Cory Doctorow Quotes

If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.

Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.

I became convinced that the whole essence of the computer revolution is interactivity. That was very early in my career. At the time I did that it was heresy.

IT is now reaching out to fuels and chemicals, energy and clean tech, rockets, all kinds of bizarre industries that formerly didn't face much competition.

We see Google experimenting in so many places outside of its core search and advertising business, whether that's bringing broadband Internet to the world or funding an entirely separate company to pursue solutions to disease and mortality. Amazon's one of the few other companies that thinks as big as Google does.

It's very difficult in the technology space when you have been leapfrogged to prosper again.

Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

Whether it's steamships disrupted by the railroads or railroads disrupted by the airlines, it's typically the large entrenched incumbents that are displaced by innovators.

Innovation happens because there are people out there doing and trying a lot of different things.

I think that Apple has revolutionized every other consumer industry; why not television? The complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated. So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple.

The only reason Twitter itself would be a fad is if someone comes along and does it better.

Innovation never comes from the established institutions.

Like it or not, the United States is a revolutionary power. Whether the government is trying to overthrow foreign dictators is almost irrelevant. American society is about the most revolutionary force on the planet. The Internet is more subversive than the CIA in its prime. The dynamism of American Society is constantly creating new businesses, new technologies, new ideas and new social models. These innovations travel, and they make trouble when they do.

As a global disrupter, Uber is no stranger to conflict, and its instinct has always been pugilistic.

In August of 2011, Steve Jobs, the tech icon who disrupted a string of traditional industries, called me and told me he thought he'd figured out a way to revolutionize TV. He invited me to come see it at Apple in a few months, but he died just six weeks later, and that meeting never came to pass.

This is the age of disruption.

Netflix completely shook up the world.

I think the rise of A.I. is bigger than the rise of mobile. Large companies are sometimes as worried about startups as startups are about large companies. Ultimately, it will be about who delivers the best service or product.

Apple was selling $400 iPods with $1 earbuds. They're making a beautiful white object with all the music in the world in it... I'm going to make a beautiful black object that will play it back.

The blockchain is going to change everything more than the Internet has.

I was ringside for Amazon and Google.

The Internet free marketplace is defined by fierce competition. And that competition has transformed the world with innovation, investment, and what we need most of all right now: jobs.

Before Bitcoin, I was just waiting around for the Singularity.