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.

For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.

We are entering an era of unprecedented choice. And that’s a good thing.

Talent is not universal but it is widely spread: Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge.

The ultimate cost reduction is eliminating atoms entirely and dealing only in bits.

Blockbusters are the exception, not the rule, and yet we see an entire industry through their rarefied air.

Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions.

Remember, in the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.

Never underestimate the power of a million amateurs with keys to the factory.

Order it wrong and choice is oppressive; order it right and it’s liberating.

This is the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require—and reward—investigation.