Early Adopters Quotes

You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first. In our case, we knew the users we had in mind for this product. So in the early days, we looked at our customers, really just testers at that point, and we paid extra attention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully.

I'd been on the Internet since the 1970s when it was just for nerds. I started saying, 'Who would benefit from this?' I started imagining a world where young people could have their own email address, back in the days of family AOL accounts.

I was using computers for music in the '70s, '80s and '90s, and people didn't get it. They thought you should only use computers for your taxes and making pie charts.

At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.

I actually looked at an Apple ad from 1978. It was a print ad. That shows you how ancient it was. And it said, 'Thousands of people have discovered the Apple computer.' Thousands of people.

Use your development time to brief analysts and industry press. Use these influencers as your eyes and ears to let you know what else is being developed by competitors so that you can be the first to market, and don't make the mistake of launching an also-ran product.

Warner Bros. got into television very early, so I did a lot of television there. In the beginning, it was sort of okay to do television. But then it became this thing where movie actors didn't do television - they certainly didn't do commercials, because that just meant the end of your career.

I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.'

OK, I wasn't really paying attention to YouTube in the year after it began. No one was. But its growth was remarkably rapid.

For any new technology there is always controversy and there always some fear associated with it. I think that's just the price of being first sometimes.

The big problem that UWink had was we were essentially building tablets because they hadn't been invented yet. That drove up the cost a lot.

For a lot of fans from the early days, they probably had issues they were A-ha fans, because it probably wasn't 'cool.'

I'm a firm believer in everything going digital, in a matter of years. I wanted to kind of be one of the pioneers, one of the people that jump on that bandwagon early.

I think it's necessary for VR to start with an early adopter audience that's highly engaged, and I think that means gamers. They're the ones who have the high-end hardware and the expertise and the patience to sort through the uncertainty of it all.

If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it's always expensive.

If pornographers are among the early adopters of the new technology, then it has definite commercial possibilities.

In the early '90s, well under 5 percent of the global population was online.

When I was in Japan on tour in 2010, I felt like I was 30 years into the future. I love technology and they are so advanced with their phones, computers, everything. I think they had the iPhone way before we did in the U.S. I love gadgets, games, social media and I try to stay ahead on all that stuff, but they get it all first.

Even when early innovations start to succeed, it is not uncommon to see growing businesses sabotaged for threatening the status quo.

I follow Rick Falkvinge, who founded the Swedish Pirate party and was one of the very early adopters of Bitcoin.

We took the whole thing far too seriously. After all, those were early days in television.

The future belongs to those who change it.

I did not have a mobile phone in 1993. No one did, except the occasional banker or Hollywood star seeming smart, or the main character in 'American Psycho.' In 1993, every day was 'let's get lost.' I could walk Greenwich Village for hours and not be found.

When there is change, there are always sceptics who think it won't work. I am sure someone at some point thought the iPhone wouldn't take off.

One of the biggest challenges we had in the first decade was not that many people had personal computers. There weren't that many people to sell to, and it was hard to identify them.