Esther Dyson Quotes
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I became a real free market fanatic. I'm probably less so now than even two or three years ago.
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The inner sort of consumer identity got the best of people. And everybody just wants things for free. And that's created this strange kind of cheapness to everything, where everything becomes throwaway. And people, I think, have started to undervalue things, maybe because there's too much, maybe because it's too easy to make, but I think mostly just because, somehow, that's the pattern that got set. And I think that's regrettable.
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Dyson's Law: Do ask; don't lie.
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Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy.
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The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.
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The great thing is, Internet allows you to create your own job, not just look for jobs other people are going to give you. And that, combined with the American spirit, I think, is going to help us come out of the recession faster than other countries. And I think it's going to help Africa come out of, you know, a century of slump.
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Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.
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Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.
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Internet becoming accessible everywhere, whether it was Wi-Fi at work, on your cell phone as you traveled. People had it at home with broadband. There was a big change.It used to be people used the Internet primarily at work, because that's where they had a good connection. Now they're using it at home. And the second big change is, they used it not just to get information, but to communicate with one another. And, so, it became not simply an information exchange, but a personal exchange, a communication mechanism.
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Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers' rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody - government stay away.
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As an investor in small companies, I don't care how rich Microsoft is. I care about what my opportunities are.
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Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.
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The Net is not a single home. Rather, it's an environment where thousands of small homes and communities can form and define and design themselves.
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It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.
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I believe in markets doing what they do well, which is to develop technology, and letting citizens do what they ideally do well, which is to set policy.
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I would like to see us shake-in, instead of a shakeout, in the sense that it's true that there's a lot of junk online, and we have to filter it and so forth.
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In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.
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Listening to other companies' customers is the best way to gain market share, while listening to the visionaries is the best way to create new markets.
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The best investor is your customer.
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Owning the intellectual property is like owning land: You need to keep investing in it again and again to get a payoff; you can't simply sit back and collect rent.
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It's not that you have jobs on the Internet, but the Internet makes it possible for more people to build their own jobs. What it does is, it erodes the power of institutions. It used to be you needed an institution to have a job. But, if you look at the three of us on this show, I don't think any of us is really employed by an institution. We run our own lives.
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From the business point of view—not to overstate it—intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.
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It looks simple to come up with a tablet that works, but it is not, ... In order to have the power and portability you need, you need power. The screen is the part of the device that uses the most power.
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I had a lot of successes, but what really made me fearless was my complete failure at Zidd-Davis. Once you've lived through that, you know you can survive, and you're not as scared... There's nothing to build confidence like real achievement, but also like real failure.