Quotes of the Week, June 2-6

"The Pentium processor with MMX technology has been Intel's fastest selling processor ever." - Pierre Mirjolet, European marketing manager at Intel.

"Customers are saying that the market is slow. Basically, it's confusion: MMX was released in January, Pentium II is out, K6 is hanging around and the [Cyrix 6x86MX] is coming. Nobody knows what's going on." - AMD's Richard Baker.

"Demand has gone through the roof for Pentium MMX and we've had strong orders for Pentium II so we're ramping as fast as we can." - Intel UK spokeswoman.

"You have to be bringing something more than a box. The sensible third alternative to Compaq and IBM in desktops is weak: firms like AST and Olivetti. Dealers don't want to leave the door open to Dell. We want to be selling 3,000-3,500 desktops per month inside 12 months." - Toshiba UK's desktop PC boss Howard Seabrook

"At the moment we're only in preliminary talks with Microsoft. Nothing has been confirmed as yet and it's all very much in the air. The Daily Telegraph got a hold of the story and it all kind of spiralled from there, but there's nothing established yet." - Cambridge University spokeswoman.

"Direct sales is the healthiest part of the PC business and there is opportunity to focus on the activities of Dell and Gateway to make sure they don't get too far away" - Bordan Tkachuk, chief executive at Viglen.

"There's a lot of things that can happen. We'll be watching very carefully what happens with the new slot. We don't believe that many vendors will want to go exclusively with Slot One. Dell and Gateway probably will, they're so closely tied in to the Intel mother ship. Will Compaq? I'd be surprised." - Cyrix's Brendan Sherry.