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It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.
Esther Dyson
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Having an online presence may not yield immediate profits, but lacking one will lead to long-term losses.

Esther Dyson's quote emphasizes the importance of establishing an online presence for businesses in the modern digital age. Although the initial costs and efforts may not lead to immediate financial benefits, the consequences of not having an online presence can be severe, potentially driving businesses to failure in a competitive and increasingly digital marketplace.

Themes

OnlineBusinessProfitDigitalPresence

In practice

Example use cases

In a presentation on the importance of e-commerce, you might say, 'As Esther Dyson noted, it may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online.'

More from Esther Dyson

The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.
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Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.
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Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.
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