Software's Quotes

#1. Launch is just another point in software's life. Not the end-all and be-all.

Ka Wai Cheung

#2. If software's the only thing in your bag of tools, I'm not going to give you great odds.

Astro Teller

#3. I have a big collection of quotation programs ... In particular, I like MCR Software's Wisdom of the Ages, which has the best selection of relevant quotes I know.

Jerry Pournelle

#4. We have over 60 million machines that can take the same diskette, plug it in and immediately ah, that that software's working. And so it's created the worldwide software industry that ... that is so very competitive and moving so quickly.

Bill Gates

#5. Transparency is therefore more than an esthetic triumph; it is a victory that will be reflected in lower costs throughout the software's life cycle. 6.2.2

Eric S. Raymond

#6. I know one business, and that's how to make software.

Xavier Niel

#7. It is possible to share a dial-up Internet connection by using software tools, but it's also possible to push a stalled car up a muddy hill.

Quentin Docter

#8. I wanted to grow in terms of making pictures, not adapting to new software and technology. But that's the game now.

Gregory Heisler

#9. Adding last-minute features, whether in response to competitive pressure, as a developer's pet feature, or on the whim of management, causes more bugs in software than almost anything else.

John Robbins

#10. People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born.

Linus Torvalds

#11. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.

Eric S. Raymond

#12. For Mandarin scripts, there's software now where you can just insert the Chinese script, and it comes out all in pinyin.

Daniel Wu

#13. We can collaborate with a Netscape employee or partner who's halfway around the world. We can distribute information and software to customers and shareholders, and get their feedback.

Jim Barksdale

#14. Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of successful software yet it's frustratingly neglected by many teams.

Simon Brown

#15. It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it.

Nicholas Negroponte

#16. I think it's great that people now have access to Pro Tools and other recording software at home. I've never understood how anyone could be comfortable in a recording studio

Michael Dumontier

#17. If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave.

Edward Yourdon

#18. Fight Features. ... The only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum

#19. You need to look no further than Apple's iPhone to see how fast brilliantly written software presented on a beautifully designed device with a spectacular user interface will throw all the accepted notions about pricing, billing platforms and brand loyalty right out the window.

Edgar Bronfman Jr.

#20. How many software developers does it take to change a lightbulb? None, it's a hardware problem.

Laura Griffin

#21. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

Jamie Zawinski

#22. There's a huge latent market for software development that's just flat-out honest.

Kent Beck

#23. Scrivener is where I live. I'm planning the next novel, two screenplays and a couple of short stories with it and it's amazing how fluid the software makes the process. I genuinely think this is the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.

Michael Marshall Smith

#24. It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast machine slow.

Craig Bruce

#25. A software system is transparent when you can look at it and immediately see what is going on. It is simple when what is going on is uncomplicated enough for a human brain to reason about all the potential cases without strain

Eric S. Raymond

#26. Obviously, a lot of people involved with Volkswagen's emissions were aware of the diesel car software cheat. One has to wonder how many of them tried to stop it and perhaps were demoted or lost their jobs over trying to prevent the secret Volkswagen car emissions fraud?

Steven Magee

#27. What's needed now are software technologies that interconnect computing systems, people and data to produce more rapid answers to the questions of science, and to help researchers use computation in the most effective manner.

Bob Muglia

#28. Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.

Orson Scott Card

#29. Trees and bones are constantly reforming themselves along lines of stress. This algorithm has been put into a software program that's now being used to make bridges lightweight, to make building beams lightweight.

Janine Benyus

#30. You can have an Apple in the phone business, or a RIM, and they can do very well, but when 1.3 billion phones a year are all smart, the software that's gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that's sold by somebody who doesn't make their own phones.

Steve Ballmer

#31. I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss.

Dave Barry

#32. Predation is part of the everyday life of capitalism, in sectors as mainstream as pharmaceuticals, software and oil - where people's money, their data, their time and their attention are routinely taken in fundamentally asymmetrical exchanges.

Geoff Mulgan

#33. 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

#34. If you want to be a modern citizen of the world, you have to be minimally capable in technology. It's a new literacy test. Technology rules your outcome in life. And software is making a lot of decisions in our lives.

Daniel Suarez

#35. A refund for defective software might be nice, except it would bankrupt the entire software industry in the first year.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum

#36. Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

Eric S. Raymond

#37. It's hard to read through a book on the principles of magic without glancing at the cover periodically to make sure it isn't a book on software design.

Bruce Tognazzini

#38. Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

Bill Gates

#39. Software is usually accompanied by documentation in the form of big fat scary manuals that nobody ever reads. In fact, for the past five years most of the manuals shipped with software products have actually been copies of Stephen King's The Stand with new covers pasted on.

Dave Barry

#40. Yahoo is free, it's fast and it's Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software.

Fred Wilson

#41. That's not to say that all software project management books are crap. Just most of them. One of the few that I've found compelling enough to finish is Johanna Rothman's "Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management." She co-wrote it with Esther Derby.

Jeff Atwood

#42. The joke about SAP has always been, it's making '50s German manufacturing methodology, implemented in 1960s software technology, delivered to 1970-style manufacturing organizations, like, it's really - yeah, the incumbency - they are still the lingering hangover from the dot-com crash.

Marc Andreessen

#43. I feel lucky because earlier in my career, I found what I liked to do; it's build software that you see your friends using on the street, and they like it.

Dennis Crowley

#44. If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

Eric S. Raymond

#45. 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

#46. Paying isn't wrong, and being paid isn't wrong. Trampling other people's freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.

Richard Stallman

#47. Another trick in software is to avoid rewriting the software by using a piece that's already been written, so called component approach which the latest term for this in the most advanced form is what's called Object Oriented Programming.

Bill Gates

#48. The software industry has to become better in componentization. That's a clear focus for most of the software companies. How components look, how they are maintained, the ability to maintain them separately.

Hasso Plattner

#49. The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to hold its global complexity down - to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole

Eric S. Raymond

#50. 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

#51. My parents had a software company making children's software for the Apple II+, Commodore 64 and Acorn computers. They hired these teenagers to program the software, and these guys were true hackers, trying to get more colors and sound and animation out of those computers.

Bre Pettis

#52. Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

Bill Gates

#53. In software you can't really add people and expect to get more done, because their ability to understand the program and what's going on it would require so much investment and all their work would require so much review that you'd be more likely to slow things down.

Bill Gates

#54. In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the T E X project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do.

Donald Knuth

#55. The industries that fall first are the industries that either produce electromechanical items that are now inferior to their software substitutes, or the industries that produce a mechanically created service that's now inferior.

Michael J. Saylor

#56. At the end of the day, the GPL is not about making software free; it's about destroying value.

Darl McBride

#57. There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.

Bill Gates

#58. The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don't understand the software parts of it. And so you really can't make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple's the only company that has everything under one roof.

Steve Jobs

#59. America and Japan are the two leading world economies in terms of technology and innovative products. And in software, information-age technology and biotechnology the U.S. has an amazing lead.

Bill Gates

#60. The ever-growing size of software applications is what makes Moore's Law possible: 'If we hadn't brought your computer to its knees, why would you go out and buy a new one?'

Nathan Myhrvold

#61. You get the software you pay for. In every sense. To the nth degree. That's the way the world works.

Dave Winer

#62. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!

Eric S. Raymond

#63. Well, sounding wise wasn't difficult. It was a lot easier than being intelligent, actually, since you didn't have to say anything surprising or come up with any new insights. You just let your brain's pattern-matching software complete the cliche, using whatever Deep Wisdom you'd stored previously.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#64. 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

#65. For systems in which you already have a lot of hardware and software, change is difficult. That's why apps are so popular.

Vint Cerf

#66. Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.

Palmer Luckey

#67. The primary purpose of software estimation is not to predict a project's outcome; it is to determine whether a project's targets are realistic enough to allow the project to be controlled to meet them.

Steve McConnell

#68. The software is where the magic is. If you're going to have all this power be simple enough, appealing enough and cool enough, it's going to be because the software is right.

Bill Gates

#69. Software is different than other products um, partly because it's, it's not physical and, and partly because of its complexity. You can express in software millions of different cases and making sure that you handle all of them correctly is extremely difficult.

Bill Gates

#70. In software, the chain isn't as strong as its weakest link; it's as weak as all the weak links multiplied together.

Steve McConnell

#71. Software unification. So that I no longer care what computing device I pick up, whether it's a laptop or desktop, whether it's one I own or one in a public place, whether it has a small screen or a large screen.

David Gelernter

#72. Whether you are a consumer, a hardware maker, a software developer or a provider of cool new services, it's hard to make a move in the American cellphone world without the permission of the companies that own the pipes.

Walt Mossberg

#73. That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

Larry Niven

#74. 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

#75. If you think about the market that we're in, and more broadly just the enterprise software market, the kind of transition that's happening right now from legacy systems to the cloud is literally, by definition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Aaron Levie

#76. You have to give credit where credit's due. Steve [Jobs] has been probably the single hardware/software forward-looking thinker and executor in our lifetime as an individual. He's quite a brilliant innovator.

Christopher Galvin

#77. When Thomas and John Knoll launched Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, the software couldn't even handle color images. But their offerings got the startup noticed by Apple and Adobe, both of whom became key to the fledgling company's later success.

Jay Samit

#78. We have Dragon [dictation software]," one primary care doctor said, "which you have to be careful of, because I just [dictated] 'Patient's prostate is bothering him' and it turned out 'Patient's prostitute is bothering him.

Robert Wachter

#79. In software, it's easy to understand what people want, and it's hard to build. Internet stuff is super easy to build, but it's hard to know what people want.

Nick Hanauer

#80. If Apple ever lowers the iPod's price and develops Windows software for it, watch out: the invasion of the iPod people will surely begin in earnest.

David Pogue

#81. We apologise for interrupting your life but we have an important message from our sponsors the Konichiwa collective software, it's a waking sub routine,

Steve Merrick

#82. Take gets beamed back to our servers and skimmed by an algorithm reader, which is a piece of software that's maybe as smart as a puppy. It sits up and barks when something really unusual happens in its field of vision.

Warren Ellis

#83. That also means the antivirus software you are running on your own computer is likely only catching 5 percent of the emerging threats targeting your machine. If your body's own immune system had a batting average like that, you would be dead in a matter of hours.

Marc Goodman

#84. We have four blocks here. Block A, where we are now, is administration and recreation. Block B is software development. Block C is research and storage. Block D is where the main Stormbreaker assembly line is found." "Where's breakfast?" Alex asked.

Anthony Horowitz

#85. If in my lifetime the problem of non-free software is solved, I could perhaps relax and write software again. But I might instead try to help deal with the world's larger problems. Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating, and now I have a taste for it.

Richard Stallman

#86. To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That's what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games - nothing like saving the world.

Elon Musk

#87. ...I'm not saying simple code takes less time to write. You'd think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn't an accretion of code, it's a distillation of it.

Robert Nystrom

#88. It's clear that other problems such as [ ... ] the domination of business over government, science, thought, and society, are much bigger than non-free software.

Richard Stallman

#89. Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.

Wietse Venema

#90. It should be noted that no ethically -trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

Nathaniel S. Borenstein

#91. Pop belonged to more musical people in earlier times, but we've sort of gotten away from that. Now it's software people. I kind of feel like reclaiming it is in order.

Dave Sitek

#92. Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.

Richard Stallman

#93. Hardware: where the people in your company's software section will tell you the problem is. Software: where the people in your company's hardware section will tell you the problem is.

Dave Barry

#94. Apple already had everyone's billing information from iTunes ... you could buy things just by typing in your password ... That, for the first time, brought very, very easy payment to the modern software world. That, more than anything, is why there is a business for paid apps.

Marco Arment

#95. Software craftsmanship is a long journey to mastery. It's a mindset where software developers choose to be responsible for their own careers, constantly learning new tools and techniques and constantly bettering themselves.

Sandro Mancuso

#96. The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.

Bill Gates

#97. Wit and puns aren't just decor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Adam Gopnik

#98. Yes, we are a producer of cameras, but we understand that at the end of the day, you have to make photos in software. A lot of companies focus on the camera side, and a lot are on the software side. There's a chasm between the two.

Ren Ng

#99. As the commercial confrontation between [free software] and software-that's-a-product becomes more fierce, patent law's going to be the terrain on which a big piece of the war's going to be fought. Waterloo is here somewhere.

Eben Moglen

#100. I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things.

Linus Torvalds