Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Douglas AdamsRead
I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end".
Interpretation
This quote humorously highlights the inevitability of change and the unpredictability of technology.
Douglas Adams' quote reflects on the nature of progress and innovation, particularly in the tech industry, where companies often face challenges and uncertainties. By acknowledging both the imperfections in their products and their foresight regarding the future—specifically the end of the century—the quote captures a playful yet insightful perspective on the evolution of technology and the importance of adaptability amid uncertainty.
In practice
In a tech conference presentation when discussing the evolution of products over the years.
Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."
Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.
We are always creating new tools and techniques to help people, but the fundamental framework is remarkably resilient, which means it must have something to do with the nature of organizations or human nature.
We know in our hearts that technology at its best should make us feel even more human than we currently feel. Sometimes it makes us feel less human.
On the Internet, it's survival of the easiest.... Give users a good experience and they're apt to turn into frequent and loyal customers. But ... it's easy to turn to another supplier in the face of even a minor hiccup. Only if a site is extremely easy to use will anybody bother staying around.
For many oppositional movements, the Internet, while providing the opportunity to distribute information more quickly and cheaper, may have actually made their struggle more difficult in the long run.
I don't tweet, I don't go on Facebook. I think there's too much information about all of us out there. I'm liking the idea of privacy more and more.
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