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Gary Becker
Nobel Prize in Economics
Gary Becker: I was a strong advocate of free speech, and that protest can go on, but you shouldn't intimidate lecturers and so on. We had several buildings occupied. You'd try to lecture and they tried to break into classrooms. That's what happened at Columbia and some other places at the time. I thought that was intolerable at a university. My colleagues probably deep down thought so, but they were unwilling to take any actions or express these thoughts. They wanted these students to like them, and sometimes you've got to do things that not everybody likes. That's what bothered me a lot. And particularly, as I say, it's not the students that bothered me so much. I mean, I felt the faculty should be more mature then the students, and they're older. Students were under a lot of peer pressure, even those who didn't want to go along with it, and they had to deal with them. So I never held it against any of my students, even those who participated actively, but I did hold it against a lot of my colleagues for doing that. And that was an important factor, as I said, in why I left.
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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
The people who were crucial to the pickup of the web were, for example, people in companies who probably had day jobs, but were doing this out of interest, engineers who were picking it up. If there had been patents around it, their lawyers would have told them not to even read the code, not to download it, not to install it, not to read anything about it, in case they were tainted by something which would allow the company later to be sued. So similarly, somebody else in their garage or their basement, just doing it for fun, they're doing it because they think it would be really exciting. Because they share the twinkle in their eye, they understand what it would be like if everybody had a web server, or if everybody had a web page and everybody had a web browser. So they're some of the people who do it because it would be cool if everybody did it. Right?
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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
Everybody realized that these new markets, these new spaces, these new ideas -- there will be new spaces of things in which other things will be built -- but they will depend on the basic web infrastructure being royalty-free. It's always been like that. Every now and again, we've had a hiccup when somebody didn't understand it, when somebody thought that maybe they'd try to make a quick killing by somehow getting a stranglehold on it, somehow finding a way to be able to limit your access -- everybody's access -- to the web, and then they would be able to charge for it. Yeah. You can see they had a different gleam in their eyes. But rapidly, they found that really people treated them with the utmost contempt and programmed around them, went around them, and left them, having learned a lesson, and generally picking up the pieces and moving on and joining this world of openness, of open standards, of royalty-free standards.
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
We still have a tremendous amount of hard work ahead of us, but we have all the assets in place now. We have eliminated the necessity for the luck that a start-up company requires, and now our future is in our own hands as a team and as a company, and we have so many smart people. We have so many customers who treat us so well, and we have the right kind of culture that obsesses over the customer. If there's one reason we have done better than most of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word of mouth is so very, very powerful. You know, if you make a customer unhappy they won't tell five friends, they'll tell 5,000 friends. So, we are at a point now where we have all of the things we need to build an important and lasting company, and if we don't, it will be shame on us.
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