Trip Hawkins Quotes

The first calculators tended to sell for $400 or $500. Today, you can get a pretty good one for 4 or $5.

There's a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time. that's true of all types of consumer electronics.

Technological innovation has dramatically lowered the cost of computing, making it possible for large numbers of consumers to own powerful new technologies at reasonably low prices.

The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we've learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago.

I think that a lot of guys reach for electronics first, but the truth is that you can never keep up with electronics. You buy a flat-screen TV, and then six months later, there's one that has 3D and Blu-ray and all this business, and that is just going to keep continuing.

'The Victorian Internet' is a must read for anyone interested in the history of technology and in the cycles of hype, boom, and bust that seem to only quicken with each new wave of innovation. Highly recommended.

No particular technology lasts for long.

India is not going to come up with the best and most modern car, but if you want the most economic car in the world, we're pioneering that with the Nano, which the Tata Group did in India, for example. And I would call that innovation of the highest degree.

Each new machine or technique, in a sense, changes all existing machines and techniques, by permitting us to put them together into new combinations. The number of possible combinations rises exponentially as the number of new machines or techniques rises arithmetically. Indeed, each new combination may, itself, be regarded as a new super-machine.

It's an amazing time to be an entrepreneur because not only is the stuff getting more capable and powerful, but it's becoming more reliable and the costs are coming down dramatically. So you can go out as an entrepreneur and start a company on a credit card and go to AWS and a few other services and be pretty virtual and, who knows, you may be the next Steve Jobs.

We are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet.

Over my career, I'd say the last 25 years; we've gone from music and computer being for 10 people in the world to having personal computers, to now being able to do amazing things on your iPhone, or with Rock Band. So, right now there's enormous capability with technology in our devices that everybody has access to.

When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer and it took up a whole building. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. What now fits in your pocket 25 years from now will fit into a blood cell and will again be millions of times more cost effective.

Software was changing so fast, so unbelievable, that that got very quick adoption.

Humans change themselves through technology.

Surely this new age is not a repudiation of, but a fulfillment of, the American dream. What were the machines for, unless to give man a new freedom to choose how he would live?

There are dangers, but only dangers if people don't understand where technology is taking us.

All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about through permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one area to another.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996.

The world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.

For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.

Knowledge is our most powerful engine of production.

In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.

During the past two centuries, innovation has more than doubled our life span and given us cheap energy and more food. If we project what the world will be like 10 years from now without continuing innovation in health, energy or food, the picture is dark.

Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.