“Some company executives are very good at making it easy for Wall Street to fall in love with their companies. Some aren’t. Oracle falls into the latter group. As a matter of fact, there are times when I think Oracle founder Larry Ellison goes out of his way to make it hard for Wall Street to even like his company.”
– Paul McWilliams, editor, NextInning
“That Microsoft had to scrap its own plans [for a Big Data solution] and plug into Hadoop when it had the same amount of time to build its own solution is telling. Obviously, Microsoft’s corporate focus is very large as it tries to maintain its dominance in all things IT, but that wide focus may have cost them a chance to dominate in the big data sector. I would also venture that Microsoft’s natural aversion to true open source development (instead of the shared-source/open-surface twist it likes to say is open source) may have held Microsoft back as well.”
– Brian Proffitt, Linux and open source journalist/analyst
“Watch out, Intel. That Apple-shaped company in your rear-view mirror is closer than you think ….”
– Steven Sande, features editor, TUAW blog
“H.264 [the patent-encumbered video standard backed by Apple and Microsoft] is absolutely required right now to compete on mobile. I do not believe that we can reject H.264 content in Firefox on Android or in B2G and survive the shift to mobile. Losing a battle is a bitter experience. I won’t sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to succeed in our mobile initiatives. Failure on mobile is too likely to consign Mozilla to decline and irrelevance.”
– Brendan Eich, CTO, Mozilla
“Whereas I think, before, the perception on Wall Street was that we were going to become a software-and-services-only play à la IBM’s transformation, what we’re going to be is a hardware company that differentiates through the combination of hardware, software and services.”
– Mark Potts, CTO, HP Software