Microsoft's Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Microsoft has gotten so big that it can put out a Preview that will install itself without checking first to see if it has expired. The message here is that Microsoft's time is worth more than yours ... no start-up company could get away with being that arrogant.

Jerry Pournelle

#3. For the last 15 years, Microsoft's master business plan seems to have been, Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it.

David Pogue

#4. Microsoft's philosophy is to 'do things better.' And Vista has given us lots of opportunity to do that.

Bill Gates

#5. Microsoft's only factory asset is the human imagination.

Bill Gates

#6. I'm going to retain a lot of Microsoft's stock.

Bill Gates

#7. We expect the launches of Skylake, Microsoft's Windows 10 and new OEM systems will bring excitement to client computing in the second half of 2015.

Brian Krzanich

#8. MSN became a quagmire, partly because of Microsoft's hubris.

Donald Clark

#9. Microsoft's new OS, Windows 7, may finally be a worthy successor to XP, eliminating the clutter of Vista and letting users get to what they want to use without the fuss. All this, while remaining compatible with their IT departments' demands for scalability and custom implementations.

Douglas Rushkoff

#10. 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

#11. The futures of Crackle and Hulu and so forth become more and more important as we connect to more and more devices. We need our content to make our services as attractive as Apple's or Amazon's or Microsoft's. We're in a brave new world of fierce competition.

Howard Stringer

#12. I think they should separate Microsoft's application group from its operating system group.

Jim Barksdale

#13. Microsoft does not dominate the software industry by any stretch of the imagination. We have lots of very able competitors who keep us constantly vigilant, and sometimes they beat us to the punch. Microsoft's success to date is based solely on the fact that people like Microsoft software.

Bill Gates

#14. Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li's situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft's state-of-the-art hellhounds.

Neal Stephenson

#15. There was nothing in the deal with Justice that would change Microsoft's business practices in any way.

Tom Reilly

#16. Microsoft has a division that studies the way people work, to develop efficiency-improving software. (According to Microsoft's research up to 2007, if you're looking for a technological solution to being more efficient, getting a bigger computer screen is one of the few clear winners.)

David Rock

#17. 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

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

Brendan Sullivan

#19. 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

#20. Traditional PCs face competition from specialty products like Palm Pilots and from the servers that provide the nodes in computer networks. Microsoft's Windows CE hasn't done too well in the specialty-device market, and its Windows NT faces strong competition for server customers.

Virginia Postrel

#21. Microsoft's an important partner for Dell, an important company in the industry.

Michael Dell

#22. I have been able to attend many technology conferences around the world over the years, including some of the largest, like Google I/O, Microsoft's Developer Conference, Apple's WorldWide Developers Conference, Oracle World, Le Web, and more.

Megan Smith

#23. The fact is ... our doors have not exactly been knocked down by companies willing to defend Microsoft's business practices.

Orrin Hatch

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

Cory Doctorow

#25. I find that it's not the numbers but the quality of the audience. That's why it got to be such a big thing when I left Microsoft, because I had an interested audience; not huge, but passionate. The passionate ones are the ones who change society.

Robert Scoble

#26. 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 with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it's your fault.

Bruce Schneier

#27. The problem with Microsoft is that it's so committee-driven and slow.

Robert Scoble

#28. It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, 'Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.'

Bill Gates

#29. 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

#30. Windows is the best place; it's the home for the very best Microsoft experiences.

Satya Nadella

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

Jim Cramer

#32. Microsoft seems obsessed with the word active. there's Active Desktop, ActiveX, and Active Directory. however, the term is accurate-indeed, Active Directory is Active (when used correctly)

Ed Tittel

#33. Oracle, for example, has even hired people to dumpster dive for information about its competitor, Microsoft. It's not even illegal, because trash isn't covered by data secrecy laws.

Kevin Mitnick

#34. 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

#35. It's like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there's some fundamental technology shift, it's just over.

Steve Jobs

#36. A photo app is a utility. It's like comparing 'Twitter' to Microsoft Word. If you want to be an author, you're not always going to constrain yourself to 140 characters.

Kevin Systrom

#37. Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness.

Bill Gates

#38. Microsoft is still living down its disastrous introduction of Clippy, a ghastly piece of artificial intelligence - I'm using that term very loosely - that would observe people's behavior as they worked on a document and try to bust in, offering 'advice' that tended to be spectacularly useless

Clive Thompson

#39. A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That's a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market.

Burt Rutan

#40. I think most people either forget or don't know that Microsoft only hires people with I.Q.'s well over 130.

Douglas Coupland

#41. Setupcomplete.cmd is a file that is created under %WINDIR%SetupScripts to run a post-installation script in Full OS. It is required by Configuration Manager and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT). Here's what Setupcomplete.cmd does:

Andre Della Monica

#42. At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.

Bill Gates

#43. I curse Microsoft at least once a day. I only curse Apple every other day. As I see it, that's a 100 percent improvement.

Sam Kass

#44. Just as war cost the Montagues and Capulets their children, it cost Microsoft and Google their dominance: Apple came along and overtook them all. In January 2013, Apple's market capitalization was $500 billion, while Google and Microsoft combined were worth $467 billion. Just

Peter Thiel

#45. 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

#46. There's an entire flight simulator hidden in every copy of Microsoft Excel 97.

Bruce Schneier

#47. Microsoft knows that reliable software is not cost effective. According to studies, 90% to 95% of all bugs are harmless. They're never discovered by users, and they don't affect performance. It's much cheaper to release buggy software and fix the 5% to 10% of bugs people find and complain about.

Bruce Schneier

#48. 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

#49. Microsoft runs the world's biggest blogging platform, MSN Spaces.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#50. 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.

Douglas Rushkoff

#51. 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

#52. A couple of years ago this guy called Ken Brown wrote a book saying that Linus stole Linux from me It later came out that Microsoft had paid him to do this

Andrew S. Tanenbaum

#53. The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That's over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it's going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

Steve Jobs

#54. I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less.

Ken Thompson

#55. There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw. It's like saying that as of 1932, cars didn't have radios in them, so they should never have radios in them.

Bill Gates

#56. 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.

#57. There's nothing more frustrating than seeing cynics sit there and say, 'Well, nobody can make any more money because Microsoft and Intel own everything.' Is the software industry mature, or is it embryonic? I would say it's embryonic. There will be a hundred more Microsofts, not just one.

Michael J. Saylor

#58. It's pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We're finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.

Bill Gates

#59. I think I am very goal oriented. I'd like to win the America's cup. I'd like Oracle to be the No 1 software company in the world. I still think it is possible to beat Microsoft.

Larry Ellison

#60. While Microsoft does not share all of Oracle's ambitions for Java, we agree that it is a very valuable tool for software developers.

Bill Gates

#61. I think belief is like having the first Microsoft Windows - it's so rudimentary, in the human brainwork, it's so obviously a sham.

Rupert Everett

#62. Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

George Packer

#63. 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

#64. Joey broke the silence. "MS?" he asked.
"Microsoft," said Calvin. "Or multiple sclerosis. Computer programs everyone has to use, or a debilitating disease. That's life, in a nutshell.

David Pratt

#65. 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

#66. The earnings have been pretty good so far, but there's an ambiguity in the market about them, because you'll see Amazon or Microsoft disappointing and then others beating.

Hugh S. Johnson

#67. 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

#68. I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.

Niall Ferguson

#69. 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

#70. Bill Gates finds people in Russia to hire them to Microsoft. That's the Russian interest in this process.

Anatoly Chubais

#71. Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.

Bill Gates

#72. When you think about the guys who started Twitter, and the Google guys, and the Facebook guys and the Napster guys, and the Microsoft guys, and the Dell guys and the Instagram guys, it's all guys. The girls, they're being left behind.

Will.i.am

#73. (In response to Java) Anybody who thinks a little 9,000-line program that's distributed free and can be cloned by anyone is going to affect anything we do at Microsoft has his head screwed on wrong.

Bill Gates

#74. 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

#75. Microsoft has had its success by doing low-cost products and constantly improving those products and we've really redefined the IT industry to be something that's about a tool for individuals.

Bill Gates

#76. There's more at risk in what happens in Microsoft than I could ever bet on a poker table.

David Einhorn

#77. Overall, OS/2's problems fall into two categories: IBM and Microsoft.

Jean-Louis Gassee

#78. As you know, Microsoft eventually kind of grabbed the gold ring out of Apple's hands, I guess.

Andy Hertzfeld

#79. Every time you turn on your new car, you're turning on 20 microprocessors. Every time you use an ATM, you're using a computer. Every time I use a settop box or game machine, I'm using a computer. The only computer you don't know how to work is your Microsoft computer, right?

Scott McNealy

#80. When Facebook acquired Oculus, the game changed immediately. You saw big companies jumping in. You saw people like Google getting fully committed, and then Microsoft came along with HoloLens - there was a lot of stuff that people were doing before, but now the space really ignited.

Brendan Iribe

#81. On the Intel platform, Microsoft is the defacto standard. It's the weather.

Jean-Louis Gassee

#82. Microserfs (1995) p28 'He's thinking of quitting [Microsoft] to be a pixelation broker, going around to museums to digitize their paintings

Douglas Coupland

#83. Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom.

Eric S. Raymond

#84. I think the world's a better place because Bill realized that his goal isn't to be the richest guy in the cemetery, right?

Steve Jobs

#85. It's Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead.

Larry Ellison

#86. The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it's Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

Bill Gates

#87. No one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year - if you check, you'll see that's more than most people make in a lifetime!

Bill Gates

#88. There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft.

Bill Gates

#89. In the U.S., Wikia has content sponsorships with top brands, including Blizzard Activision, Sony, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, ABC Television and others.

Gil Penchina

#90. Early versions of Microsoft Word left a lot to be desired. However, to the company's credit, it quickly learned where Word fell short, made the necessary changes, and repeatedly introduced new versions of the software.

Naveen Jain

#91. Microsoft could help Facebook with one of the biggest challenges, namely monetizing its traffic without reducing the user's experience. It's obvious that Microsoft needs traffic and Facebook needs search.

David Einhorn

#92. We don't spend our days thinking about Microsoft or trying to get revenge on Microsoft. That's a really negative and backward way, and that's not how I want to live.

Mitchell Baker

#93. My dad's a biophysicist. My brother is a computer guy. His wife works at Microsoft.

Alec Berg

#94. It's quite an unfair thought that Microsoft are trying to control our gaming, they're trying to force us to be online all the time. [People] didn't really think that through.

Peter Molyneux

#95. Carefully calculate the potential size of your market to make sure you can grow. Before starting Mint, I knew that there were about 20 million people who had purchased 'Quicken' or 'Microsoft Money' over the years, and 80 million people using online banking in the U.S. alone.

Aaron Patzer

#96. Toyota has announced it will start integrating Microsoft technology into their vehicles. It's perfect for the person who wants a car that crashes every ten minutes.

Conan O'Brien

#97. 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

#98. Well we have a good working relationship with Microsoft at the development level. But let's not kid ourselves, this is a company with enormous resources and talented people, and there is a certain pride that comes along with that for them and for us.

John W. Thompson

#99. Any religion whose messiah's name
isn't recognized by Microsoft Word can't be that much of
a threat.

Stephen Colbert

#100. In my view, it's irreverence, foolish confidence and naivety combined with persistence, open mindedness and a continual ability to learn that created Facebook, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, Apple, Juniper, AOL, Sun Microsystems and others.

Vinod Khosla