Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.
Nolan BushnellRead
Everybody copied Atari products. So we started messing with them and it was fun. We bought enough chips that we could get them mislabeled. So we bankrupted at least two companies which copied our boards, and bought all the parts but they were the wrong parts, so they're sitting on all this inventory they can't sell because the games don't work.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the playful and competitive spirit of innovation in the tech industry.
Nolan Bushnell's quote highlights the humorous yet strategic approach of Atari in dealing with competitors who copied their products. By creatively manipulating the market, Atari not only had fun but also managed to outsmart rivals who were imitating their technology, illustrating the challenges of innovation and the sometimes ruthless nature of competition in the tech world.
In practice
During a tech conference, this quote could be used to illustrate the playful rivalry often seen in the industry.
Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.
Creativity is every company's first driver. It's where everything starts, where energy and forward motion originate. Without that first charge of creativity, nothing else can take place.
A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.
The game business reinvents itself every five years.
Do I really want to do a mobile game that's one of 300,000, where discoverability is everything? You really have to have a little more sizzle on the steak. I would rather be one of 100 apps for Google Glass than one of 300,000 for iOS and Android.
If you don't hire at least one or two people that are smarter than you are, then you're a terrible manager and I don't need you.
I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology
There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control
Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.
Now it's easy for someone to set up a storefront and reach the entire world in very modest ways. So these technologies that we thought would dis-intermediate traditional sellers gave more people the tools to be sellers. It also changed the balance of power between sellers and buyers.
Because of cyberattacks and fake news, we can already imagine the problem all democratic societies will face in future elections: how to limit lies when they threaten democracy?
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