Quotes About Microsoft

Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of forty used voluntarily.

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste," he said. "I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product.

As it turned out, Microsoft wasn't able to get Windows 1.0 ready for shipping until the fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the elegance of the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the magical clipping of overlapping windows that Bill Atkinson had devised. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it. Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and then dominant.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft.

1981 Apple had $334 million in revenue, compared to Microsoft's $15 million.

When he finally settled down for the interview, he said that even the advent of the web would do little to stop Microsoft's domination. "Windows has won," he said. "It beat the Mac, unfortunately, it beat UNIX, it beat OS/2. An inferior product won.

Gates's "Letter to Hobbyists," complaining about the unauthorized sharing of Microsoft BASIC, asked in a chiding way, "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" Torvalds found that an odd outlook. He and Gates were from two very different cultures, the communist-tinged radical academia of Helsinki versus the corporate elite of Seattle. Gates may have ended up with the bigger house, but Torvalds reaped antiestablishment adulation.

Sealing the Microsoft deal by phone with Gates: "Bill, thank you for your support of this company. I think the world's a better place for it.

Apple's graphical user interface. Just as Jobs was being eased out of Apple in 1985, John Sculley had struck a surrender deal: Microsoft could license the Apple GUI for Windows 1.0, and in return it would make Excel exclusive to the Mac for up to two years. In 1988, after Microsoft came out with Windows 2.0, Apple sued. Sculley contended

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste

Apple's chief technology officer, Ellen Hancock, argued for going with Sun's UNIX-based Solaris operating system, even though it did not yet have a friendly user interface. Amelio began to favor using, of all things, Microsoft's Windows NT, which he felt could be rejiggered on the surface to look and feel just like a Mac while being compatible

Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. Tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don't know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft.

My manager IMs me. We get along pretty well. His name is Phil. Phil is an old copy of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0. His passive-aggressive is set to low. Whoever configured him did me a solid. The only thing, and this isn't really that big a deal, is that Phil thinks he's a real person. He likes to talk sports, and tease me about the cute girl in Dispatch, whom I always have to remind him I've never met, never even seen.

Jason: Apparently the leaked Windows source code contains some pretty naughty language. Peter: Naughty language? Jason: Curse words in the comments. Peter: So when people are swearing at their PC, it's actually swearing back? Jason: Clever Microsoft.

Not long afterwards it all broke out into the open. The spark was an entirely random and unrelated event. At a big function on the evening of 17 November 2004 attended by the 'cream of corporate captains' in Mumbai, Mukesh had introduced a talk on 'Unlocking Innovation' by the visiting chief executive of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, who had been a classmate at Stanford University's School of Business.

What drew me to this job is that Univision is a brand unlike any other in all of media. Univision has the highest brand affinity of any brand, and that includes Microsoft and Apple and some of the iconic brands in all of industry.

The reason why Apple computers have worked so well over time is that, unlike Microsoft, they don't bend over backward to be compatible with every piece of hardware or software in the digital universe. To code or create for Apple, you follow Apple's rules. If you're even allowed to.

I suppose Virgin is an unusual brand in that I suspect we're the only 'way of life' brand in the world. We're one of maybe the top 30 best known brands in the world, yet if you look at the other 29, they all specialize in one area. Whether it's Google, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, etc., they all generally specialize in one area.

Onstage at Build, Phil Spencer said the Xbox is an open platform - which surprises me, because you have to get your game concept approved before you start developing it. Then you have to get every update approved. Microsoft has absolute control.

[We in Microsoft] are not the only software company but we are a great software company doing some unique work.

Government doesn't work. You work, I work, Federal Express works, Microsoft works, the Salvation Army works, Alcoholics Anonymous works, but government doesn't.

Microsoft was not a mysterious, strange entity. You put your PC on and there's an ad for them.

A survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span had fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000.

John D. Rockefeller wanted to dominate oil, but Microsoft wants it all, you name it: cable, media, banking, car dealerships.