“For those of you who haven’t been to a Microsoft store, it isn’t hard to imagine. Picture an Apple store. Now picture a poorly designed Apple store. … Everything in the Microsoft store is a cheap knockoff of Apple. It doesn’t have to be that way. Microsoft is a real company. They make real products that real people use, and there are many reasons why somebody might buy a Microsoft product over an Apple product. … But like McDonald’s trying to pretend it’s an upscale coffee shop, Microsoft is trying to emulate another big business while losing sight of what made their own company successful in the first place.”
– Dave Thier, freelance writer covering technology and consumers
“We’ve [Silicon Valley] always had this gravitational pull, and then on top of that, we have the economic contrast, because the rest of the country looks like a desert and here money is flowing freely.”
– Julie Hanna, a serial entrepreneur who sits on the boards of a number of successful companies
“The incorrect perception that Microsoft programs still represent the primary attack vector, means that defenses based on this false assumption are as effective as locking the front door to your home while the back door remains wide open.”
– Authors of research firm Secunia’s Yearly Report 2011 on software vendor security vulnerabilities and exposures
“I actually believe one of the reasons I joined Salesforce.com was because the industry overall is going through a massive shift, and you can have as much impact inside the government as you can outside.”
– Vivek Kundra, Salesforce.com’s executive vice president of emerging markets, and former first U.S. government CIO
“Arrington and Siegler [partners at CrunchFund] have appointed themselves the watchdogs of tech journalism, eager to point out the irresponsible and inaccurate reporting that they see all around them. This might ring a little less hollow if they hadn’t been such egregious violators themselves, and if they weren’t writing this stuff to protect the people they’re in bed with financially.”
– Dan Lyons, tech blogger, technology editor at Newsweek and the creator of Fake Steve Jobs, the persona behind the notorious tech blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
“I think this is an awesome idea, it shows you that fresh ideas are still out there. Not everything has been thought of yet, you just need to think out the box!”
– Desiree Rowland, commenter on article about startup Chirpify’s platform for T-commerce enabling Twitter-based transactions for buying/selling things and donating money
“As mobile users download more applications than ever before, applications themselves are becoming the “killer app” for hackers and the most popular way to compromise devices.”
– Juniper Networks 2011 Mobile Threats Report
“We have entered the golden age of software, and software is your business.”
– Forrester Research blog for CIOs
“Some time ago, Joe Wilcox called sync the killer app for mobile devices. I think he is spot on. This year has the potential to be the biggest in Microsoft history — there are so many exciting products in the pipeline. It would truly be sad for the big software underdog to screw-the-pooch and lose out to its competitors in the consumer space.”
– Robert Johnson, user interface developer specializing in the user experience of .NET-based web applications