“Google isn’t the 800-pound gorilla. Google is whatever it is that snacks on the 800-pound gorilla before bedtime.”
– Mike Cassidy, columnist, Mercury News
“We also don’t know how much support HP will provide for the open-source webOS. Clearly it will be giving some, but what does that mean to those who have been or were about to be laid off from HP’s webOS division? … Even if HP does right by its webOS staffers and the open-source community, will developers want to work on it? After all between Android and iOS, most mobile developers already have their hands full.”
– Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, tech writer
“You can’t move to the US because we are idiots and we won’t give you a visa.”
– Eric Schmidt, executive chairman, Google, urging European cities to compete with Silicon Valley
“Once something is a successful feature, it can usually no longer thrive as a product. And that’s how Google plans to dominate the future of the Internet. Many of the product categories for online services will be marginalized as Google makes these technologies mere features of Google+. … When a major company like Google adds a product to a market with competing products, it validates the market. But when it turns those products into features, it sucks the oxygen out of the market for those products. …Right now, Google+ is viewed as a young and immature “startup” competing against the mighty Facebook. But as Google transforms one powerful Google product after another into Google+ features, Facebook will increasingly struggle to compete.”
– Mike Elgan, tech writer
“While a small team of brilliant engineers can build some of the world’s best software, it has no hope of keeping up with big companies’ rate of patent filings. Patents threaten to turn Silicon Valley into a place where new firms must develop large legal bureaucracies before they can challenge incumbent firms.”
– Timothy B. Lee, Cato Institute scholar
“The large software companies are buying because they’re losing market share. They look at SaaS and they think that’s the way of the future, and they need to have a play there.”
– Patrick Walravens, JMP Securities analyst, in an interview about IBM buying DemandTec, SAP buying SuccessFactors and Oracle buying RightNow Technologies
“The management challenge, of course, is that while all parties involved want a strong, successful VCE [the joint effort of Cisco and EMC that also has investments from VMware and Intel], the success of their respective independent company is most important and has to take precedent. … This arrangement makes VCE neither a pure-play vendor nor systems integrator. All this puts VCE in a class by itself and makes the company a ‘vendorgrate’ – a word I’ve made up to describe what could be a new category of supplier as we further journey to the cloud.”
– Robert Faletra, CEO, UBM Channel