Quotes from Walt Mossberg

Companies often visit my office, or invite me to theirs, to brief me on new products, Web sites, or software before they are released - usually a few weeks or days ahead of time. I don't review most of these products.

In August of 2011, Steve Jobs, the tech icon who disrupted a string of traditional industries, called me and told me he thought he'd figured out a way to revolutionize TV. He invited me to come see it at Apple in a few months, but he died just six weeks later, and that meeting never came to pass.

I simply believe that people who respect their customers and have faith in their own technology products should welcome competition and that consumer choice should be a paramount value in retailing.

It's often hard to remember that the personal computing era is still quite young. It only dates from 1977, with the arrival of the first mass-market PCs.

It's no easy task to either make money online as a publisher or to advertise your product in a world where attention is so fleeting and divided.

The Secretary of the State at the time was James Baker, who had also been Secretary of Treasury and White House Chief of Staff: very powerful guy. And I went to see him in his very ornate office at the State Department to say I wasn't going to cover him anymore. It was just a courtesy call.

By the 2010s, almost everybody in the developed world, it seemed, had a powerful digital device that took little or no special skills or training to use.

I have on my wall right now a front page of the 'Journal' from January 1991, when I co-wrote a front-page story about Iraq firing missiles at Israel. By October, I was writing about tech products.

Ultimately, I don't think even a five-company platform oligopoly is good for consumer tech. By its very nature, it handicaps independent companies with new ideas. But it will end one day. I just don't know when.

I shifted my career when I was 44 to quit the Washington beats. I had a great Washington beat, a series of them, and I quit to start my tech column, which was a different kind of tech column.

Open-minded tech tinkerers may still prefer traditional PCs for work because they allow much more customization than, say, an iPad.

Taken as a whole, consumer technologies have made startling advances, but they still are not as easy to use as they should be.

I'm well aware that the Internet is global and can't be wholly affected by any one country. But the United States has outsized influence.

Who co-founded Google? Sergey Brin, a Russian-born Jew whose family fled anti-semitism in the Soviet Union to settle here and who considers himself a refugee.

Arguably Apple's least successful core hardware product in decades, the Apple Watch could have been nursed along, like a terminal patient.

Slack spread through businesses like wildfire, initially in the tech and media sectors, but now much more widely. At its public launch in February 2014, it had 17,000 users. As of April 1st, 2016, that number had rocketed to 2.7 million daily active users.

Jeff Williams, Apple's senior vice president of operations, has been called 'Tim Cook's Tim Cook' by some.

Microsoft's Windows 3.1, released in 1992, was the first truly successful edition of Windows and juiced the Redmond juggernaut. Apple's Macintosh System 7.5, released in 1994, was another in a string of versions that lacked key architectural features that the Mac didn't have until Steve Jobs returned and brought with him the code that became OS X.

What's the third smartphone platform? Is it Windows phone? Is Windows Phone going to finally get off the mat in the developed world? Amazon believes their platform has a chance to become the third.

Microsoft makes numerous apps for both Android and iOS, as do Google, Amazon and Facebook. You can run iTunes and iCloud on Windows and Office on the Mac.

When I walk into a Best Buy, I now see, right from the front door, a giant Apple logo. I see a giant Samsung logo. I see a giant Microsoft Windows logo. And those are stores within a store.

I'm an enemy of what I call 'computer theology.' There's a class conflict out there. There's a techno-elite that lives in a different world.

You have giant Facebook, which wants people to be more engaged, and they also want to grow and trade different things, including content.

We need a wireless mobile device ecosystem that mirrors the PC/Internet ecosystem, one where the consumers' purchase of network capacity is separate from their purchase of the hardware and software they use on that network. It will take government action, or some disruptive technology or business innovation, to get us there.