1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Ben Thompson

Ben Thompson Quotes

Total quotes: 13
“If you raise the floor of competence, you inevitably lower the ceiling of achievement.”
— Ben Thompson, Facebook Adds Reputation Scores, Facebook’s Solution, The Unintended Consequences
Tagged: Creating Successful Social Frameworks, Environment Building, Institutional Conditioning
“The fact of the matter is that Facebook is a whole lot closer to a common carrier or infrastructure than any information-providing service we have seen before.”
— Ben Thompson, Fake News Follow-up and Twitter Bans, Facebook Screws Up More Measurements, Snap Files for IPO
Tagged: The Present Of Media, Facebook, Election 2016, Fake News, Digital Monopolies
“Advertising can augment a publisher, but it’s hard to believe it can support one, even one expressly built for the Internet. That is now the realm of Aggregators.”
— Ben Thompson, The BuzzFeed Lesson
Tagged: Media Cliff Notes, Buzzfeed, Business Model
“There is a very real tension here — criminals either have encryption like the rest of us, or no one does — and it's on us to make the argument that we collectively have much more to lose than criminals have to gain”
— Ben Thompson, Update on the Fight over iPhone Security, Encryption Under Attack, WhatsApp Adds Encryption
Tagged: Encryption, Backdoor, Golden Key, Senate Intelligence Committee Encryption Bill 2016, Apple, FBI
“Remember, everything is a system. And, given the changes wrought by the post 1970s wave of globalization, it is foolish to think that a core component of society — labor — can be fundamentally changed without there being knock-on effects on the other components of that system.”
— Ben Thompson, The Brexit Possibility
Tagged: Brexit, Corporate Colonialism, Tech Morality
“Spotify is an impressive product and company, and CEO Daniel Ek and team deserve credit for reaching this point. Being a true aggregator, though, means gaining power over supply; Spotify doesn’t have that — the company doesn’t even have control over its marginal costs — and it’s hard to see where the profits come from.”
— Ben Thompson, Lessons from Spotify
Tagged: Spotify, Saas Model, Media Cliff Notes, Media Aggregator
“More broadly, the righteousness with which Thiel acted, and with which many on Twitter reacted, combined with a seeming lack of obliviousness to how this might look to the outside world, very much reconfirmed fears I have voiced repeatedly that the tech industry is headed for a regulatory disaster of its own making. Here's the deal: the tech industry is winning. Internet economics have destroyed the journalism industry, they are destroying the transportation and hospitality industries, and I still think we are only in the beginning of a fundamental reordering of business and the economy. Moreover, I think these changes will, on balance and in the long run, be a huge positive for humanity generally and the United States in particular. The short to medium-term, though, will be wrenching, and it would be nice if the tech industry acted with a bit more grace and humility and a with a bit less certainty about its own righteousness and superiority; success, particularly when ascribed entirely to one's own capabilities, inevitably breeds contempt.”
— Ben Thompson, Disrupting Basketball, Thiel-Gawker Follow-up, Intel and ARM
Tagged: The Present Of Media, Peter Thiel, Facebook, Gawker, Thiel vs Gawker
“ It is in Facebook's interest to make sure media organizations have the means to produce the content that makes Facebook the front door to the Internet; that Facebook would make this change knowing it will hurt media organizations (the company wrote in a second blog post that "We anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages") suggests to me not that the company is out to make money off of the media, but rather that more pressing priorities were worth the collateral damage.

It will be interesting to see how that damage is distributed. Obviously organizations that have invested in differentiation strategies predicated on making their sites or apps "destination sites" will fare but better, but I also think the other extreme — companies built on Facebook from first principles — will do better than expected. For example, BuzzFeed's entire business is predicated on understanding how content is shared by, you guessed it, friends and family; this shift makes their core competency that much more valuable. BuzzFeed has also been buying Facebook ads to seed its native advertising articles for years; that expertise can certainly be shared if it ends up making financial sense.

The companies that will predictably be in trouble are those in the middle: doing a little bit here to differentiate, a little bit there to be popular on Facebook, or more likely, not thinking nearly deeply enough how much strategy, business model, distribution, and editorial need to be aligned.”
— Ben Thompson, Follow-up: Governments’ Focus, Elizabeth Warren’s Speech on Competition, Facebook Changes the News Feed
Tagged: Facebook, Facebook Referral Traffic, The Present Of Media, Facebook Prioritizes Friends June 2016
“And yet, right there in the first two paragraphs, are two Trump statements that should be deeply unsettling for those interested in defending the (small 'l') liberalism I discussed yesterday: "I'm here to help you folks do well" and "We're going to be there for you".

First off, these sorts of statements in fact are the threats the New York Times was apparently expecting: once you've introduced the idea of the President having a direct impact on the success of a particular company, it only takes the flip of one bit to realize the downside. Today Trump says he wants to "help"; there is nothing stopping him from tomorrow saying he wants to "hurt."”
— Ben Thompson, Tech and Trump: The Meeting, Google Self-Driving Cars = Waymo, Uber Deploys Self-Driving Cars in San Francisco
Tagged: Trump, Trump and Tech, Election 2016
“The risk for the technology industry is that we are now the incumbents: we have a stake in keeping things exactly as they are, and we build products for ourselves — we’re our own best customers. That, though, cedes the future to the powerless — those with nothing to lose under the current system will by sheer necessity build the new.

That is why we need more companies like those above, ones that work for everyone, enabling the application of human creativity and ingenuity to the creation of a new world order. I know at this moment in history that seems optimistic, but the truth is that a new world order is inevitable; the question now is who will shape it.”
— Ben Thompson, The State of Technology at the End of 2016
Tagged: State Of Technology 2016, Disruption, Silicon Valley, Future Capitalism
“Let me be absolutely crystal clear: this bill, absent massive changes (which, given the previous statements of its authors — Democrat Diane Feinstein of California and Republican Richard Burr of North Carolina — is highly unlikely) is an unmitigated disaster. The only way for any company to abide by its provisions to deliver any data on their devices or services to law enforcement in an "intelligible format" would be to insert a "golden key" into its encryption; as I detailed in the excerpt above, this is far worse than anything the FBI is requesting. It proactively weakens all devices, whether they are served with a warrant or not, and it creates the conditions for a systematic silent security failure, where critical data is compromised without anyone.”
— Ben Thompson, Update on the Fight over iPhone Security, Encryption Under Attack, WhatsApp Adds Encryption
Tagged: Apple, Encryption, Backdoor, Golden Key, FBI, Senate Intelligence Committee Encryption Bill 2016
“More importantly, though, is that calling the United States a democracy is incomplete; we are a (small 'l') liberal democracy: that is not only do we elect our representatives, but we also are governed by the rule of law and the guarantee of individual rights and personal liberty. That our liberalism may be under threat is a far graver concern than bad policy decisions; I'm by no means denigrating the terrible outcomes that can result from bad policy, but said policy can be reversed by winning the next election. The loss of liberalism, on the other hand, reduces democracy to a sham.”
— Ben Thompson, Tech and Trump, Tech and Politics
Tagged: Trump, Democracy, Election 2016, Liberty, Liberalism
“[F]or many years, not just the post-World War II era but also the colonial era, governments saw one of their chief roles as being the creation and protection of markets for large companies (which in turn employed large amounts of the governments' citizens). My question at a very fundamental level is whether or not the new economics unleashed by the Internet, with its bias towards centralization and winner-take-all dynamics, ought not lead to a reset of governments' fundamental orientation away from big companies — which in the age of technology both don't need the help and don't employ that many workers, relatively speaking — and towards systematic efforts to empower individuals, both through means of economic security as well as reduced regulation and new tax policy.”
— Ben Thompson, Follow-up: Governments’ Focus, Elizabeth Warren’s Speech on Competition, Facebook Changes the News Feed
Tagged: Brexit, Corporate Colonialism, Tech Morality, New World Order
loading next page...