Innovation
Invention, creativity, technology, and building the future.
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
Verified sourceThe Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination · Watch at 14:32 · Harvard Gazette
14:32 of 23:51All quotes from this speech →
As delivered Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
Verified sourceThe Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination · Watch at 22:10 · Harvard Gazette
22:10 of 23:51All quotes from this speech →
As delivered We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
SourceThe Lyceum Address (1838) · via Wikiquote
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
SourceSecond State of the Union address (1862) · via Wikiquote
To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.
SourceApple company event (October 1983) · via Wikiquote
We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.
SourceJeffrey Bezos, Washington Post’s next owner, aims for a new ‘golden era’ at the newspaper. September 2013 · via Wikiquote
You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.
SourceLarry Page’s University of Michigan Commencement Address, 2009. · via Wikiquote
You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.
SourceInterview with Inc. Magazine for its "The Entrepreneur of the Decade Award" (1 April 1989) · via Wikiquote
A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
SourceInterviewed with Wired: Gary Wolf. Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing (February 1996) · via Wikiquote
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.
SourceInterviewed with Wired: Gary Wolf. Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing (February 1996) · via Wikiquote
We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them.
SourceOn Mac OS X's Aqua user interface, as quoted in Fortune magazine (24 January 2000) · via Wikiquote
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
SourceAs quoted in Fortune (9 November 1998); also quoted in "TIME digital 50" in TIME digital archive (1999) · via Wikiquote
But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem.
SourceAs quoted in "The Seed of Apple's Innovation" in BusinessWeek (12 October 2004) · via Wikiquote
Discontent is the first necessity of progress.
SourceThe Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (1948), p. 110 · via Wikiquote
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
SourceAs quoted in Behavior-Based Robotics (1998) by Ronald C. Arkin. p. 8 · via Wikiquote
Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
SourceThe Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (1948), p. 110 · via Wikiquote
Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.
SourceAs quoted in OpenGL Shading Language (2006) by Randi J. Rost, p. 411 · via Wikiquote
I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.
SourceAs quoted in Success (2003) by Ariel Books · via Wikiquote
I believe in being an innovator.
SourceAs quoted in Cult of the Mouse · via Wikiquote
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
SourceFrom a speech given at the Royal Academy of Art in 1953; quoted in Time magazine (11 May 1954). · via Wikiquote
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
SourceSpeech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943 (full text, audio). · via Wikiquote
As our case is new, we must think and act anew.
It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones.
I have been quoted saying that, in the future, all companies will be Internet companies. I still believe that. More than ever, really.
Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC.
I was running an assembly line designed to build memory chips. I saw the microprocessor as a bloody nuisance.
Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution.
We are now living on Internet time. It's a new territory, and the cyber equivalent of the Oklahoma land rush is on.
We know that the nation that goes all-in on innovation today will own the global economy tomorrow. This is an edge America cannot surrender.
Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you're flying high at first, but it won't take long before you feel the impact.
My task over the last two years hasn't just been to stop the bleeding. My task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created.
The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.
People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines... There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.
Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.
I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.
Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.
Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.
If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.
Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.
I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.
I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.
Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.
The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it's Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.
Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.
I'm never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.
Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary. TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels.
The microprocessor is a miracle.
This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.
In order for the United States to do the right things for the long term, it appears to be helpful for us to have the prospect of humiliation. Sputnik helped us fund good science - really good science: the semiconductor came out of it.
The Internet is the easiest thing to get into. To be an Internet retailer, you just get that URL.
The future of Windows is to let the computer see, listen and even learn.
In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.
Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book 'The Most Powerful Idea in the World.'
I don't think there's a... boundary between digital media and print media. Every magazine is doing an online version.
Windows 8 is key to the future, the Surface computer.
Eventually you won't think of 'the Internet business.' You'll think of it more like news, weather, sports, but even that taxonomy isn't clear.
Outlook 2003 did create the idea of search folders and the whole Longhorn philosophy. You can see it at work in search folders, where instead of having to drop things into individual folders, and things exist only in one folder, you create these search folders and you have the criteria for the search folder.
When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.
The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.
3D is a way of organizing things, particularly as we're getting much more media information on the computer, a lot more choices, a lot more navigation than we've ever had before.
There is a difference between what technology enables and what historical business practices enable.
Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it's a good thing they'll be reading a newspaper on a screen.
You can always think of something like the Xbox 360 as a super set-top box that can do everything the set-top box does, but then have the graphics to do the games as well.
Innovation is a good thing. The human condition - put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes - is improving because of innovation.
Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.
The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.
Digital reading will completely take over. It's lightweight and it's fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.
Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it's taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, 'Let's get out the camera and get that shot.' You just have that, and software helps you pick what you want.
Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.
Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.
The tool that's most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.
The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy - even beyond the market opportunities - that's something that appropriately ought to be done.
The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.
We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn't make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.
Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.
The nuclear approach I'm involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There's a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true - many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.
People don't want lots and lots of single purpose devices. They do not want to have to learn how to set up something for photos, another thing for music, another thing for video.
I'm interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you're like, 'Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?'
The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.
We're already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow.
Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.
If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.
The key to making things affordable is design and technology improvements, as well as scale.
The factory is the machine that builds the machine.
With DNA, you have to be able to tell which genes are turned on or off. Current DNA sequencing cannot do that. The next generation of DNA sequencing needs to be able to do this. If somebody invents this, then we can start to very precisely identify cures for diseases.
If you don't have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur.
If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic - being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.
In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.
Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.
Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That's pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.
The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It'll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable.
It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you're not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it's actually space that's moving.
A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.
Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code - with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It's very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.
We could definitely make a flying car - but that's not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that's super safe and quiet? Because if it's a howler, you're going to make people very unhappy.
I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.
It's obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.
It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don't think it's possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.
There's no better place in the world for technology start-ups than Silicon Valley; there's such an incredible well of talent and capital and resources. The whole system is set up to foster the creation of new companies.
Government isn't that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you've got to have commercial companies do it.
My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars - this is very important - so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there.
If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it's always expensive.
The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.
I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.
There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.
Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.
You can't do it unless you can imagine it.
The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.
Whatever has happened in my quest for innovation has been part of my quest for immaculate reality.
Digital technology is the same revolution as adding sound to pictures and the same revolution as adding color to pictures. Nothing more and nothing less.
When I was making 'Star Wars,' I wasn't restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, 'I'm going to create a world that's fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.'
One thing about 'Star Wars' that I'm really proud of is that it expands the imagination. That's why I like the 'Star Wars' toys.
For 'Star Wars' I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography.
In 3-D filmmaking, I can take images and manipulate them infinitely, as opposed to taking still photographs and laying them one after the other. I move things in all directions. It's such a liberating experience.
Everyone seems to think that digital technology devoids the medium of content, but that is not true at all. If anything, it broadens the content.
Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.
We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.
Trust the young people; trust this generation's innovation. They're making things, changing innovation every day. And all the consumers are the same: they want new things, they want cheap things, they want good things, they want unique things. If we can create these kind of things for consumers, they will come.
I'm not a tech guy. I'm looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people's eyes.
When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.
Every technological revolution takes about 50 years.
When we started the e-commerce, nobody believed that China would have e-commerce because people believed in 'guang-shi,' face-to-face, and all kinds of network in traditional ways. There's no trust system in China.
If you're doing business, not that simple to only buy. You have to create something. You have to create something that never exist for the future.
The most important thing is to make the technology inclusive - make the world change. Next, pay attention to those people who are 30 years old, because those are the internet generation. They will change the world; they are the builders of the world.
Our philosophy is, using internet technology, we can make every company become Amazon.
On privacy issues, it's just like hundreds of years ago when people said, 'I would rather put my money under my pillow than in a bank.' But today, banks know how to protect money much better than you do. Today, we may not have the answers to privacy issues, but I believe our young people will come up with the solutions.
What's dangerous is not to evolve.
I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.
It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.
I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
My view is there's no bad time to innovate.
I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.
Once you get into space, you can really unleash a lot of creativity, but the launch itself? I have been through all of the creative ways, and believe me, chemical rockets are the best.
Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don't have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.
Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.
The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.
I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It's really a different product category.
We're taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.
The reason we chose vertical landing as our recovery architecture is that vertical landing scales really well.
I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.
For many people, extended reading sessions on an LCD display cause eyestrain.
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.
You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.
Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.
Ebooks had to happen.
Infrastructure web services had to happen.
I think the definition of a book is changing.
You cannot make a giant space company in your dorm room. Not today. And the reason is that the heavy lifting infrastructure isn't in place.
Lots of companies don't succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future.
Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.
We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren't that many things people use twice a day.
You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.
Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don't believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you're likely to have issues.
I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I've tried to really stress that.
We're at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we're still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity... Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That's boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don't exist.
Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.
The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that.
Computing is kind of a mess. Your computer doesn't know where you are. It doesn't know what you're doing. It doesn't know what you know.
If you say you want to automate cars and save people's lives, the skills you need for that aren't taught in any particular discipline. I know - I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.
I have always believed that technology should do the hard work - discovery, organization, communication - so users can do what makes them happiest: living and loving, not messing with annoying computers! That means making our products work together seamlessly.
Whatever you are studying right now, if you are not getting up to speed on deep learning, neural networks, etc., you lose. We are going through the process where software will automate software, automation will automate automation.
Automation is going to cause unemployment, and we need to prepare for it.
Technological change always accelerates. It never stagnates over time. Which means we are going to face the fact that, if nothing in the States changes, we will find ourselves dependent on other countries for almost everything that can and will be manufactured in a quickly approaching future.
I believe that starting any business should be as easy as a 10-year-old starting a lemonade stand.
We can't ever forget that the Internet now is just a staid utility. The exciting platforms are software applications that are very, very simple.
I am telling you, the world's first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters A.I. and all its derivatives and applies it in ways we never thought of.
Traditional TV will have to innovate their TV delivery software in new ways beyond just offering their content in an app in order to change the viewing erosion of TV.
Entrepreneurs need to be reminded that it's not the job of their customers to know what they don't. In other words, your customers have a tough enough time doing their jobs. They don't spend time trying to reinvent their industries or how their jobs are performed.
Being able to take a traditional cable-television subscriber and give them new widget type applications to me is huge.
We have to face the fact that countries are going to lose jobs to robotics. The only question that needs to be answered is which country will create and own the best robotic technology and have the infrastructure necessary to enable it.
Wherever I see people doing something the way it's always been done, the way it's 'supposed' to be done, following the same old trends, well, that's just a big red flag to me to go look somewhere else.
I think Amazon is the greatest start-up and the greatest company in the world. The way they are using new technologies is not just disrupting retail, it's getting ready to disrupt everything.
In my opinion, right now there's way too much hype on the technologies and not enough attention to the real businesses behind them.
All TV is now digital. It's a platform ripe for innovation; we just haven't seen any beyond picture quality changes. That's a secular problem.
Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.
I just think that VR and AR are going to be a really big deal.
We're at a point now where we've built AI tools to detect when terrorists are trying to spread content, and 99 percent of the terrorist content that we take down, our systems flag before any human sees them or flags them for us.
Hackathons are these things where just all of the Facebook engineers get together and stay up all night building things. And, I mean, usually at these hackathons, I code too, just alongside everyone.
Open Graph is a language for structuring content and sharing that goes on in other apps, and we're continuing to build it out longer term. But we found we need to build more specific experiences around categories like music or movies. Where we've taken the time to build those specific experiences, stuff has gone quite well.
I do think that we're gonna move towards this world where eventually you'll be able to capture a whole experience that you're in and be able to send that to someone.
There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn't how we've approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.
What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that's a problem that's probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that's actually within the range of affordability.
Now the playbook is we build AI tools to go find these fake accounts, find coordinated networks of inauthentic activity, and take them down; we make it much harder for anyone to advertise in ways that they shouldn't be.
The thing that's been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is - I think then, and I think now - that if we didn't do this, someone else would have done it.
My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.
For the first time we're allowing developers who don't work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That's a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.
Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn't do with anything else, we just have to do it.
One of the things that we're trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren't all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.
I think what we've found is that when you can use products with your friends and your family and the people you care about, they tend to be more engaging. I think that we're really going to see this huge shift where a lot of industry is and products are just going to be remade to be social.
I'm very inspired by nature - you could say Mother Nature. I look at things around me and get all kinds of inspiration daily.
I love dessert. I can't be guilty about it because I have to taste everything. I experiment.
I'm not a sponge exactly, but I find that something I look at is a great opportunity for ideas.
Whether you're a programmer or a seamstress, it's all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster - but not worse.
In New York, I get a tremendous amount of ideas by looking at the paintings and the sculptures, adapting artistic endeavors to crafts. There is a lot of inspiration around us that we can see every day and turn into projects.
It is hard to imagine Andre Le Notre laying out the exquisite landscape designs for Vaux-le-Vicomte, and later the magnificent Chateau de Versailles, with no high hill to stand on, no helicopter to fly in, and no drone to show him the complexities of the terrain. Yet he did, and with extreme precision, accuracy, and high style.
A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.
So I've seen life as one long learning process. And if I see - you know, if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn't in - 21 years ago, then I'd think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on.
In this digital age, it doesn't really matter if you are in Canary Wharf or the Caribbean; there are opportunities waiting to be grasped by entrepreneurs.
We, we - as I say, we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.
At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?
You never know with these things when you're trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental.
We believe that within five years, 96 percent of British consumers will have access to the Internet, whether it be through a personal computer, a set-top box or a mobile phone.
And you know, I've had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.
It's our own ability to have an idea and go after the idea and make it happen. That's what at the end of the day defines us.
Information technology is at the core of how you do your business and how your business model itself evolves.
Everything is going to be connected to cloud and data... All of this will be mediated by software.
Human language is the new UI layer, bots are like new applications, and digital assistants are meta apps. Intelligence is infused into all of your interactions.
I don't want to fight old battles. I want to fight new ones.
Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future.
Ultimately, it's not going to be about man versus machine. It is going to be about man with machines.
With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.
The mobile-first, cloud-first is a very rich canvas for innovation - it is not the device that is mobile, it is the person that is mobile.
You look at marketing: everything that's happening in marketing is digitized. Everything that's happening in finance is digitized. So pretty much every industry, every function in every industry, has a huge element that's driven by information technology. It's no longer discrete.
We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.
If you don't have a real stake in the new, then just surviving on the old - even if it is about efficiency - I don't think is a long-term game.
We've had great successes, but our future is not about our past success. It's going to be about whether we will invent things that are really going to drive our future.
We are going to completely change what it means to do advanced analytics with our data solutions. We have machine-learning stuff that is about really bringing advanced analytics and statistical machine learning into data-science departments everywhere.
My ambition with connectivity is not to fly balloons in the national airspace of other countries, but my dream is to be able to enable the local entrepreneurs to have low-cost connectivity solutions.
Wherever we are seeing something getting used, that to us is an early indicator that there might be something that people want. And then let's figure out how to make that great. And then let's go figure out monetization.
Bottom line, we will continue to innovate and grow our fan base with Xbox while also creating additive business value for Microsoft.
I definitely fall into the camp of thinking of AI as augmenting human capability and capacity.
We have only one Windows. We don't have multiple Windows. They run across multiple form factors, but it's one developer platform, one store, one tool chain for developers. And you adapt it for different screen sizes and different input and output.
If every sector of business and society will be driven by software - how does that get enabled? By highly-paid computer scientists funded by risk capital in Silicon Valley? Or by lots of engineers who can build it themselves?
Culturally, I think we have operated as if we had the formula figured out, and it was all about optimizing, in its various constituent parts, the formula. Now it is about discovering the new formula.
Most people have a very strong sense of organizational ownership, but I think what people have to own is an innovation agenda, and everything is shared in terms of the implementation.
In the past, there was hardware, software, and platforms on top of which there were applications. Now they're getting conflated. That is all going to get disrupted by the move to the cloud.
To me, what Minecraft represents is more than a hit game franchise. It's this open-world platform. If you think about it, it's the one game parents want their kids to play.
You've got to remember even the Apple regeneration started with colorful iMacs. So let us first get the colorful iMacs. I think with what we're doing with Lumia, we're at that stage. I want to do good devices that people like, and then we will go on to doing the next thing and the next thing.
Making more sense out of my data, my needs, my tasks - to me, that's the future of Office.
If you don't jump on the new, you don't survive.
A big part of my job is to accelerate our ability to bring innovative products to our customers more quickly.
I will talk about two sets of things. One is how productivity and collaboration are reinventing the nature of work, and how this will be very important for the global economy. And two, data. In other words, the profound impact of digital technology that stems from data and the data feedback loop.
We want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences.
We're not in hardware for hardware's sake. We're in hardware to be able to express all our platform and productivity software in a way that's unique.
At the core of the products we build, I want to think about productivity centered around people.
I try to do the fancy things out there by going with both hands, making crossover moves, and having a certain creativity and flair to my game.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator... these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.
Older people sit down and ask, 'What is it?' but the boy asks, 'What can I do with it?'.
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.
If you're gonna make connections which are innovative... you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.
Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form.
Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.
First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we're going to bring multi-touch to the market. And each of these revolutionary interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product - the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone.
The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it's like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.
The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.
What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we're going to reinvent the phone.
We're going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.
In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.
The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That's a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.
We want to reinvent the phone. What's the killer app? The killer app is making calls! It's amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones. We want to let you use contacts like never before - sync your iPhone with your PC or mac.
This revolution, the information revoultion, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It's very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now?
To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.
The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people - as remarkable as the telephone.
Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We've done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it's much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it's not only easier to use but more efficient.
You'll see more and more perfection of that - computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as a guide or agent.
These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I'm not downplaying that.
The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.
The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.
We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.
Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to and I see another movie I want to make.
So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.
I had a great time creating the future on 'Minority Report,' and it's a future that is coming true faster than any of us thought it would.
I guess my first digital movie was 'Tintin' because 'Tintin' has no film step. There is no intermediate film step. It's 100% digital animation, but as far as a live-action film, I'm still planning to shoot everything on film.
I think every movie I've made after 'Indiana Jones,' I've tried to make every single movie as if it was made by a different director, because I'm very conscious of not wanting to impose a consistent style on subject matter that is not necessarily suited to that style. So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject.
I once said that CGI makes you less inventive. At the time I was bemoaning the loss of the practical stunt. If a stunt can be done practically and safely, I'd rather do it old-style.
I believe in 3D for certain kinds of films. I certainly believe in using 3D for all things in animation because animation has such clarity and so much depth of focus. It worked great with 'Avatar' because 70 percent of that film is animated.
My filmmaking really began with technology. It began through technology, not through telling stories, because my 8mm movie camera was the way into whatever I decided to do.
I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.
Android was intended to be very customizable. And we welcome innovations.
There's an evolution from, today we tell computers to do stuff for us, to where computers can actually do stuff for us. For example, if I go and pick up my kids, it would be good for my car to be aware that my kids have entered the car and change the music to something that's appropriate for them.
If you step back and take a holistic look, I think any reasonable person would say Android is innovating at a pretty fast pace and getting it to users.
Android is one of the most open systems I've ever seen. What makes Android great is it's literally designed from the ground up to be customised in a very powerful way.
It's a world of multiple screens, smart displays, with tons of low-cost computing, with big sensors built into devices. At Google, we ask how to bring together something seamless and beautiful and intuitive across all these screens.
Computing is evolving beyond phones, and people are using it in context across many scenarios, be it in their television, be it in their car, be it something they wear on their wrist or even something much more immersive.
There's been a big evolution since the days of personal computing. People had a concept of one computing device per family or maybe per person. We've clearly evolved to computing devices becoming more personal.
There's a way to do it better - find it.
The value of an idea lies in the using of it.
The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet, and the cause and prevention of disease.
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
I'm excited about Augmented Reality because unlike Virtual Reality, which closes the world out, AR allows individuals to be present in the world but hopefully allows an improvement on what's happening presently.
Anything can change, because the smartphone revolution is still in the early stages.
Virtual reality sort of encloses and immerses the person into an experience that can be really cool but probably has a lower commercial interest over time. Less people will be interested in that, but there are some really cool areas there for education and gaming that we have a lot of interest in.
When we launch a product, we're already working on the next one. And possibly even the next, next one.
From an app point of view, if you looked at innovation on the PC, you'd be hard pressed to find companies innovating. The list is small.
Augmented reality will take some time to get right, but I do think that it's profound.
In my view the tablet and the PC are different. You can do things with the tablet if you are not encumbered by the legacy of the PC.
I've been thinking about 'The Jetsons' since I was a kid. But occasionally, you want 'The Jetsons' to come to reality. That's what Apple is so great at: Productizing things and bringing them to you so you can be a part of it.
Prior to the App Store, the chances of that happening, of somebody really young forming a company and in a period of no time really becoming a global provider of a game or something else, it really didn't happen. Now there are these success stories popping up everywhere.
I personally think 3D Touch is a game changer. I find that my efficiency is way up with 3D touch because I can go through so many emails so quickly.
I think that some people will never buy a computer because I think now we're at the point where the iPad does what some people want to do with their PCs.
We didn't make the first mp3, smartphone, or tablet. But you can say we made the first modern mp3, smartphone, and tablet. And I think now we're making the first modern smartwatch.
You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.
I think a lot of things that are the norm, that are very systematic, don't work.
We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.
Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.
I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.
I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.
It's no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.
If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.
Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.
No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.
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