Time & Perspective Quote by John W. Thompson

Thompson’s line lands like an earnings call that suddenly turns into a weather alert: the threat isn’t just bigger, it’s faster. He’s not trying to sound poetic; he’s trying to make speed feel like destiny. The first clause frames vulnerability discovery as an accelerating curve, a metric executives can picture: more findings per day, rising like costs or user growth. Then he tightens the screw with the real punchline for anyone who has ever funded “security improvements” as a nice-to-have: the window between discovery and exploitation is collapsing.

The intent is managerial triage. By pairing volume with velocity, Thompson translates a messy technical reality into business risk that can’t be postponed. It’s a quiet argument against complacency and quarterly thinking: if attackers can operationalize a flaw in days or hours, your annual audit and once-a-quarter patch cycle becomes a liability, not a plan.

Subtext: the old mental model of security as fortification is obsolete. You don’t “finish” securing a system; you run a race with no finish line, and the other side has gotten better at sprinting. There’s also an implicit critique of the ecosystem that makes exploits travel quickly: public disclosure norms, commodified exploit kits, copycat tooling, and the industrialization of cybercrime. Thompson, as a businessman, is selling urgency and continuous investment without saying “spend more.” He’s reframing the conversation from “How safe are we?” to “How quickly can we respond?” That shift is the real rhetorical move.