Microsoft Quotes

Because Microsoft seems to sometimes not trust customer choice, they salt XP with all these little gizmos and trap doors to get people to try Microsoft stuff. But the reality is that we're downloading more players than we ever have on a worldwide basis. ~ Rob Glaser

New video gaming systems are coming out that track every joint of your body. It's basically going to become a normal thing for us to allow Microsoft to put a three-dimensional camera on top of your television set looking at you, which sounds like a Big Brother scenario if ever I heard one, but, still, it's what we're going to allow. ~ Jesse Schell

What I love about what I get to do is that I'm allowed to create the stories that I want to tell with minimal interference by some very big corporations like Microsoft and Sprint and EA and BioWare. The advantage that these tech companies have is that they understand the space organically, versus traditional media companies. ~ Felicia Day

Microsoft's philosophy is to get it out there and fix it later. Steve [Jobs] would never do that. He doesn't get anything out there until it is perfected. ~ John Sculley

If a startup stays in Microsoft, it does not have a chance, because all it tries to do goes against what Microsoft is about. ~ Leroy Hood

Microsoft has one more shot at a role in smart phone software through its deployment on Nokia phones. Nokia is still the global market share leader in cell phones. Maybe it will work out, but this is hard to envision great success in the area coming on the heels of so much disappointment in missed opportunity in this important and visible category. ~ David Einhorn

I've used the common wooden pencil in some of my writing as an example. When I ask audiences which is "simpler", a digital pencil like Microsoft Word or a wooden pencil, people agree the wooden variety is simpler. Until I point out that Microsoft Word was written by eight programmers, while the wooden variety involved thousands, none of whom could appreciate the full complexity of harvesting lumber, mining graphite, smelting metals, making lacquer, growing rapeseed for oil, etc. The complexity was there in the pencil, but hidden from the user. ~ Brad Cox

Wesco had a market capitalization of $40 million when we bought it [in the early 1970s]. It's $2 billion now. It's been a long slog to a perfectly respectable outcome - not as good as Berkshire Hathaway or Microsoft, but there's always someone in life who's done better. ~ Charlie Munger

Even though we don't know which companies the NSA has compromised – or by what means – knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost. Even if they succeed in limiting government surveillance. Even if they succeed in improving their own internal security. The best they'll be able to say is: "We have secured ourselves from the NSA, except for the parts that we either don't know about or can't talk about. ~ Bruce Schneier

There is a growing body of work coming out of psychology and cognitive science that says you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the thoughts you think. Instead, you create narratives, little stories to explain away why you gave up on that diet, why you prefer Apple over Microsoft, why you clearly remember it was Beth who told you the story about the clown with the peg leg made of soup cans when it was really Adam, and it wasn't a clown. ~ David McRaney

Most people know that there is this partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft on search. ~ Ross Levinsohn

Here is a rewriting of the British national anthem, by 'Camille, Australia'. It is, she explains, chiefly for the benefit of Microsoft Word and Outlook Express users:

Gd CTRL-S r gr8sh Qun.
Long liv r nobl Qun.
Gd CTRL-S the. Qun!
ALT-S hr vktrES,
HpE & glrES,
Lng 2 rain ovR S
Gd CTRL-S th. Qun! ~ David Crystal

You have to revisit anyway The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture. -Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft ~ Jason Fried

When I worked at Microsoft, I got to go and visit a bunch of different companies. Probably a hundred different companies a year. You'd see all the different ways they'd work. The guys who did Ventura Publisher one day, and then United Airlines the next. You'd see the 12 guys in Texas doing Doom, and then you'd go see Aetna life insurance. ~ Gabe Newell

Microsoft and Dell have been building, implementing and operating massive cloud operations for years. Now we are extending our longstanding partnership to help usher in the new era of cloud computing, by giving customers and partners the ability to deploy the Windows Azure platform in their own datacenters. ~ Bob Muglia

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

The Software You will have to buy Microsoft Office, which contains PowerPoint, or you can download the freeware OpenOffice, which contains Impress. Once you understand the basics of how to use these programs to create the book cover, you may prefer to use some other presentation software. Both ~ Jimmy Clay

Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the 'most reliable Windows ever.' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.' ~ Dave Barry

I have three Microsoft Windows 10 computers with 4GB of RAM and Intel processors: 1. The first was a free upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and is unusable. 2. The second is a Windows 10 computer with a Celeron processor and is unusable whenever background updates are in progress. 3. The third is a Windows 10 computer with a i3 processor and runs really slow when background updates are in progress. Both Windows 10 computers suffer from horrible lag in normal use. ~ Steven Magee

Gates and Allen's use of Harvard's lab space would return to haunt them over the years, as their rivals suggested time and again that Microsoft played a rigged business game, ~ Linsey McGoey

Samasource's largest clients are technology companies such as Microsoft, Google, Getty Images, and TripAdvisor, which contract with my company rather than a traditional outsourcing company in order to participate in 'impact sourcing' - conscious efforts to reduce poverty by moving money into places that need it. ~ Leila Janah

In Windows Server 2012 R2, Server Core is the default installation option for reasons other than simply providing administrators with the ability to switch options after installing. In Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft is attempting to fundamentally modify the way that administrators work with their servers. Server Core is now the default installation option because in the new way of managing servers, administrators should rarely, if ever, have to work at the server console, either physically or remotely. ~ Craig Zacker

Before Mint.com, I was a long-time user of 'Microsoft Money' and Intuit's 'Quicken.' Both were powerful tools, loaded with features and functionality around taxes, investment, budgeting - too feature-laden, in fact. They took hours to set up, forever to learn, and an hour a week to maintain. ~ Aaron Patzer

There are some things that money can't buy: peace of mind, for starters, and lean muscle mass. Neither the Queen of England nor the founder of Microsoft can put in an order for either one. ~ Victoria Moran

At Microsoft, we're aspiring to have a living, learning culture with a growth mindset that allows us to learn from ourselves and our customers. These are the key attributes of the new culture at Microsoft, and I feel great about how it seems to be resonating and how it's seen as empowering. ~ Satya Nadella

My guess is that Apple won't just pass Microsoft in market capitalization, but will go way beyond it. ~ John Sculley

There are a lot of things not going well for Microsoft right now - Microsoft reorganization appears to be rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. ~ Adam Hartung

My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking. ~ Nathan Myhrvold

keep an open mind with Windows 8. Yes, it seems like a big change from Windows 7, Vista, or XP, but you'll find that many of the changes are an improvement. Moreover, you're only a few settings away from a more familiar Windows, if you so choose. ~ Tim Fisher

The antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

Microsoft is a company that manages imagination. ~ Bill Gates

I have a G4 at home. Theyre great machines for individual users, and I even know a few core Linux hackers who are having a lot of fun with them. But if you want to move the needle on the non-Microsoft desktop, youve got to look elsewhere. ~ Nat Friedman

Graduation Speech: I'd like to thank the internet, Google, Wikipedia, Microsoft Word, and Copy & Paste. ~ Steve Weinburg

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. ~ Linus Torvalds

On the Intel platform, Microsoft is the defacto standard. It's the weather. ~ Jean-Louis Gassee

There's no reason that anything should ever become obsolete, whether it be VHS tapes, celluloid film, print books or even the previous versions of a computer operating system, as long as even just one person still wants them around. After all, one thing leads to another, old inventions are the basis for new ones, inventors and designers and scientists and hobbyists worked hard to create all these things, so don't they deserve some respect, enough not to have their ideas buried in the dust by the latest trends and fads? ~ Rebecca McNutt

With 48 million subscribers through Xbox Live (silver and gold), Microsoft has a bigger audience than DirecTV. ~ Nancy Tellem

I think the combination of graduate education in a field like Computer Science and the opportunity to apply this in a work environment like Microsoft is what drove me. The impact these opportunities create can lead to work that has broad, worldwide impact. ~ Satya Nadella

When I heard about the Microsoft Kinect, though, I felt an urgency rising in me. A game you played without touching any machinery? A chance to wave your hands around, Minority-Report style, and move things around on a screen? This sounded like almost too much fun, with gadget-y pizzazz that sounded astonishing. ~ Susan Orlean

In the first eight or so years at Microsoft, we were always chained to our terminals, and after I got sick the first time, I decided that I was going to be more adventurous and explore more of the world. ~ Paul Allen

Thanks to the very best in Microsoft/Intel engineering, it crashes every time you exhale too hard in its general vicinity.
Fanboy on his computer ~ Barry Lyga

we believe that in the majority of cases, it probably does make sense for you to pay a DaaS provider to host your VDI. After all, they're the experts at VDI. They have the scale to get good deals on hardware, power, and cooling. They have great relationships with Citrix, VMware, and Microsoft. They have architects and engineers who focus exclusively on VDI. ~ Brian Madden

Microsoft looks at new ideas, they don't evaluate whether the idea will move the industry forward, they ask, 'how will it help us sell more copies of Windows? ~ Bill Gates

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

Microsoft has had many, many successful products. I'm committed to one company. This is the industry I've decided to work in. ~ Bill Gates

It's Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead. ~ Larry Ellison

Microsoft loves losing money with online services, so this should stay free forever ... unless they get a new CEO who isn't crazy about pouring billions into a hole. ~ Marco Arment

When I was in my 40s, Microsoft was my primary activity. ~ Bill Gates

It became clear to me by 1984 that Microsoft was likely going to be the big winner in the PC software apps and operating system category, partly because of the dynamics of owning and controlling the operating system: that gave you enormous power, and I came to see Bill Gates was fierce competitor. ~ Mitch Kapor

When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy. ~ Steven Pinker

Internet Explorer, your honor, is the fruit of Microsoft's statutory violations and it should be denied them. ~ Brendan Sullivan

I told [Bill Gates] I believed every word of what I said but that I should never have said it in public. 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

In early 2014, the global economy's top five companies' gross cash holdings - those of Apple, Google, Microsoft, as well as the US telecom giant Verizon and the Korean electronics conglomerate Samsung - came to $387 billion, the equivalent of the 2013 GDP of the United Arab Emirates.78 This capital imbalance puts the fate of the world economy in the hands of the few cash hoarders like Apple and Google, whose profits are mostly kept offshore to avoid paying US tax. "Apple, Google and Facebook are latter-day scrooges," worries the Financial Times columnist John Plender about a corporate miserliness that is undermining the growth of the world economy. ~ Andrew Keen

One thing I've always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they'll tell you, 'We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.' ~ Bill Gates

As an investor in small companies, I don't care how rich Microsoft is. I care about what my opportunities are. ~ Esther Dyson

Companies such as Microsoft, Cisco and Intel were just starting at their 10-year anniversary. ~ Jerry Yang

The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it's very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk. ~ Bill Gates

At my first job in the mid-to-late '90s, almost every product was from Microsoft. Everything was designed to work together - Windows for workgroups, shared M drives, etc., etc. ~ Stewart Butterfield

Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don't know any better. ~ Steve Jobs

Let's say a startup is hot. It ships something great, and it achieves success. Thus, it's able to attract the best, brightest, and most talented. These people have been told they're the best since childhood. Indeed, being hired by the hot company is "proof" that they are the A and A+ players; in fact, the company is so hot that it can out-recruit Google and Microsoft. ~ Guy Kawasaki

In the future, when Microsoft leaves a security-flaw in their code it won't mean that somebody hacks your computer. It will mean that somebody takes control of your servant robot and it stands in your bedroom doorway sharpening a knife and watching you sleep. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

At Microsoft, the magic of software is used to take on very interesting challenges. ~ Jeff Raikes

I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft. ~ Maria Semple

We recommend that you use Blend for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 to work on the visual appearance of your app. ~ Anonymous

Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half. ~ Michael Lewis

RPX's current members include such giants as Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HTC, IBM, Intel, LG, Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung, Sony, T-Mobile, and Verizon. ~ Anonymous

Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google's products - Android, Google Docs - are shit. [Steve Jobs] ~ Walter Isaacson

The Microsoft actions announced today are exactly the kinds of industry initiatives we need. Microsoft is using its resources to bring real privacy protection to Internet users by creating incentives for more websites to provide strong privacy protection. ~ William M. Daley

It's my job for Oracle, the number two software company in the world; to become the number one software company in the world. My job is to build better than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one. ~ Larry Ellison

Carlyle spread her hands. 'I speculated that it was the remains of the starship that took the Eurydiceans to the planet. This seems to have been borne out.' She smiled. 'It transmitted a defensive virus that contained Microsoft patches. ~ Ken MacLeod

Microsoft doesn't have to make back the purchase price. They have to make something of Skype, not from Skype. If they fail to grow as a company, I'm going to conclude that Microsoft has officially and deliberately taken themselves off the list of "A list innovators." ~ Andy Ihnatko

Bottom line, we will continue to innovate and grow our fan base with Xbox while also creating additive business value for Microsoft. ~ Satya Nadella

Microsoft is no longer thought of as the company where the smartest people want to work. ~ Stephen Manes

Sometimes you have to suffer a little bit in your youth to motivate yourself to succeed in later life. If Bill Gates had got laid in high school, do you think there'd be a Microsoft? ~ Greg Giraldo

Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage. ~ Jonathan Raymond

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet - basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost. ~ Steve Jobs

Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness. ~ Bill Gates

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself - and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense. ~ Neal Stephenson

IBM has research and development; so do Microsoft and Nike and even Jose Andres. But there hasn't been enough R&D on feeding people in the Third World. This has to be part of the process; if not, we'll keep throwing money at the problem instead of investing in true solutions. ~ Jose Andres

Inheritance adds complexity to a program, and, as such, it's a dangerous technique. As Java guru Joshua Bloch says, "Design and document for inheritance, or prohibit it." If a class isn't designed to be inherited from, make its members non-virtual in C++, final in Java, or non-overridable in Microsoft Visual Basic so that you can't inherit from it. ~ Steve McConnell

Microsoft has built loyalty at the end-user level, including upper management, .. That works for a while in the early stages of a product, but after a couple of years the blush fades from the rose. It's reality versus marketing. ~ Murphy J. Foster, Jr.

With the general availability of Windows 8/RT and Surface, I have decided it is time for me to take a step back from my responsibilities at Microsoft. ~ Steven Sinofsky

I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change. ~ Tim O'Reilly

Microsoft is involved in setting some fairly key standards and people are afraid of it because they think, Geez, they are quite capable. It's daunting, I suppose. ~ Bill Gates

Microsoft has long hired based on IQ and "intellectual bandwidth." ~ Bill Gates

wireframes in tools such as Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle and Microsoft Visio. Originally, these ~ Smashing Magazine

Google Drive has many uses. However, if I had to name the killer feature, it would be the ability to instantly create or edit online documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other types of files from any Web browser connected to the Internet. It's a cheap, quick and effective substitute for Microsoft Office. ~ Ian Lamont

True, the name of the product wasn't so great. Kindle? It was cute and sinister at the same time - worse than Edsel, or Probe, or Microsoft's Bob. But one forgives a bad name. One even comes to be fond of a bad name, if the product itself is delightful. ~ Nicholson Baker

Actual evil probably requires much more creativity, passion, and political ideology than anyone at or near the top of Microsoft seems to possess. ~ Jon Katz

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside - as the startup culture sees it - while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures. ~ Ellen Ullman

despite a conducive environment and comforting faith, there is unease among the rooms' inhabitants, a rising tide of something close to fear. They know that a terrible ghost is abroad in the cloisters of Microsoft. The ~ Glyn Moody

I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success - I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. ~ Steve Jobs

Gates has always understood Moore's Law better than anyone else in the industry. If you can make something run at all, get it out there -it may be slow and clunky, but hardware improvements will bail you out. If you wait until it's running perfectly on the hardware already in the field, it will be obsolete before it's released. This philosophy built Microsoft and is the main reason Microsoft won the war IBM declared back in the OS/2 days. ~ Jerry Pournelle

Living in the same city as Microsoft, I'm only too aware that, even in low-technology businesses like coffee, the Next Big Thing could knock the dominant player into second place tomorrow. I keep pushing to make sure that Starbucks thinks of the Next Big Thing before it has even crossed anybody else's mind. In fact, Don Valencia is working on it even as I'm writing this book. ~ Howard Schultz

Microsoft first entered the living room with Ultimate TV way back in 2000 - a year before Apple's first iPod was announced. Ultimate TV offered consumers a DVR and supporting online services, including 14 days of programming and the ability to record 35 hours of programming. Microsoft's reach was then thwarted when Echostar acquired DIRECTV. ~ Jay Samit

Driving up the value of the advertising is a big commitment for Microsoft. ~ Bill Gates

Building on our successful partnership, we can now bring together the best of Microsoft's software engineering with the best of Nokia's product engineering, award-winning design, and global sales, marketing and manufacturing, ~ Stephen Elop

The problem with Microsoft is that it's so committee-driven and slow. ~ Robert Scoble

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. ~ Walter Isaacson

What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. ~ Walter Isaacson