- "We have an industrial society that is based on the use of machines and technology, which serve to economize on labor. It would be logical that we should have to work less because we can have all of our needs satisfied with a minimum amount of activity. But what takes place is just the opposite. Today we work much more than ever before." (Anselm Jappe)
- "The great innovations of the past are now well understood as being very, very important. It's very obvious. In almost every case, they were not widely understood as such at the time. In fact, I would assert that they were often actually viewed as trivialities or jokes. I don't think it is a new phenomenon to be this dismissive about new technology." (Marc Andreessen)
- "When Thomas Edison was first working on the telephone, the assumption of the use case was the idea that telegraph operators needed to be able to talk to each other. It was considered so implausible that you would have a system that would let any ordinary person pick up the telephone and talk to another person, like that was clearly implausible, that was clearly not going to happen." (Marc Andreessen)
- "It's hard to remember, but the Internet was laughed at. It was heaped with scorn from 1993 to 1997/1998. In fact, those of you who were in the industry at that time will remember that the New York Times had a reporter on staff named Peter Lewis. I'm convinced he was hired by the editors to just write negative stories about the Internet. It was all he did. And it was always 'the Internet is never going to be a consumer medium, the Internet is not nearly as big as these people think, nobody is ever going to trust the Internet for e-commerce." (Marc Andreessen)
- "The car was absolutely viewed as a triviality and a toy when it first emerged. In fact, J.P. Morgan himself refused to invest in Ford Motor Company, with the response that it's 'just a toy for rich people', which is in fact what it was at the time. If you had one of the first cars, you had to be a rich person, which means you also had to have a driver, unless you were a very advanced rich person. You also had to have a stoker with the early cars to keep the engine going, and then you also had to travel with a full-time mechanic cause the thing would break down every three miles. So there were a lot of reasons to doubt the importance of the car." (Marc Andreessen)
- "We have a large computer rust belt, which nobody likes to talk about, but it is companies like Cisco, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, IBM, where I think the pattern will be to become commodities, no longer innovate, corresspondingly cut their labor force, and cut their profits in the decade ahead." (Peter Thiel)
- "Twitter is instant public global messaging for free. If you think about the impact of that, if you go back into any previous era, the era of telegraphs, the era of telephones, the era of television, and you tell that instead of having the communication technologies you have at the time, I can give you instant public global messaging for free, they would have thought you delivered it straight from heaven, like its the most astonishing communications breakthrough they could have possibly imagined. And we actually have it, and it actually works." (Marc Andreessen)
- The technology-driven economy greatly favors a small group of successful individuals by amplifying their talent and luck, and dramatically increasing their rewards. (Erik Brynjolfsson)
- "Agatha Christie never imagined being rich enough to own a car or poor enough to have no servants. Profound example of tech and social change." (Benedict Evans)
- "Education is the most powerful thing you can do to affect lifetime earnings." (David Autor)
- Once you've produced a certain product, the cost of making additional copies (marginal cost) tends to zero.
- Advertising allows you to give away your complete product to consumers for free while generating revenue from third parties who purchase ads that are shown to the audience. This has always been a popular business model for radio, TV and the web.
- Tiered pricing allows you to give away some products for free and conversely set higher prices for other parts of the portfolio. Examples for this model include coupons and the freemium model.
- When you bundle products that each individually have almost zero marginal cost, you can sell the whole package as a unit that's worth paying for. For example, movie streaming sites such as Netflix package individual films and series (with very low marginal costs) into a subscription that's worth paying for.
- Larger companies can make single products free to support their overall ecosystem. For example, Google and Apple subsidize their ecosystems with free GPS tools such as maps and navigation.
- Net neutrality prevents "a transformation from a market where innovation rules to one where deal-making rules. Or, a market where firms rush to make exclusive agreements with AT&T and Verizon instead of trying to improve their products." (Tim Wu)
- Regarding net neutrality, "let's think about the nation's highways. How would you feel if [they] announced an exclusive deal with General Motors to provide a special 'rush-hour' lane for GM cars only? That seems intuitively wrong. [...] And if highways really did choose favorite brands, you might buy a Pontiac instead of a Toyota to get the rush-hour lane, not because the Pontiac is actually a good car. As a result, the nature of competition among car-makers would change. Rather than try to make the best product, they would battle to make deals with highways." (Tim Wu)
- "[T]he 700-person start-up Airbnb, which allows users to rent their apartments like hotel rooms, was valued at $10 billion this past spring, about half as much as the Hilton corporation, which employs 152,000 people." (Michael Harris)