# "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs."
-- Bill Gates - OS/2 Programmer's Guide
# "The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems." -- Bill Gates, OS/2 Notebook, Microsoft Press, 1990, p. 614
# "The Internet? We are not interested in it"
-- Bill Gates, 1993
# "Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority."
-- Bill Gates, Jul, 1998
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C2 ... d.ne.tx.fs
# "We had planned to integrate a Web browser with our operating system as far back as 1993"
Microsoft (27 Jul 1998, filing its first court responses to federal antitrust)
# 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
# "Microsoft Products are Generally Bug Free"
-- Bill Gates
# "There are people who don't like capitalism, and there are people who don't like PCs, but there's no one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft."
-- Bill Gates
# "Like medieval peasants, computer manufacturers and millions of users are locked in a seemingly eternal lease with their evil landlord, who comes around every two years to collect billions of dollars of taxes in return for mediocre services"
-- Mark Harris, Electronics Times
# "Microsoft does not innovate. It buys, imitates, or steals. It makes things difficult for software developers, and thus eventually for users."
-- Richard Brandshaft, San Jose Mercury-New
# "There is a fantasy in Redmond that Microsoft products are innovative, but this is based entirely on a peculiar confusion of the words "innovative" and "successful." Microsoft products are successful -- they make a lot of money -- but that doesn't make them innovative, or even particularly good."
-- Robert X. Cringley
# "A few weeks ago, a member of the audience at a [Bill] Gates speech in San Francisco asked simply this of the world's richest businessman: ''Can you make a list of things you won't be doing? ... I just want a little piece of something to pass on to my kids 20 years from now.''"
-- San Jose Mercury News, 26 Oct 97
# "We have no intention of shipping another bloated OS and shoving it down the throats of our users."
-- Paul Maritz, Microsoft group vice president
# "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, Byte Magazine
# "Appeasement, said Winston Churchill, consists of being nice to a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last. At the moment, the biggest crocodile in the world is Microsoft, and everybody is busy sucking up to it."
-- John Naughton, the London Observer
# "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, CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
# "Microsoft's biggest and most dangerous contribution to the software industry may be the degree to which it has lowered user expectations."
-- Esther Schindler, OS/2 Magazine
