QuoteProject
Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.
Paul Samuelson
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The Internet is likely to achieve profitability in the future, similar to past innovations that eventually succeeded economically.

Paul Samuelson's quote highlights the inevitability of the Internet reaching a point of profitability, drawing parallels to historical technological advancements such as canals, railroads, and automobiles. These past innovations faced skepticism but ultimately transformed economies and societies, suggesting that the Internet will follow a similar trajectory despite current challenges.

Themes

InternetProfitabilityTechnologyInnovationEconomy

In practice

Example use cases

In a presentation about future market trends, this quote can illustrate the potential of the Internet as an emerging economic force.

More from Paul Samuelson

To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.
Paul SamuelsonRead
I can't think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.
Paul SamuelsonRead
My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.
Paul SamuelsonRead
Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
Paul SamuelsonRead
My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.
Paul SamuelsonRead
Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
Paul SamuelsonRead

Similar quotes

The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.
Marshall McluhanRead
We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires. They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing.
Richard PowersRead
The function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on.
Joseph A. SchumpeterRead
The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic.
David BowieRead
One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless.
Richard StallmanRead
Is it a fact-or have I dreamt it-that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?
Nathaniel HawthorneRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.