"Email is the greatest thing"
About this Quote
“Email is the greatest thing” sounds like a throwaway boosterism line until you remember who’s saying it: Wally Amos, the cookie entrepreneur who built a brand on personality, hustle, and direct connection. Coming from a businessman of his generation, the praise isn’t about novelty for novelty’s sake. It’s about access. Email collapses the old gatekeeping layers - assistants, phone tag, postage, in-person schmoozing - into something close to a straight line between the maker and the market.
The intent reads pragmatic and a little evangelical: here’s a tool that lets you move faster, talk to more people, and keep relationships warm without the overhead. For entrepreneurs who once had to rely on expensive mailers or whoever would take their call, email is cheap distribution plus cheap persuasion. It’s also record-keeping: promises, orders, follow-ups, all archived. For someone who has lived through multiple eras of small-business survival, that’s not “tech”; that’s leverage.
The subtext is optimism about democratization, with an unspoken caveat. Email empowers the scrappy operator, but it also floods everyone with noise, marketing, and the constant pressure to be “reachable.” Calling it “the greatest thing” is the kind of big, promotional language a brand-builder uses - and it tips his worldview: progress is measured in how easily you can connect, sell, and sustain momentum.
Context matters here: a pre-social-media moment when email felt like the internet’s cleanest promise, before the inbox became another battleground for attention. Amos is praising a doorway that, at the time, still looked wide open.
The intent reads pragmatic and a little evangelical: here’s a tool that lets you move faster, talk to more people, and keep relationships warm without the overhead. For entrepreneurs who once had to rely on expensive mailers or whoever would take their call, email is cheap distribution plus cheap persuasion. It’s also record-keeping: promises, orders, follow-ups, all archived. For someone who has lived through multiple eras of small-business survival, that’s not “tech”; that’s leverage.
The subtext is optimism about democratization, with an unspoken caveat. Email empowers the scrappy operator, but it also floods everyone with noise, marketing, and the constant pressure to be “reachable.” Calling it “the greatest thing” is the kind of big, promotional language a brand-builder uses - and it tips his worldview: progress is measured in how easily you can connect, sell, and sustain momentum.
Context matters here: a pre-social-media moment when email felt like the internet’s cleanest promise, before the inbox became another battleground for attention. Amos is praising a doorway that, at the time, still looked wide open.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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