Edwin Catmull Quotes

The technical is not just the machinery. The technical is a disposition to life.

We need business leaders who have a respect for technical issues even if they don't have technical backgrounds. In a lot of U.S. industries, including cars and even computers, many managers don't think of technology as a core competency, and this attitude leads them to farm out technical issues.

Over the years I have tried to develop something which is technically assured.

Competence is the creed of the technocrat who makes sure the gears mesh but doesn't for a second understand the magic of the machine.

I was trained to be more technical in Europe because that's the audience. They enjoy a more technical style.

Business has only two basic functions - marketing and innovation.

I have no people reporting to me and don't expect to. My competency is in the tech realm.

Most tech companies do one trick and die. If you can do two or three or four, that's where wealth gets created.

I am a very technical guy. I'm proud of my technique, my fluidity, and my skill; that's what I work on every day. I try to out-technique guys.

I don't see myself as necessarily a very creative person. I'm a technical guy.

To gain the competitive edge, companies must master the ability to innovate.

You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.

The time to go into a new business is when it’s badly run by others.

To be successful, you should concentrate on the world of companies, not arcane accounting mathematics.

With a wonderful business, you can figure out what will happen; you can't figure out when it will happen. You don't want to focus on when, you want to focus on what. If you're right about what, you don't have to worry about when

In a world where routine production is footloose...competitive advantage lies not in one-time breakthroughs but in continual improvements. Stable technologies get away.

Every day were saying, 'How can we keep this customer happy?' How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don't, somebody else will.

Most of our competitors were one-product wonders... They would do their one product, but never get their engineering sorted out.

The sum of all technical knowledge cannot make a master contract player.

If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it - a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. So it is not disruptive at all - you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.

We always enter markets where the leaders are not doing a great job, so we can go in and disrupt them by offering better quality services.

Strategy is about shaping the future.

We use technology to make it cheaper, better, and faster for the client. And then if you have the most flow, you can win. Now, having said that, Silicon Valley wants to take on this business. They think they see an opening.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.