Dee Hock Quotes

Because I do think - not just in building AOL - but just the world in which we live is a very confusing, rapidly changing world where technology has accelerated.

People in the high-tech sector are living with change every hour. They can get up in the morning and find themselves behind already.

The pace of change and the speed of war has greatly accelerated.

The new environment dictates two rules: first, everything happens faster; second, anything that can be done will be done, if not by you, then by someone else, somewhere.

All technological breakthroughs start with a small "elite". Think about cellphones, for example. Now just about everyone has one. The same will happen to innovations such as Twitter.

If you're not adapting to the very rapidly changing environment, if you can't think creatively, you lose big in this society because there are very few jobs for you left.

A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road.

The Internet moves very fast. In the old world, we could afford to sit and analyze forever. But in the new world, the first mover has the advantage.

The only constant in the technology industry is change.

I can watch CNN on television or the Internet to find out what happened in Hong Kong ten minutes ago. After all, it doesn't matter where something is made, we're all part of the same big family now.

It's a different world.

The only thing that scares me in the tech area is that it moves so fast that you have to be ready to invest in 20 things. Because if you just invest in one, next week, somebody has a better mousetrap, and you get taken to the cleaners.

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.

When I was a young man in the 1970s, tech firms were scattered across the developed world. Since then, America has come to dominate tech almost totally.

Our world is moving at an ever-accelerating pace, and with the advent of social media, what happens in New York now can be reported across the globe 60 seconds later.

Modern industry and the opening of the world market made the struggle universal and at the same time gave it unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside.

National cultures and heritages must compete for man's attention with the mind-absorbing advances of universal science.

No particular technology lasts for long.

Like it or not, the United States is a revolutionary power. Whether the government is trying to overthrow foreign dictators is almost irrelevant. American society is about the most revolutionary force on the planet. The Internet is more subversive than the CIA in its prime. The dynamism of American Society is constantly creating new businesses, new technologies, new ideas and new social models. These innovations travel, and they make trouble when they do.

We live in a dynamic time, where the rate of change and the rate of innovation are very high. It’s not equal in all segments or sectors of the economy, but we are seeing a lot of innovation in certain sectors, and I expect that to continue.

The speed of change today is faster than the human psyche seems able to handle, and it's increasingly difficult to reconcile the rhythms of our personal lives with the rapidity of a twenty-four-hour news cycle.

This rise of the new global mega-rich is happening as established institutions are falling. The fall runs the gamut from the music business and traditional media to the Detroit automakers who find themselves obsolete, outmaneuvered, and out-priced by entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Mumbai, Shanghai, and even Siberia.

New tech explosions create winners and losers, but overall are remarkably positive for the country, middle-class folks, the economy, jobs, and wages.

The future has both gritty and savage and clean and 'techno-hip.' I think it's a very realistic point of view.

Access to information, to music or any kind of culture, is getting faster and faster and more streamlined. At each juncture, people are thrown into tumult and have to adapt or die.