Nicholson Baker Quotes

Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one.

Learning how to understand how technology evolves, using tools like a Technology Road Map, is what you need more than anything to ride on top of the tsunami instead of being crushed by it.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it's like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

For systems in which you already have a lot of hardware and software, change is difficult. That's why apps are so popular.

As the TiVos and the Replays are coming into our world - and they're coming - it's better to - be inside the tent and figure out what they're doing and to work hand in hand with them as opposed to saying, 'You know what, the automobile is not going to work. I'm going to stick to my horse and carriage,' you know.

Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.

The one thing with the established and traditional media industries is that whenever something new comes along, they don't know what to make of it, and the natural reaction is to fight it or push back.

The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. 'YouTube' was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.

Every technological revolution takes about 50 years.

I think that's what happened to the record business when 'Napster' came around. The industry rejected what was happening instead of accepting it as change.

This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.

The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors...Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects.

When a technology is replaced by another technology, the previous technology either becomes art or it dies.

The largest enemy of change isn't 'no', it's 'not yet' - that is the easiest way to forestall change.

I'm always looking for older equipment and ways of recording, but you can't escape the fact that it's all going to be digitized and reduced.

I'm not a big believer in revolutions. What people call revolutions in technology were more of a shift in perception - from big machines to PC's (the technology just evolved, fairly slowly at that), and from PC's to the internet. The next "revolution" is going to be the same thing - not about the technology itself being revolutionary, but a shift in how you look at it and how you use it.

People don't like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.

A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.

I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You'll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.

In the same spirit, when the automobile arrived, there were those that declared the horse to be the most perfect form of locomotion.

Technology is constantly changing and brings you automatically into the present. In that way, it automatically makes you build for this time.

I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon.

The only the way that you can live and function without seeing the facts in front of you is to put yourself in a constant state of denial.

Any change of government which has to be introduced should be one which men, starting from their existing constitutions, will be both willing and able to adopt, since there is quite as much trouble in the reformation of an old constitution as in the establishment of a new one, just as to unlearn is as hard as to learn.

Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.