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I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas.

Nicholas Negroponte

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Nicholas Negroponte
Age: 80
Born: 1943
Born: December 1
Architect
Author
Computer Scientist
Investor
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Ideas
Good
Laptops
Selling

More quotes by Nicholas Negroponte

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While a significant part of learning certain comes from teaching - but good teaching and by good teachers - a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself.
Nicholas Negroponte
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The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.
Nicholas Negroponte
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My advice to graduates is to do anything except what you are trained for. Take that training to a place where it is out of place and stimulate ideas, shake up establishments, and don't take no for an answer.
Nicholas Negroponte
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Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work.
Nicholas Negroponte
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Scale will get you strategy.
Nicholas Negroponte
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The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. Why now? Because the change is also exponential - small differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking consequences tomorrow.
Nicholas Negroponte
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Kids drop out of school mostly because school is boring and not particularly relevant.
Nicholas Negroponte
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Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
Nicholas Negroponte
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It's even hard for people to imagine today that telephones were wired, and they certainly were and you went to the end of a wire to make a phone call.
Nicholas Negroponte
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Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.
Nicholas Negroponte
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The cost of electronics in a modern car now exceeds the cost of its stall.
Nicholas Negroponte
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Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.
Nicholas Negroponte
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Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble.
Nicholas Negroponte
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By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.
Nicholas Negroponte
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It makes no sense to ship atoms when you can ship bits.
Nicholas Negroponte
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To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper.
Nicholas Negroponte
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You go to developing countries today and you'll find automobiles that you haven't seen since you're childhood and that's because they really are valuable, they're taken care of, they're repaired, and when something breaks, they just don't buy a new one, they actually fix it.
Nicholas Negroponte
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Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. Whatever big problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education, ... We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The laptop is one important means of doing that.
Nicholas Negroponte
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Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.
Nicholas Negroponte
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If you were to hire household staff to cook, clean, drive, stoke the fire, and answer the door, can you imagine suggesting that they not talk to each other, not see what each other is doing, not coordinate their functions?
Nicholas Negroponte