Ben Horowitz Quotes

The first stage in a technology's advance is that it'll fall below a critical price. After it falls below a critical price, it will tend, if it's successful, to rise above a critical mass, a penetration.

As long as our user base continues to grow, at some point it will have critical mass, and at some point it will tip, and at some point, people will just have to use WhatsApp because their friends are using WhatsApp.

The reason that Google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web. It's in ecological sustainability. It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy.

There will be certain points of time when everything collides together and reaches critical mass around a new concept or a new thing that ends up being hugely relevant to a high percentage of people or businesses. But it's really really hard to predict those. I don't believe anyone can.

If you look at the history of communication, new technologies like the phone and e-mail didn't just let people do things faster; it fundamentally changed the scope of the kinds of projects people dared to take on.

Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn't have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They're going to adopt e-books much faster than we do.

Because of technology, we don't develop telepathy. We don't use telepathy, but use, you know, the mobile phones. Why?

I joined the Aspen Institute, which is a terrific nonpartisan center. They have a wonderful effort that focuses on the impact of communications technology on society and our economy.

Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle.

Social media is the most disruptive form of communication humankind has seen since the last disruptive form of communications, email.

So as I look at transitioning to the communication platforms of the future, I see that the beauty of Internet protocols is you get the separation of the layers between service and technology.

The Internet has changed everything. We expect to know everything instantly. If you don't understand digital communication, you're at a disadvantage.

When we change the way we communicate, we change society.

In the past, before phones and the Internet, all communication was face-to-face. Now, most of it is digital, via emails and messaging services. If people were to start using virtual reality, it would almost come full circle.

I laugh at stuff like Snapchat thinking it can change the world.

I believe that social change has almost reached critical mass. So many people have undergone personal transformation that their effect on society is having a geometric - not arithmetic - impact. This coalescence of energies brings about meeting, networking, and a sophistication in communications that is unprecedented in history.

Advances in technology and the Internet have dramatically changed the way we communicate, live, and work.

A lot of things have changed since the days of Flickr. Facebook has concentrated the sociality of the Internet within its blue borders, like a Walmart siphoning off the mom-and-pop shops that formerly comprised the Internet's gathering places. Communication, in the age of mobile dominance, has become, of necessity, shorter and snack-sized.

Tech is a key driver of social and economic change, and around the world, women like me are transforming businesses, industries, and communities.

People said, 'MySpace is going to rule and dominate all Internet; all young people will live on MySpace.' Well, along comes Facebook. And, obviously, all the innovation that Apple is doing.

Anyone familiar with the marvels of the Worldwide Web can hardly fail to see that we have entered a new era in communications on a scale perhaps comparable to the invention of the Gutenberg press.

It's rare that a company has an opportunity to forever transform the ways in which people interact with the world and communicate with each other, but that is exactly what we plan to do with Valve.

I think there certainly was a milestone in the '90s with regards to the Internet achieving critical mass. There were several magical factors that came together: the creation of HTML by Tim Berners-Lee, the drop in the price of communications, and all the PCs out there that you could put this software into.

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.