Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact. What went wrong? Why did that person have to call? Why aren’t they spending that time talking to their family instead of talking to us? How do we fix it?

- Jeff Bezos on the use of Social at Amazon

When wireless is fully applied, the earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts.

- Nikola Tesla, 1926

Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want to think about what the world would be like if we did it right.

- Chris Poole speaking at 2011 Web 2.0 Summit

Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new.

- Steve Jobs speaking at Stanford Commencement, 2005

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

- Pablo Picasso

It is what it is. It will be what you make it.

- Pat Summit upon hearing of her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s

“We are willing to think long-term. We start with the customer and work backwards. And, very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

- Jeff Bezos speaking at Amazon Shareholder’s Meeting

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

- Warren Buffett in a New York Times editorial

. . . the lack of uptake of RSS reading software by consumers and businesses is among the turns of events in recent technology history that’s most disparaging of the state of humanity. That a personalized, centralized repository for updates from dynamic streams of information delivered by free trusted sources of democratic publishing all over the world has had its tech-lunch eaten by mind-rotting casual Flash games on Facebook is as depressing as the way that public education dreams were dashed when the promise of television became its reality. It’s like the psychedelic dreams of Harvard’s Dr. Timothy Leary becoming the wretched, heartbreaking narcotic drama of the TV show The Wire. It’s terrible. It’s reason to pack it all up and go home.

- Marshall Kirkpatrick, in review of Glassboard, new venture for Nick Bradbury and other rockstars of the RSS reader world