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

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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.
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Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
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