Chris Anderson Quotes

“As Joe Kraue, CEA of JotSpot ... puts it, Up until now, the focus has been on dozens of markets of millions, instead of millions of markets of dozens.”

— Chris Anderson

When the tools of production are available to everyone, everyone becomes a producer.

— Chris Anderson

“Diamonds can be found anywhere.”

— Chris Anderson

For all the enlightened nations that profess a loyalty to liberty, democracy, economy and all the rest, there has long been a readiness to look for a chosen one; as Carlyle pointed out, even the French, those great anti-venerators, those relentless beheaders of Great Men, worshipped Voltaire.

— Chris Anderson

“In a world of infinite choice, context-not content-is king.”

— Chris Anderson

“For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching-a market response to inefficient distribution.”

— Chris Anderson

What entrepreneurs quickly learn is that they need to price their product at least 2.3 times its cost to allow for at least one 50 percent margin for them and another 50 percent margin for their retailers (1.5 × 1.5 = 2.25). That first 50 percent margin for the entrepreneur is really mostly covering the hidden costs of doing business at a scale that they hadn't thought of when they first started,

— Chris Anderson

“That country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets. 5. The controller board is made in China because U.S. companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia. 6. The lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook”

— Chris Anderson

“Ninety percent of everything is crud.”

— Chris Anderson

“The past ten years have been about discovering new ways to create, invent, and work together on the Web. The next ten years will be about applying those lessons to the real world.”

— Chris Anderson

A physical store cannot be reconfigured on the fly to cater to each customer based on his or her particular interests.

— Chris Anderson

“There's a value in that space - rent, overhead, staffing costs, etc. - that has to be paid back by a certain number of inventory turns per month. In other words, the onesies and twosies waste space. However, when that space doesn't cost anything, suddenly you can look at those infrequent sellers again, and they begin to have value. This was the insight that led to Amazon, Netflix, and all the other companies I was talking to.”

— Chris Anderson

“The three main observactions - (1) the tail of available variety is far longer than we realize; (2) it's now within reach economically; (3) all those niches, when aggregated, can make up a significant market - seemed indisputable, especially baked up with heretofore unseen data.”

— Chris Anderson

With the evolution of online retail, however, has come the revelation that being able to recategorize and rearrange products on the fly unlocks their real value.

— Chris Anderson

“What people intuitively grasped was the new efficiences in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing were changing the definition of what was commercially viable across the board. The best way to describe these forces is that they are turning unprofitable customers, products, and markets into profitable ones. Although this phenomenon is most obvious in entertainment and media, it's an easy leap to eBay to see it at work more broadly, from cars to crafts. Seen broadly, it's clear that the story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance - what happens when the bottlenecks and stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.”

— Chris Anderson

“But our tendency to give scarcity more attention than abundance has caused us to ignore the many examples of abundance that have arisen in our own lifetime, like corn, for starters. The problem is that once something becomes abundant, we tend to ignore it,”

— Chris Anderson

“What we're now starting to see, as online retailers begin to capitalize on their extraordinary economic efficiences, is the shape of a massive mountain of choice emerging where before there was just a peak ... By necessity, the conomics of traditional, hit-driven retail limit choice. When you dramatically lower the costs of connecting supply and demand, it changes not just the numbers, but the entire nature of the market. This is not just a quantiative change, but a qualitative one, too. Bringing niches within reach reveals latent demand for noncommercial content. Then, as demand shifts toward the niches, the economics of provided them improve further, and so on, creating a positive feedback loop that will transform entire industries - and the culture - for decades to come.”

— Chris Anderson

“The overwhelming trend of our age is to take products that were once delivered as physical goods, find ways to turn them into data, and stream them into your home.”

— Chris Anderson

“The governing ideal was not merely to keep up with the Joneses, but to be the Joneses-to own the same model of car or dishwasher or lawn mower.”

— Chris Anderson

“For a generation of customers used to doing their buying research via search engine, a company's brand is not what the company says it is, but what Google says it is.”

— Chris Anderson

“When you can dramatically lower the costs of connecting supply and demand, it changes not just the numbers, but the entire nature of the market.”

— Chris Anderson

“Then television took over, birthing the ultimate in lockstep culture.”

— Chris Anderson

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was a safe assumption that nearly everyone in your office had watched the same thing the previous night.

— Chris Anderson

Peak sewage usage was routinely measured at halftime of the Super Bowl.

— Chris Anderson

“Every time a new technology enables more choice, whether it's the VCR or the Internet, consumers clamor for it. Choice is simply what we want and, apparently, what we've always wanted.”

— Chris Anderson

“Netflix changed the economics of offering niches and, in doing so, reshaped our understanding about what people actually want to watch.”

— Chris Anderson

“If you're troubled by the fact that 80/10 doesn't add up to 100, you've discovered the second confusing thing about the Rule. The 80 and the 20 are percentages of different things, and thus don't need to equal 100.”

— Chris Anderson

Only peer production has the capacity to extend as far as the Long Tail can go.

— Chris Anderson

“Google is not a media company by any traditional definition of the word, but it makes its billions from the media business model.”

— Chris Anderson

“The natural model for music and anything else where the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution are close to zero is variable pricing.”

— Chris Anderson

Rule 8: Trust the market to do your job.

— Chris Anderson

“But every effort to make this work in practice at any scale failed, largely because the social bonds that police such mutual aid tend to fray when the size of the group exceeds 150 (termed the "Dunbar number"-the empirically observed limit at which the members of a human community can maintain strong links with one another).”

— Chris Anderson

“If you think about it, today's hit is tomorrow's niche. Almost”

— Chris Anderson

Google is in a sense serving as a time machine, and we're just now being able to measure the effect this has on publishing, advertising, and attention.

— Chris Anderson

“We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world may no longer be to write a letter to the editor or publish a book. It may be simply to stand up and say something ... because both the words and the passion with which they are delivered can now spread across the world at warp speed.”

— Chris Anderson

The first stage in a technology's advance is that it'll fall below a critical price. After it falls below a critical price, it will tend, if it's successful, to rise above a critical mass, a penetration.

— Chris Anderson

And this is one way to do technology forecasting; get a sense of where technology is, and then anticipate the next upturn.

— Chris Anderson

“Free is really, you know, the gift of Silicon Valley to the world. It's an economic force, it's a technical force. It's a deflationary force, if not handled right. It is abundance, as opposed to scarcity.”

— Chris Anderson

And it's interesting, when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s, about e-commerce, or internet traffic, or broadband adoption, or internet advertising, they were all right - they were just wrong in time.

— Chris Anderson

“And what's interesting about the hybrids taking off is you've now introduced electric motors to the automobile industry. It's the first radical change in automobile technology in 100 years.”

— Chris Anderson