhat like the ancient Greek “liar’s paradox,” in which the truth of the statement “This statement is false” cannot be determined. (If the statement is true, then it’s also false, and vice versa.) By coming up with statements”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The knack is to get people to follow you, even to places they may not think they can go, by motivating them to share your sense of mission.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“This interplay of military and academic motives became ingrained in the Internet. “The design of both the ARPANET and the Internet favored military values, such as survivability, flexibility, and high performance, over commercial goals, such as low cost, simplicity, or consumer appeal,” the technology historian Janet Abbate noted. “At the same time, the group that designed and built ARPA’s networks was dominated by academic scientists, who incorporated their own values of collegiality, decentralization of authority, and open exchange of information into the system.”90 These academic researchers of the late 1960s, many of whom associated with the antiwar counterculture, created a system that resisted centralized command. It would route around any damage from a nuclear attack but also around any attempt to impose control.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“One of the commonly accepted narratives of the Internet is that it was built to survive a nuclear attack. This enrages many of its architects, including Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts, who insistently and repeatedly debunked this origin myth. However, like many of the innovations of the digital age, there were multiple causes and origins. Different players have different perspectives. Some who were higher in the chain of command than Taylor and Roberts, and who have more knowledge of why funding decisions were actually made, have begun to debunk the debunking. Let’s try to peel away the layers. There is no doubt that when Paul Baran proposed a packet-switched network in his RAND reports, nuclear survivability was one of his rationales. “It was necessary to have a strategic system that could withstand a first attack and then be able to return the favor in kind,” he explained. “The problem was that we didn’t have a survivable communications system, and so Soviet missiles aimed at U.S. missiles would take out the entire telephone-communication system.”76 That led to an unstable hair-trigger situation; a nation was more likely to launch a preemptive strike if it feared that its communications and ability to respond would not survive an attack. “The origin of packet switching is very much Cold War,” he said. “I got very interested in the subject of how the hell you build a reliable command and control system.”77 So in 1960 Baran set about devising “a communication network which will allow several hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack.”78”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Bush’s description of how basic research provides the seed corn for practical inventions became known as the “linear model of innovation.” Although subsequent waves of science historians sought to debunk the linear model for ignoring the complex interplay between theoretical research and practical applications, it had a popular appeal as well as an underlying truth. The war, Bush wrote, had made it “clear beyond all doubt” that basic science—discovering the fundamentals of nuclear physics, lasers, computer science, radar—“is absolutely essential to national security.” It was also, he added, crucial for America’s economic security. “New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science. A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.” By the end of his report, Bush had reached poetic heights in extolling the practical payoffs of basic scientific research: “Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.”9 Based on this report, Congress established the National Science Foundation.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“markets rather than merely chasing old ones.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“the importance of spawning new”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Innovation happens in stages.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“En 2011 se alcanzó un hito significativo: Apple y Google gastaron más dinero en pleitos y pagos relacionados con patentes que en la investigación y el desarrollo de nuevos productos.”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“En palabras de George Dyson: «El computador de programa almacenado, tal y como lo imaginó Alan Turing y lo plasmó John von Neumann, diluyó la distinción entre números que significan cosas y números que hacen cosas. Nuestro universo nunca volvería a ser el mismo».”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“unexpected results drove new theories.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The roots of the personal computer can be found in the Free Speech Movement that arose at Berkeley in 1964 and in the Whole Earth Catalog, which did the marketing for the do-it-yourself ideals behind the personal computer movement.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“poetry as a language within a language,”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“American science and engineering was even more sexist than it is today,” Jennings said.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“She attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College in Maryville, where the tuition was $76 per year. (In 2013 it was approximately $14,000 per year for in-state residents, a twelve-fold increase after adjusting for inflation.)”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“focused, yet he dazzled and baffled colleagues by suddenly changing his mind when he realized he needed to think different.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Steve Jobs was famously stubborn and”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The same traits that make them inventive, such as stubbornness and focus, can make them resistant to change when new ideas come along.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Computer innovators, like other pioneers, can find themselves left behind if they get stuck in their ways.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Grace was a good man,”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution