A biography for Martin Cooperhasn’t been written yet.
“My rule is, if you want to build something that does all things for all people, it's not going to work real well.”
“I like to think about the future and how things can be done better than they are now. That's what engineers do.”
“We should be focused on how to make people's lives better. That is the purpose of technology.”
“It doesn't take a cell phone to make a person rude. There are rude people all over the place. But people are learning. I have never heard a cell phone ring in the movies. We are going to learn how to live with the advantages of new technology.”
“The future of cellular telephony is to make people's lives better - the most important way, in my view, will be the opportunity to revolutionise healthcare.”
“A telephone number shouldn't represent a home or a car or a restaurant, but instead a person.”
“If you want people to think out of the box, you shouldn't create the box in the first place.”
“I have trouble going to sleep at night, because you always get the feeling that there is another thing you could do.”
“As soon as I get a typical day, I'll know I'm in trouble. I like doing different things all the time.”
“I use Verizon. My wife uses Cingular. I also have an AT&T phone for the car.”
“What we did with this mobile telephone was create a revolution. Before the mobile phone existed we were calling a place, now we are calling a person.”
“We predicted the concept of a telephone that isn't tied to a wall or a desk. We anticipated that everyone would have a cell phone. We joked that when you're born you would be assigned a cell phone and if you didn't answer you had died.”
“There is no reason why T-Mobile can't be successful on its own and the only real reason AT&T would want to own T-Mobile is to increase its exclusivity by owning more spectrum.”
“If you asked me what the most important thing in my life is, it's learning.”
“Somehow in the last 100 years, every time there is a problem of getting more spectrum, there is a technology that comes along that solves that problem.”
“The only thing that was in my mind when we made that first phone call was, 'Is it going to work?' We had all these parts hand soldered together, engineers standing by with the soldering iron - just in case.”
“Even though you can't get along without your smartphone, there are not many essential services on your smartphone. They're mostly convenience; you could live without it. Essential means you die without it. A gadget that warns you're about to have a heart attack - that's essential. We're about to go into that phase with smartphones.”
“The more we learn about new communications, the more capacity we need, and that is going to keep going on forever. That's been happening since radio was invented, and that's going to keep going.”
“The notion that there's finite spectrum is mostly wrong.”
“I have a mantra that people are naturally, fundamentally and inherently mobile.”