User Empowerment Quotes

This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

Fox Interactive Media's acquisitions of Newroo and kSolo demonstrate our commitment to empowering users with interesting tools that they can use to further enhance their online experience and online identity.

Figure out the people part and the technology gets a whole lot simpler.

The power of crowd sourcing always remains with the crowd, not the technological implementation.

YouTube has moved culture forward in attitudes - on refugees, on LGBT issues - especially trans issues. There was untapped demand there; a lot of our users would still be under-served without us. We're a platform that enables everyone to have a voice.

It's a new medium, it's a universal medium and it's not itself a medium which inherently makes people do good things, or bad things. It allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently.

Fans decide what pop culture is. We can define ourselves. Music and the presentation of art nowadays is totally in our control, with the Internet specifically. You no longer need record labels. You no longer need movie distribution companies. You can just make it and put it online, and it will distribute itself to millions of people. The borders and everything have been broken down. It really is in the hands of the people.

If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the "owner" of the program, that controls the program and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.

I think companies need to put up tools that put privacy and security in the hands of their users and make it easy to understand those tools. In Google's case, two-step verification is a perfect example of this.

The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.

If I learned one thing working at Facebook: If users are trying to use your app in a certain way, get out of their way and let them.

If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

The web's earliest architects and pioneers fought for their vision of freedom on the Internet at a time when it was still small forums for conversation and text-based gaming. They thought the web could be adequately governed by its users without their needing to empower anyone to police it.

All through time in Apple products, even from our very first ones, that's how he [Steve Jobs] looked at the world, that you don't really want a piece of technology, a certain type of chip. What you want is a solution to a problem in life, some cause, some issue that you want in your life that'll help you. And it's how do you make that almost one step - say it and it happens.

We started YouTube to democratize video distribution. Now, we are democratizing video creation.

We need to teach people to refuse to install non-free plug-ins; we need to teach people to care more about their long-term interest of freedom than their immediate desire to view a particular site.

Twitter wanted to become a more egalitarian justice system, but instead it became a draconian one.

The Web's core vision and value is to be platform independent. Microsoft has no right to think it can win a tool that is for the people, of the people, and ultimately - by the people.

We've been using C and C++ way too much - they're nice, but they're very close to the machine and what we wanted was to empower regular users to build applications for Linux.

You can do anything. Put stuff on YouTube. You can create your own media, which you couldn't do not so long ago.

The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.

Apple has an opening to say, 'The tools we are selling to you will enable you to do things rather than do things for you.' Google's vision is tools that will do things for you.

The openness on which Apple had built its original empire had been completely reversed - but the spirit was still there among users. Hackers vied to 'jailbreak' the iPhone, running new apps on it despite Apple's desire to keep it closed.

We need better options for securing the Internet. Instead of looking primarily for top-down government intervention, we can enlist the operators and users themselves.

Now that corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users.