John W. Thompson Quotes

Innovators are developing the ideas and bringing them to life in amazing new applications. All we, as an industry, need to do now is focus on standardizing the interfaces to ensure interoperability - and stand out of the way.

The useful part of Microsoft was that everything worked together.

When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash.

One of the companies that we've invested in is called Facebook. In only two years, between 2009 and 2011, the information exchanged between people increased 28 times. And that cannot be explained by new people joining Facebook.

It's not about HTML 5 vs Flash. They're mutually beneficial. The more important question is the freedom of choice on the web.

IT professionals have a responsibility to understand the use of standards and the importance of making Web applications that work with any kind of device.

It's clear that people are going to download media files, and they're going to talk to each other, and they're going to exchange information and knowledge and so forth. So this system logic is basically what you bounce off of.

The web's strength lies precisely in its unique position as the world's first universal platform.

But what Web services suggest is that the connection is always there between an application that is resident somewhere in the cloud, and a user who is somewhere on the other end of a connection.

With the increasing importance of standards for system-level objects such as COM and CORBA, it is particularly important that the C++ bindings to those be clean, well documented, and simple to use.

Today, Web services is really about developing for the server. What it means to developers is any set of systems services that you make a Web service you to access by any kind of device with a highly interactive client, not just a browser.

The web as a platform is the most powerful platform we have ever seen.

I think exploring the Internet's - and the Web's - ability to facilitate personal linkages is remarkable; and expect to see additional social networking applications and services emerge.

We are connecting everything to everything

I've always believed that you need to find interactive applications on the Internet.

My impression is that a really, really high-order concern for the whole development community is interoperability and consistency.

Because of the Internet of Things, we're all going to be connected.

In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.

Silos can't interoperate unless the technology does.

Machines need to talk easily to one another in order to better serve people.

I'm not worried about the kernel itself or the basic system. All the commercialization is about the distributions and the applications. As such, it only brings value-added things to Linux, and it doesn't take anything away from the Linux scene.

We make tools for people. Tools to create, tools to communicate. The age we're living in, these tools surprise you. ... That's why I love what we do. Because we make these tools, and we're constantly surprised with what people do with them.

A design isn't finished until someone is using it.

If you like your remote messaging fat, dumb, and interoperable, you could also look into the SOAP libraries distributed with Ruby.

Unless you go on discovering new applications of the law of nonviolence, you do not profit by it.