Quotes of the Week, August 4-8
"I think [Apple] still has some basic problems to sort out, but mainly, if it doesn't listen to its customers, even with all these lovely people on board, it's going to be in a world of trouble." - Umax's David Robson on Apple's attitude to cloners.
"We're taking a cross-platform view of the world but the truth is that 60-70 per cent of our customers are still taking the Mac route, almost in spite of the bad PR there has been." - Computers Unlimited spokesman.
"The type of retailers that will gain are the high volume firms. Firms like [online bookshop] Amazon.com, bookshops [and record shops] will gain in the short term. One quaint one that's signed up is an online flower shop. The banks don't really tell us what sort of merchants they've got. Part of the problem is finding out what works on the Net. I suspect there's a long learning curve ahead." - Saj Arshad on the SET Mark and Web selling.
"The most important technology we're getting from VXtreme is the ability to reach a broad audience through support for multiple bit rates When you encode the stream you don't have to choose the bit rate. It covers modem, cable, intranet, Internet - from 28.8 modems to 10Mbit LANs and beyond - and that affects the size of audience you hit." - Microsoft's Peter Bell on the VXtreme buy.
"A couple of years ago we had product that started with a 'P'. People said it sounds like a toothpaste. Hopefully, in two years, the Pandesic name will be a name like Pentium is in high-performance processors." - Intel's Craig Barrett on the e-commerce alliance with SAP.
"The whole aim is to get back the hearts and minds of consumers. If we're going to win the server war we have to win the browser war." - Netscape's Sam Sethi on a new war with Microsoft.
"We are seeing our competitors attempting to change their sales model in order to compete... but our experience puts us years ahead." - Dell's Steve Rawsthorn - who could he talking about?
"It's a little lower than we would have liked but it represents tremendous value." - Viglen boss Bordan Tkachuk on the firm's flotation day stock price.