Encouragment for the New Year

For your New Year's Eve Giggling Pleausure - I bring you

 

How To Stop A Great Idea

"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy." - Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" - H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927

"Inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further development," - Julius Frontinus in the first century A.D.

"A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make." - Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies

"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." - A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." - Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" - David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s

"But what ... is it good for?" - Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." - Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." - 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." - Western Union internal memo, 1876

After Fred Astair's first screen test in 1933, the MGM testing director wrote a meme saying, "Can't act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little. " Astaire got the memo and kept it over his fireplace.

An expert said of football coach Vince Lombardi, "He possesses minimal football knowledge. Lacks motivation."

"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" - Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." - Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M's Post-It notes