Question success.

Not every success needs to be abandoned drastically, but every success needs to be questioned drastically. Do interesting substitutes exist? Are radical alternatives receiving compounding attention? You need to consider innovations far afield, ones that are not "on the same mountain." Are there innovations that are changing the rules of the game? Beware of minor incremental improvements--slight baby steps on the same mountain. These can be a form of denial. Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, declares "Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy."

Spiral Eye Needles

Easy threading needles

These ingenious sewing needles can be threaded blindfolded. You pull the thread into a spiral from the side, and for the most part the thread will remain in the eye as you sew. That is not true for calyx eye needles (invented a hundred years ago) as a solution to the vexing problem of threading the eye. It's as easy for the thread to slip out of the open slot at the end of the calyx needle as it is to slip in, and this wavering can fray the thread. The spiral eye needle doesn't snag, but in my experience it will occasionally let the thread slip out. Expert sewers might find that annoying. It is dead simple to slip back on, and the thread is not frayed, so I can put up with that small inconvenience.

Spiral Eye needles are expensive: $5 each. However they should last a lifetime if you don't lose track of them (they look very similar to regular sewing needles). What I really want is a side-threading sewing-machine needle. Schmetz makes some in limited sizes, but of a less ingenious design.

Who is in charge of devolution?

It is a rare leader who can creatively destroy as well as relentlessly build. It's a rare committee that will vote to terminate what works. It's a rare outsider whose advice to relinquish a golden oldie will be heeded. You are in charge of devolving. Everyone is. It's just one more chore in the network economy.

Send the network out.

There is only one sound strategy for crossing the valley: Don't go alone. Established firms are now doing what they should be doing: weaving dozens, if not hundreds, of alliances and partnerships; seeking out as many networks of affiliation and common cause as possible, sharing the risk by making a web. A motley caravan of firms can cross a suboptimal stretch with hope. Banding together buys their networks several things. First, it allows knowledge about the terrain to be shared. Some firm riding point might discover a small hill of opportunity. Settling there allows small oases of opportunity to be created. If enough intermediate oases can be found or made, the long journey can become a series of shorter hops along an archipelago of small successes. The more firms, customers, explorers, and vested interests that are attempting to cross, the more likely the archipelago can be found or created.

To create the future car--a car that is easily imaginable right now--an entrepreneurial car company can only succeed by spinning together a network of vendors, regulators, insurers, road makers, and competitors to help others to devolve quickly and cross.

Don't mistake a clear view for a short distance.

The terror of devolution is that a firm must remain intact while it descends into the harsh deserts between the mountains of successes. It must continue to be more or less profitable while it devolves. You can't jump from peak to peak. No matter how smart or how speedy an organization is, it can't get to where it wants to go unless it muddles across an undesirable place one step at a time. Enduring a period of less than optimal fitness is doubly difficult when a very clear image of the new perfection is in plain sight.

For instance, sometime in the early 1990s the Encyclopaedia Britannica company saw that they were stuck on a local peak. They were at the top: the best encyclopedia in print. They had a worldwide sales force peddling a world-recognized brand. But rising fast nearby was something new: CD-ROM. The outline of this dazzling new mountain was clear. Its height was inspiring. But it was a different realm from their old mountain: no paper, no door-to-door salespeople, cheap, little dinky disks on the shelf, and a media that required constant updates. They would have to undo much of what they knew. Still there, clear as could be, was their future. But while the destination was extremely clear, the path that led to it was treacherous. And, it turned out, the route was even longer than they thought. The company spent millions, lost salespeople in droves, and verged on collapse. They entered a scary period during which neither print nor CD worked. Eventually they completed the CD-ROM encyclopedia they had envisioned many years earlier, but only after an outsider (Microsoft) published a better one. Encyclopaedia Britannica's future is still in doubt. But their travails are common. Says futurist Paul Saffo: "We tend to mistake a clear view of the future for a short distance."

To scale a higher peak -- a potentially greate gain -- often means crossing a valley of less fitness first. A clear view of the future should not be mistaken for a short distance.

Today, nearly everyone in business has a clear view of the future of TV. It's something that comes to you in the same way you get the internet. You choose your shows, from 500 channels. You can shop, maybe interact with a game, or click for more information about a movie you are watching. The technology seems feasible, the physics logical, and the economics plausible. But Future TV looks a lot closer than it really is because the path between here and there winds through a barren desert with little optimal about it. Although the economics may work later, they barely work out now in the alkali flats. It may be that none of the large television or computer or phone companies are sufficiently nimble (or hungry) to make it across the valley of death--even though the shape of success is so visible.

A New Way of Reading

I have a piece in the August 2010 issue of the Smithsonian magazine, their 40th Anniversary issue. They commissioned 40 views of the future. I wrote about the future of reading, or what they titled Reading in a Whole New Way

.

An excerpt:

And it demands more than our eyes. The most physically active we may get while reading a book is to flip the pages or dog-ear a corner. But screens engage our bodies. Touch screens respond to the ceaseless caress of our fingers. Sensors in game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii track our hands and arms. We interact with what we see. Soon enough, screens will follow our eyes to perceive where we gaze. A screen will know what we are paying attention to and for how long. In the futuristic movie Minority Report (2002), the character played by Tom Cruise stands in front of a wraparound screen and hunts through vast archives of information with the gestures of a symphony conductor. Reading becomes almost athletic. Just as it seemed weird five centuries ago to see someone read silently, in the future it will seem weird to read without moving your body.

Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. The screen rewards, and nurtures, thinking in real time. We review a movie while we watch it, we come up with an obscure fact in the middle of an argument, we read the owner’s manual of a gadget we spy in a store before we purchase it rather than after we get home and discover that it can’t do what we need it to do.

The basic rules of success are eternal:

serve customers obsessively, escalate quality, outdo your competitors, have fun. The nature of the new economy changes none of those rules. But the success they help one attain is not what it used to be. However you want to measure it, success is a type of inertia. The law of increasing returns can compound it but success still follows its momentum to the top--but the top is highly unstable now. Being at the top when the sands shift is a liability. For anyone sane, success should breed paranoia.

In the highly turbulent, quickly reforming environment of the new economy, the competitive advantage goes to the nimble and malleable, the flexible and quick. Speed and agility trump size and experience. Fast to find the new is only one half the equation; fast to let go is the other important half.

Of all the lessons that biology has to offer us as we begin to assemble a network economy, the necessity of abandoning our successes will be the hardest to practice.

Tour:Smart

Musician touring tips

I don't have a band, but if I did, I would use this book to guide me through the intricacies of touring. That's the new economics of the music: a returning emphasis on live performance. This fat book is the best guidance I've seen for emerging musical artists. It is brutally honest, remarkably wise, and extremely helpful. Atkins is really good at extracting lessons. There are testimonies not just from many other musicians, but their roadies, agents, bus-drivers, managers, fans, and all the other folks you will need supporting you. This book is so good, in fact, anyone "touring," including authors, dancers, filmmakers would find pats of it useful. In the new economy, your live presence is more valuable than copies of your past work. Here's how to maximize your presence with the least hassles, and hopefully make a living do it.

Practicing what he preaches, author Martin Atkins offers live interactions, chats, lectures, performances, and email correspondence versions of his advice. Another kind of touring.

To maximize innovation, maximize the fringes.

Encourage borders, outskirts, and temporary isolation where the voltage of difference can spark the new. The principle of skunk works plays a vital role in the network economy. By definition a network is one huge edge. It has no fixed center. As the network grows it holds increasing opportunities for protected backwaters where innovations can hatch, out of view but plugged in. Once fine-tuned, the innovation can replicate wildly. The global dimensions of the network economy means that an advance can be spread quickly and completely through the globe. The World Wide Web itself was created this way. The first software for the web was written in the relative obscurity of an academic research station in Geneva, Switzerland. Once it was up and running in their own labs in 1991, it spread within six months to computers all around the world.

Because skill guilds constrain...

...(and defend) an organization, it is often far easier to start a new organization than to change a successful old one.

This is a major reason why the network economy is rich in start-ups. Starting new is a less risky way to assemble an appropriate new set of competencies than trying to rearrange an established firm, whose highly intertwined bundles resist unraveling.
In a rugged economic landscape, about the only hope an established company has for adapting to turbulent change is by employing the "skunk works" mode, which reflects another biological imperative. Computer simulations of evolution, particularly those run by David Ackley, a researcher at Bellcore, demonstrate how the source for mutations that eventually conquer a population start at the geographical fringes of the population pool. Then after a period of "beta testing" on the margins, the mutants overtake the center with their improvements and become the majority.

At the edges, innovations don't have to push against the inertia of an established order; they are mostly competing against other mutants. The edges also permit more time for a novel organism to work out its bugs without having to oppose highly evolved organisms. Once the mutants are refined, however, they sweep rapidly through the old order and soon become the dominant form.

This is the logic of skunk works. Hide a team far from the corporate center, where the clever can operate in isolation, away from the suffocating inertia of success. Protect the team from performance pressures until their work has had the kinks ironed out. Then introduce the innovation into the center. Every once in a while it will take over and become the new standard.

Economist Michael Porter surveyed 100 industries in 10 countries and found that in all the industries he studied, the source of innovations were usually either "outsiders" or else relative outsiders--established leaders in one industry making an entry into a new one.

The more successfully integrated...

...a firm's capabilities are, the harder it is to shift its expertise by changing just a little. Thus successful firms are more prone to failure during high rates of change. (Success makes it easy for the successful to deny this fact.) Indeed, the very success of successful organizations makes them conservative toward change--because they must unravel many interdependent skills--even if some are working fine.

The problem that IBM faced with the arrival of the personal computer in the early 1980s was not the problem of acquiring technological know-how. As a matter of fact, IBM already knew how to build personal computers better than anyone. But the package of proficiencies the blue suits had honed over the years to make IBM indomitable in the mainframe computer field could not be gradually adapted to fit the new faster-paced terrain of desktop-based computing. IBM was supreme in the old regime because their sales, marketing, R&D;, and management skills were all optimally woven into a highly evolved machine. They couldn't change the size of the computers they sold without also altering their management, forecasting, and research skills at the same time. Changing everything at once is difficult for anyone, anytime.

Letting go at the top is not an act against...

... perfection, but against shortsightedness.

In addition to the scarcity of leaders willing to disassemble the profitable, and the natural bias of companies toward perfection, there is another reason why letting go is so hard. Economists Paul Milgrom and John Roberts studied the competencies--the winning traits--of a large number of firms in modern manufacturing and concluded that competencies of companies tended to occur in suites, or in a guilds of skills.

This natural bundling of traits makes it very difficult for contenders to challenge a successful firm. As Richard Nelson, an economist at Columbia University says, "Successful firms often are difficult to imitate effectively because to do so requires that a competitor adopt a number of different practices at once." Companies can buy technology and human skills in a particular area. But gradually acquiring one or two competencies at a time does no good when you are attempting to displace a highly successful firm. The whole suite of mastery has to be acquired simultaneously in order for you to be competitively effective. A firm such as Disney is almost inimitable because of the difficulty of obtaining in one swift swoop its highly integrated mix of skills.

The natural bundling of traits also makes unraveling for devolution immensely difficult. To devolve demands going against all the best qualities of an organization all at once. The organic world offers a number of lessons in this regard. Biotechnology is built on the knowledge that most genes don't code for anything themselves. Most genes regulate--turn off and on--other genes. The genetic apparatus of a cell, then, is a dense network of hyperlinked interactions. Any gene is indirectly controlled by many other genes.

Thus, most attributes in a biological organism usually travel in the genome as loosely coupled associations. Blue eyes and freckles, say. Or red hair and a hot temper. Two important consequences follow from this. First, to get rid of the redhead's feisty temperament by evolution may also mean--at least at first--getting rid of the red hair. Animal breeders know this dilemma firsthand. It is difficult to breed out an unwanted trait without breeding out many desirable ones. Chicken breeders can't get rid of a chicken's aggressiveness without throwing out its egg-laying proficiencies.

Secondly, the interlocking guild of competencies, which give organisms and organizations their advantages, becomes a drawback during change. The increased interlinkage of the network economy heightens this dilemma. In the network economy, the skills of individual employees are more tightly connected, the activities of different departments more highly coordinated, the goals of various firms more independent. The net brings the influence of formerly unrelated forces to bear upon each potential move.

Found Quotes, 2

"With 300 million people in America, you can fail to impress 299 million of them and still go platinum." -- Kareem Abdul Jabbar TED 2007

"If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant." -- Markus Dohle

"In many ways, it's the things that are not there that we are most proud of." -- Jonathan Ive, iPad designer, on all the features that are missing from the iPad.

"Women’s friendships are face to face: They talk, cry together, share secrets. Men’s friendships are side by side: We play golf. We go to football games." -- Jeffrey Zaslow

"Always provide correction in private and praise in public." -- Scott Delinger

“When I was hacking [in my 20s], I’d be working away and think an hour had passed; then I’d look up, and it had been four hours. Now when I think an hour has gone by, I look up and it’s an hour.” -- Andy Hertzfeld

"Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money." Tim O'Reilly

"If your strategy in life is to avoid those activities and requirements that you don’t enjoy, you will have a difficult time transcending any definition of mediocrity. That’s not a criticism – merely an observation." -- Mike Rowe, in advice to a Boy Scout

"People can spend real money to purchase in-game items [in Farmville]. Clearly, even people who play Farmville want to avoid playing Farmville."
-- A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz

"A well-trained man knows how to answer questions; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking."
-- E. Digby Baltzell (1955)

There can be no expertise in innovation...

...unless there is also expertise in demolishing the ensconced.

There is nothing wrong with perfection. To be maximally fit for a niche, to serve optimally, to seek the peak of perfection--these will always remain the goals of any firm, or individual. So why let go of perfection at the top?

The problem with the top is not too much perfection, but too little perspective. Great success in one product or service tends to block a longer, larger view of the opportunities available in the economy as a whole, and of the rapidly shifting terrain ahead. Legendary, long-lived companies are intensely outward-looking. They can spot a global peak and distinguish it from the many false peaks. They understand that an inward focus, especially a narrow focus on being "world's best" in some matter, can work against long-term adaptation by blinding the organization from seeking new heights. Better for the long haul is an outward perspective that is always seeking alternative mountains to climb.

This outward vista is all the more critical in the new economy because perfection is no longer a solo act. Success is a highly interdependent enterprise, encompassing a network of vendors, customers, and even competitors. A firm needs to explore widely, outside of the current favored position, and at times contrarily.

With or without someone in charge...

... of creative destruction, there is no alternative (that we know of) to leaving behind perfectly good products, expensively developed technology, and wonderful brands, and heading down to trouble in order to ascend again with hope.

Once upon a time this march was rare. The relatively stable markets and technological environment of the industrial era were smooth, not rugged. Only a few parameters changed each year, and they changed gradually. Opportunities arrived with forewarning. Those days are over. The biological nature of the new economic order means that the sudden disintegration of established domains will be as certain as the sudden appearance of the new.

And the better the company...

...the less room there is for devolution.

Everything about a modern organization is dedicated to pushing uphill. The CEO is trained, and paid well, to push the firm toward the peak. Quality circles get the entire workforce marching uphill toward optimal performance. Consultants monitor the tiniest detail, trying to eliminate anything that might keep the company from attaining the peak of perfection. Reengineering wonks zero in on computer data showing which parts of the organization are lagging behind. Even the receptionist is in search of excellence.

Where in the modern company is the permission, let alone the skill, to let go of something that is working, and trudge downhill toward chaos?

And have no doubt: It will be chaotic and dangerous down below. The definition of lower adaptivity is that it places you closer to extinction. But you have to descend and risk extinction in order to have the opportunity to rise again.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter calls the progressive act of destroying success "creative destruction." It's an apt term. Letting go of perfection requires a brute act of will. And it can be done badly. Management guru Tom Peters claims that corporate leaders are now being asked to do two tasks--building up and then nimbly tearing down--and that these two tasks require such diametrically opposed temperaments that the same person cannot do both. He impishly suggests that a company in the fast-moving terrain of the network economy ordain a Chief Destruction Officer.

Smart Spice

Long-shelf-life spice

These small servings of spice are individually wrapped to preserve freshness. Each packet is about a teaspoonful. They are fantastic for spices you may use only occasionally, say nutmeg, cardamon, cumin, etc. Even a tightly capped bottle of spice will loose potency compared to these sealed envelopes with an extended shelf live of many years. While this method does increase litter compared to bulk spices, the actual volume of extra packing you would use in a year is negligible -- maybe equivalent to large plastic bag. In exchange for this and a higher price per ounce, you get organic spice with remarkable freshness, always at the ready. Because of their intense flavor we've started using them for some spices we use regularly. (I am surprised the creators don't offer a single box "spice rack" with a sample of each spice.) The tiny packets are also great for camping.

The harsh news is that "getting stuck...

...on a local peak" is a certainty in the new economy.

Instability and disequilibrium are the norms; optimization won't last long. Sooner, rather than later, a product will be eclipsed at its prime. Indeed, an innovation at its prime increases its chances of being eclipsed. In Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation, a study of innovation in the automobile industry, Utterback concludes that "an unhappy byproduct of success in one generation of technology is a narrowing of focus and vulnerability to competitors championing the next technological generation." The product may be perfect, but for an increasingly smaller range of uses or customers.

While one product is perfecting its peak, an outsider can move the entire mountain by changing the rules. Detroit was the peak of perfection for big cars, but suddenly the small-car mountain overshadowed it. Sears was king of the retail mountain, but then Wal-Mart and Kmart's innovations created a whole new mountain range that towered above it. For a brief moment Nintendo owned the summits of the video-game mountain until Sega and later Sony built separate mountains even higher. Each of the displaced industries, companies, or products were stuck on a less optimal local peak.

There is only one way out. The stuck organism must devolve. In order to go from a peak of local success to another higher peak, it must first go downhill. To do that it must reverse itself and for a while become less adapted, less fit, less optimal. It must do business less efficiently, with less perfection, relative to its current niche.

This is a problem. Organizations, like living beings, are hardwired to optimize what they know--to cultivate success, not to throw it away. Companies find devolving unthinkable and impossible. There is simply no allowance in the enterprise for letting go.

Predicting the Present, First Five Years of Wired

I was digging through some files the other day and found this document from 1997. It gathers a set of quotes from issues of Wired magazine in its first five years. I don't recall why I created this (or even if I did compile all of them), but I suspect it was for our fifth anniversary issue. I don't think we ever ran any of it. Reading it now it is clear that all predictions of the future are really just predictions of the present.

Here it is in full:

We as a culture are deeply, hopelessly, insanely in love with gadgetry. And you can't fight love and win.
Jaron Lanier, Wired 1.02, May/June 1993, p. 80

No class in history has ever risen as fast as the blue-collar worker and no class has ever fallen as fast.
Peter Drucker, Wired 1.03, Jul/Aug 1993, p. 80

In the world of immersion, authorship is no longer the transmission of experience, but rather the construction of utterly personal experiences.
Brenda Laurel, Wired 1.06, Dec 1993, p. 107

I expect that within the next five years more than one in ten people will wear head-mounted computer displays while traveling in buses, trains, and planes.
Nicholas Negroponte, Wired 1.06, Dec 1993, p. 136

Pretty soon you'll have no more idea of what computer you're using than you have an idea of where your electricity is generated.
Danny Hillis, Wired 2.01, Jan 1994, p. 103

If we're ever going to make a thinking machine, we're going to have to face the problem of being able to build things that are more complex than we can understand.
Danny Hillis, Wired 2.01, Jan 1994, p. 104

Computers are the metaphor of our time.
Jim Metzner, Wired 2.02, Feb 1994, p. 66

Yesterday, we changed the channel; today we hit the remote; tomorrow, we'll reprogram our agents/filters. Advertising will not go away; it will be rejuvenated.
Michael Schrage, Wired 2.02, Feb 1994, p. 73

The scarce resource will not be stuff, but point of view.
Paul Saffo, Wired 2.03, Mar 1994, p. 73

The idea of Apple making a $200 anything was ridiculous to me. Apple couldn't make a $200 blank disk.
Bill Atkinson, Wired 2.04, Apr 1994, p. 104

Roadkill on the information highway will be the billions who will forget there are offramps to destinations other than Hollywood, Las Vegas, the local bingo parlor, or shiny beads from a shopping network.
Alan Kay, Wired 2.05, May 1994, p. 77

The future is bullshit.
Jay Chiat, Wired 2.07, Jul 1994, p. 84

Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled.
Kevin Kelly, Wired 2.07, Jul 1994, p. 93

In a world where information plus technology equals power, those who control the editing rooms run the show.
Hugh Gallagher, Wired 2.08, Aug 1994, p. 86

Some functions require domesticated robots -- wild robots that have been bribed, tricked, or evolved into household roles. But the wild robot has to come first.
Mark Tilden, Wired 2.09, Sep 1994, p. 107

Immortality is mathematical, not mystical.
Mike Perry, Wired 2.10, Oct 1994, p. 105

As the world becomes more universal, it also becomes more tribal. Holding on to what distinguishes you from others becomes very important.
John Naisbitt, Wired 2.10, Oct 1994, p. 115

Marc Andreessen will tell you with a straight face that he expects Mosaic Communications's Mosaic to become the world's standard interface to electronic information.
Gary Wolf, Wired 2.10, Oct 1994, p. 116

Life is not going to be easy in the 21st century for people who insist on black-and-white descriptions of reality.
Joel Garreau, Wired 2.11, Nov 1994, p. 158

Take Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. In mere seconds, you get an entire war -- the strategy, the attack, the retreat, the recapitulation. The whole military-industrial complex is reduced to a bunny and a stuttering guy zipping across the landscape.
Brian Boigon, Wired 2.12, Dec 1994, p. 94

The very distinction between original and copy becomes meaningless in a digital world -- there the work exists only as a copy.
Daniel Pierehbech, Wired 2.12, Dec 1994, p. 158

It's hard to predict this stuff. Say you'd been around in 1980, trying to predict the PC revolution. You never would've come and seen me.
Bill Gates, Wired 2.12, Dec 1994, p. 166

For a long time now, America has seemed like a country where most people watch television most of the time. But only recently are we beginning to notice that it is also a country where television watches us.
Phil Petton, Wired 3.01, Jan 1995, p. 126

What gives humans access to the symbolic domain of value and meaning is the fact that we die.
Regis Debray, Wired 3.01, Jan 1995, p. 162

The scary thing isn't that computers will match our intelligence by 2008; the scary thing is that this exponential curve keeps on going, and going, and going.
Greg Blonder, Wired 3.03, Mar 1995, p. 107

The future won't be 500 channels -- it will be one channel, your channel.
Scott Sassa, Wired 3.03, Mar 1995, p. 113

In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of "their" works, or that recreates their way of looking at things.
Brian Eno, Wired 3.05, May 1995, p. 150

It's important to regard technology in the long sweep of history as being one with history.
Vernor Vinge, Wired 3.06, Jun 1995, p. 161

Sufficiently radical optimism -- optimism that more and more seems to be technically feasible -- raises the most fundamental questions about consciousness, identity, and desire.
Vernor Vinge, Wired 3.06, Jun 1995, p. 161

I believe human nature is vastly more conservative than human technologies.
Newt Gingrich, Wired 3.08, Aug 1995, p. 109

We're using tools with unprecedented power, and in the process, we're becoming those tools.
John Brockman, Wired 3.08, Aug 1995, p. 119

If the Boeing 747 obeyed Moore's Law, it would travel a million miles an hour, it would be shrunken down in size, and a trip to New York would cost about five dollars.
Nathan Myrhvold, Wired 3.09, Sep 1995, p. 154

Isn't it odd how parents grieve if their child spends six hours a day on the Net but delight if those same hours are spent reading books?
Nicholas Negroponte, Wired 3.09, Sep 1995, p. 206

The human spirit is infinitely more complex than anything that we're going to be able to create in the short run. And if we somehow did create it in the short run, it would mean that we aren't so complex after all, and that we've all been tricking ourselves.
Douglas Hofstadter, Wired 3.11, Nov 1995, p. 114

What the Net is, more than anything else at this point, is a platform for entrepreneurial activities -- a free-market economy in its truest sense.
Marc Andreessen, Wired 3.12, Dec 1995, p. 236

3-D isn't an interface paradigm. 3-D isn't a world model. 3-D isn't the missing ingredient. 3-D is an attribute, like the color blue.
F. Randall Farmer, Wired 4.01, Jan 1996, p. 117

Without a deep understanding of the many selves that we express in the virtual, we cannot use our experiences there to enrich the real.
Sherry Turkle, Wired 4.01, Jan 1996, p. 199

The annoyance caused by spammers grows as the square of the size of the Net.
Ray Jones, Wired 4.02, Feb 1996, p. 96

We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much -- if at all.
Steve Jobs, Wired 4.02, Feb 1996, p. 106-107

Just as there is religious fundamentalism, there is a technical fundamentalism.
Paul Virilio, Wired 4.05, May 1996, p. 121

When I want to do something mindless to relax, I reinstall Windows 95.
Jean-Louis Gassee, Wired 4.05, May 1996, p. 190

It is doubtful that the [computer industry] as a whole has yet broken even.
Peter Drucker, Wired 4.08, Aug 1996, p. 116

The most successful innovators are the creative imitators, the Number Two.
Peter Drucker, Wired 4.08, Aug 1996, p. 118

We have a predisposition in Western culture for "just do it," whereas, I think that part of the future will be built much more around "just be it."
Watts Wacker, Wired 4.09, Sep 1996, p. 168

Revolutions aren't made by gadgets and technology. They're made by a shift in power, which is taking place all over the world.
Walter Wriston, Wired 4.10, Oct 1996, p. 205

Wires warp cyberspace. The two points at opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes, the same point, even if they are on opposite sides of the planet.
Neal Stephenson, Wired 4.12, Dec 1996, p. 98

The Web is alive. Not as a sentient being or mega-meta-super-collective consciousness, but more like a gigantic, sprouting slime mold.
Steven Alan Edwards, Wired 5.04, Apr 1997

Of all the prospects raised by the evolution of digital culture, the most tantalizing is the possibility that technology could fuse with politics to create a more civil society.
Jon Katz, Wired 5.04, Apr 1997

Technology is not the nameless Other. To embrace technology is to embrace, and face, ourselves.
David Cronenberg, Wired 5.05, May 1997, p. 185

Community precedes commerce.
John Hagel, Wired 5.08, Aug 1997, p. 84

Modern technology is a major evolutionary transition. It would be astonishing if that occurred without disrupting existing life.
Gregory Stock, Wired 5.09, Sep 1997, p. 128

Pollution is a measure of inefficiency, and inefficiency is lost profit.
Joe Maceda, Wired 5.10, Oct 1997, p. 138

For email, the old postcard rule applies. Nobody else is supposed to read your postcards, but you'd be a fool if you wrote anything private on one.
Miss Manners, Wired 5.11, Nov 1997

The American government can stop me from going to the US, but they can't stop my virus.
Dark Avenger, Wired 5.11, Nov 1997 (from a side-bar item on p.270 which does not appear in the Wired digital archives, excerpting from an interview by Sarah Gordon)

It is the arrogance of every age to believe that yesterday was calm.
Tom Peters, Wired 5.12, Dec 1997

Big and small companies alike...

...have to deal with their new landscape. It's often unclear whether a firm should strive to be on top of a mountain (for example, to be the world's most reliable hard disk manufacturer), when the whole mountain range beneath that particular peak may sink in a few years (if everyone moves their storage onto large protein arrays). An organization can cheer itself silly on its way to becoming the world's expert on a dead-end technology. (The nuclear power industry offers one example.)

Turbulent times mean that local success is not global success. A company may be at peak efficiency, but on the wrong mountain. The trick is to select a high-potential area to excel in.

Some of the most perfect technology was created just before its demise. Vacuum tube technology reached a zenith of complexity just before it vanished. As MIT economist James Utterback writes: "Firms are remarkably creative in defending their entrenched technologies, which often reach unimaginable heights of elegance in design and technical performance only when their demise is clearly predictable." It's relatively easy to arrive at a peak of perfection. The problem is that perfection can be local, or suboptimal, like being the best basketball player in your state, but unaware of national tournaments. While a firm is congratulating itself on creating the world's fastest punch card reader--the fastest in the universe!--the rest of the economic world has moved on to the PC.