Say What? Notable recent Quotations
A search on Google for “collected quotations” turns up almost two million results. The word “quotations” alone on Yahoo yields more than fifty four million.
Collected quotations can be a guilty pleasure. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes insightful, and whether they take the form of witty maxim, or biting aphorism, somehow, thoughts condensed and cropped to a few sentences or a quick phrase somehow seem more articulate and more informative.
The following recent turns of phrase from executives and founders may not make their speakers look like geniuses but in short sound-byte format they make for interesting capsules of information and a fascinating barometer of current events in media, entertainment and technology:
"Tribune Co.’s revenues [in May] dropped 11% across broadcasting and newspapers. That’s huge. The Times dropped 8.5%. Half of men under 30 aren’t reading print newspapers, and there’s no sign that they come back as they age." Rupert Murdoch, CEO News Corp. (Time Magazine.)
"The larger media companies are beginning to understand that the market place is really fragmented, meaning people consume content in a lot of different places. What they are realizing is that they can’t hoard all the content in one place, they have to distribute it to where people are spending their time, and people are spending time on sites like MySpace so it makes sense to do distribution deals with us as well as with other video sites." Chris DeWolfe, co-founder MySpace. (The Independent, July ‘07)
“Today we have incredible devices with very high fidelity. Network bandwidth has gone up very dramatically… With storage space, we aren’t talking gigabytes any more … But all of that isn’t enough. What’s missing is the connection. People want connected experience where they can listen to music, manage the family calendar, or connect to people at work automatically and easily across multiple devices.” Bill Gates, Microsoft: (CEA Vision 5/07)
When asked about the separation between editorial content and sales in publishing replied “Can we be bought? Of course, but the price is too high." Bill Ziff (reported anecdotally on CNET in reference to recent blogging ethics debate.)
"With the Internet [video], 90 percent is unwatchable and maybe a 10th of one percent is brilliant. Sony is creating good cameras. Google and Yahoo are creating ways to find stuff, and people, all over the world, with the technology available at a cost they can afford, without the necessity of flying to Hollywood or New York — they can now create and we are seeing the creation everywhere… You can sit there and wait for computers and their sophisticated algorithms and ‘most popular’ rankings to tell you what to watch. But as good as computers are at tracking minutiae, when it comes to what is subjectively good, they simply cannot compete with the human brain." Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney, current boardmember of Veoh, and founder of digital production studio Vuguru. (mediapost)
"If piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of big media today – film, music, radio, and cable TV – was born of a kind of piracy. The consistent story is how each generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Each generation – until now.” Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig (excerpted in Wired Magazine 2004)
“We believe that the technology that will most profoundly change consumer electronics is the Internet combined with the convergence of data, voice, video and mobility” John Chambers, CEO Cisco. (from CEA Vision 5/07)
“We’re always going from putting out one fire to the next." Jerry Yang 1995
"I think we can be No.1 in search. Let me be on the record as saying that." Jerry Yang 2007 (Jerry Yang, Yahoo.)
