The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

⚡️ 11 Quotes from the book

“The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them. They were not conjured up in a garret or garage by solo inventors suitable to be singled out on magazine covers or put into a pantheon with Edison, Bell, and Morse. Instead, most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively.”

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“This insight would become the core concept of the digital age: any piece of content, data, or information—music, text, pictures, numbers, symbols, sounds, video—could be expressed in digital form and manipulated by machines.”

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“A physicist is one who’s concerned with the truth,” he later said. “An engineer is one who’s concerned with getting the job done.”

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“People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they’re doing and, moreover, make you want to admire them for it.”

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“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

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“Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product.”

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“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

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“First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses.”

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“The best innovators were those who understood the trajectory of technological change and took the baton from innovators who preceded them.”

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“Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation.”

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“We humans can remain relevant in an era of cognitive computing because we are able to think different, something that an algorithm, almost by definition, can’t master.”

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