Microsoft Quotes
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Remember, just because Microsoft can do something, doesn't mean you can. Microsoft makes their own gravity. Normal rules don't apply to them.
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More Microsoft Quotes
I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft.
steve ballmer— "DOJ Case: Your Voice Counts!". Freedom to Innovate Network. Microsoft (17 January 2000). Retrieved on 2007-04-20.
Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.
bill gates— Speech at the Computer History Museum, as quoted in InfoWorld magazine (October 2001)
[Microsoft] must be testing the outer limits of what a customer will put up with before bolting to Linux, certainly a valuable scientific study from my point of view.
pamela jones— A Brave New Modular World - Another MS Patent Application, retrieved 1 September 2010.
If Apple has a flaw, it's the inability of the company to crush competition using the kind of aggressive tactics that companies like Microsoft and Intel have always applied.
john c. dvorak— "Apple's Swan Song" in PC Magazine (14 January 2013)
It's Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead
larry ellison— article in The Wall Street Journal (5 March 1998)
The real threat to Linux adoption is Apple, not Microsoft. If you didn’t know, now you know.
ryan c. gordon— Quoted from, Interview with Icculus LinuxGames (2007-05-13)
[...] the only thing I'd rather own than [Microsoft] Windows is English or Chinese or Spanish, because then I could charge a $249 right to speak English. And I could charge you an upgrade fee when I add new letters like N and T.
scott mcnealy— Testimony before U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on market power and structural change in the software industry, 1998-03-03 ( )
Look at Unix. It was essentially open source before anyone invented the term, and that caused a large number of ways to solve the same problem and left the market to sort them out, which they didn't (the market never will sort out bad quality in anything but the single most important property of the products), and Unix got itself into a position where some horribly demented crapware from Microsoft could compete with it and fool a whole bunch of people for a while.
erik naggum— Re: source access vs dynamism (Usenet article)
They don't make poles long enough for me want to touch Microsoft products, and I don't want any mass-marketed game-playing device or Windows appliance near my desk or on my network. This is my workbench, dammit, it's not a pretty box to impress people with graphics and sounds. When I work at this system up to 12 hours a day, I'm profoundly uninterested in what user interface a novice user would prefer.
erik naggum— Re: Why lisp failed in the marketplace (Usenet article)
When my mother gets a prompt 'Do you want to download this?' she's going to say yes. It's disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of these tools [in Internet Explorer] with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it's your fault.
bruce schneier— Stross, Randall (2004-12-03). "Digital Domain: The Fox Is in Microsoft's Henhouse (and Salivating)". The New York Times. p. section 3, page 5.
I do believe that in a race, it is naive to think Linux has a hope of making a dent against Microsoft starting from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor. (I feel the same about Unix.)
kenneth thompson— "Ken Thompson clarifies matters", Linux Today. May 7, 1999. [7]
I think MySpace is doomed, I give them about two more years.... I think Facebook is the next Microsoft in both the bad and the good senses. That's an amazing company that is going to do a lot of good and bad things.
jimmy wales— Jimmy Wales on tech's future, Orlando Sentinel (03 November 2007)
I'm not a lawyer I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.
cory doctorow— Microsoft Research DRM talk(17 June 2004)
Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better.
steve jobs— Interview in Rolling Stone magazine, no. 684 (16 June 1994)
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And 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 products.
steve jobs— Triumph of the Nerds (1996)
I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.
steve jobs— On Bill Gates as quoted in "Creating Jobs" in The New York Times (12 January 1997)
It wasn't that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac, it's that the Mac was a sitting duck for 10 years. That's Apple's problem: Their differentiation evaporated.
steve jobs— As quoted in Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company (2004) by Owen W. Linzmayer
I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products.
steve jobs— On why he delayed the Leopard OS in favor of developing the iPhone rather than hiring more developers, at the annual Apple stockholder's meeting (10 May 2007) as quoted in "Apple's Jobs brushes aside backdating concerns" at c|net News (10 May 2007)Variant: I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check ... if so, then Microsoft would have great products.As quoted in "Apple iPhone: more secrets revealed" (11 May 2007)
When I released GNU Emacs and people started using it, they started sending me improvements in the mail. So I would get a message with a bug fix, and a message with a new feature, and another bug fix, and another new feature, and another... and another... until they were pouring in on me so fast that just taking advantage of all of the help people were giving me was a big job. Microsoft doesn't have this problem.
richard m. stallman— The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System, given at LinuxTag, July 2000
Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity it is, in a word, bourgeois and so it attracts all of the same gripes.
neal stephenson— "Class Struggle on the Desktop"
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
linus torvalds— "The Way We Live Now: Questions for Linus Torvalds". New York Times. 2003-09-28.
So the whole "We have a list and we're not telling you" should tell you something. Don't you think that if Microsoft actually had some really foolproof patent, they'd just tell us and go, "nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!"?
linus torvalds— Thomson, Iain (2007-05-16). Torvalds tells Microsoft to put up or shut up. Retrieved on 2007-05-18. Said about Microsoft's claim that the Linux kernel infringes upon 42 of their patents.
I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease.
linus torvalds— Torvalds, Linus (2009-06-22). Microsoft Patches Linux; Linus Responds. Retrieved on 2009-06-26.
I think MySpace is doomed, I give them about two more years.... I think Facebook is the next Microsoft in both the bad and the good senses. That's an amazing company that is going to do a lot of good and bad things.
— Jimmy Wales on tech's future, Orlando Sentinel, Nov 3, 2007.
Microsoft is an easy target, but it's a scapegoat, not the real source of difficulty.
— Rob Pike, 2000, "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant"
In the summer of 1988, I received an interesting call from Bill Gates at Microsoft. He asked whether I'd like to come over and talk about building a new operating system at Microsoft for personal computers. [...] What Bill had to offer was the opportunity to build another operating system, one that was portable [...].
— Dave Cutler in his introduction to the book Inside Windows NT
I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.
— Steve Jobs on Bill Gates as quoted in "Creating Jobs" in The New York Times (12 January 1997).
So the whole 'We have a list and we're not telling you' should tell you something. Don't you think that if Microsoft actually had some really foolproof patent, they'd just tell us and go, 'nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!'?
— Thomson, Iain (2007-05-16). Torvalds tells Microsoft to put up or shut up. Retrieved on 2007-05-18.
— Linus Torvalds, Said about Microsoft's claim that the Linux kernel infringes upon 42 of their patents.
I bumped into him (Craig Mundie of Microsoft) in an elevator. I looked at his badge and said, "Ah, you work for Microsoft." He looked back at me and said, "Oh ya, and what do you do?" And I thought it was some kind of tad dismissive, here is a guy in a suit looking at a scruffy hacker... so I gave him a thousand yard stare and said, "I am your worst nightmare!"
eric s. raymond— Revolution OS, a documentary (2001).
