Scott McNealy Quotes

The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.

Things which of themselves avail nothing, when united become powerful.

Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use - not only text or media but processing power too - will be located remotely.

Technology is best when it brings people together.

The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.

What the Internet is great at is building networks.

We have collapsed distances, taken down walls, and spread information.

Men knew little, formerly, of what was passing beyond ... their own immediate neighborhood, but now, through the ... newspapers ... town and country, state and nation, and the most distant parts of the world are brought together, and whatever is new, rare and important, is conveyed with rapidity to every reader ... set forth in the most succinct manner, and in a style adapted to the comprehension of all.

The film is therefore a form of science fiction, in which humans, beasts and machines are on the verge of extinction - 'sacred motors' linked together by a common fate and solidarity, slaves to an increasingly virtual world. A world from which visible machines, real experiences and actions are gradually disappearing.

But it is as silly to think about peer-to-peer as applying just to music as it would have been to think about the Internet as applying just to pornography. Whatever the initial use of the technology, it has nothing to do with the potential of the architecture to serve many other extremely important functions.

None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.

When you're young you want to show people what you can do, no matter what the cost. Whereas when you're older, and you realise that maybe a drum machine is better than you playing, then use the drum machine.

I'm revealing information to people. I'm not creating it. And to the extent that people embrace it, I think they're empowered by it, because any time you have a bigger perspective today than you did yesterday, it's got to be only for the good of your mind, your body, your soul.

If you forget about the money issue for just a minute, if it's possible to do that - because these are people's livelihoods we're talking about - and you look at Internet in terms of the most amazing broadcasting network ever built, then it's completely different. In some ways, that's the best way of looking at it.

I to the We means that both the individual's effort and the power of the network matter, and they work in tandem. Someone with no skill won't get very far, no matter how strong the network. Similarly, someone with lots of skill but a weak network won't realize his or her fullest potential. So, you need both.

The rules have changed as information and technology evolve, but it's essential that people stay in the streets, stay visible in their communities, on the news, on the Internet, and in this crucial public discussion. There are a million people just like you (or me), sharing the same doubts, fears, and insecurities that keep us from speaking out. Finding each other in our neighborhoods, online, in the streets - this is what keeps us from believing we're alone, from giving in to hopelessness.

At AOL, we thought the killer app was people

Because there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded, nor a people so small they cannot offer mighty comfort.

All these computers, all these handhelds, all these cell phones, all these laptops, all these servers - what we're getting out of all these connections is we're getting one machine. ... We're constructing a single, global machine.

People who relate what they believe to be new and startling information like to have such information received with exclamations of astonishment and admiration.

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

We are greater than the sum of our parts.

People shared everything: information, equipment, their floors, whatever. There was strength in unity.

Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

The main thing I wanted to say, and thankfully it’s what most people say they get out of the book, is simply an acknowledgement that we do affect each other in ways we can’t predict.