Time & Perspective Quote by David Milne

The weirdest thing about this quote is its time-stamp: it talks like a late-1990s chip executive scanning a booming consumer market, yet it’s attributed to David Milne, a Canadian painter who died in 1953. That mismatch matters, because the line’s real subject isn’t semiconductors at all; it’s the rhetoric of pivoting. “All the action” is a sales phrase masquerading as diagnosis, the kind of confident shorthand that turns a messy technological landscape into a single, inevitable river of progress. It flatters the speaker’s strategy by declaring the game already moved to the field where they happen to be playing.

The intent is bluntly positional: consumer applications are framed as the only place worth watching, and “we” are framed as the people smart enough to watch it. The subtext is defensive as much as visionary. By anchoring the company’s identity to “new” consumer uses, the speaker sidesteps slower, less glamorous sectors (industrial, military, infrastructure) and justifies a shift toward higher-volume, faster-turnover products. “Since we started doing our own products” quietly signals a break from being a supplier or contractor; it’s about owning the brand layer, not just the silicon.

Culturally, it captures a specific moment when tech companies learned to narrate focus as destiny. The late ’90s weren’t only an engineering era; they were a storytelling era, where “consumer” became code for relevance, speed, and growth. Even if the attribution is dubious, the line reads like a relic from the decade when the market didn’t just reward innovation - it rewarded the confidence to claim you’d already found where the future was headed.