Quotes of the Week, November 17-21
"The human face of networking is interactive and changing. The intelligent network mode - the idea that the network knows you - and the adoption of this technology is driven by increasing returns. The two together make our world extraordinarily dynamic and fascinating and competitive." - Novell boss Eric Schmidt.
"You announce a new product and within a week you have a million customers. And boom!, you go public. Then of course you have to get the revenue later. That's what 'URL' stands for - you get the revenue later." - Schmidt again.
"We try not to say too much about 1998 being 'the year of speech' but it does look as if speech recognition is finally emerging." - Lernout & Hauspie spokeswoman.
"The first two to four hours offer the best chance for a safe recovery. It's essential to immediately activate the entire region to get ahead and surround the abductor." - Child search agency TRAK's Robert Asquith on using the Net
"Our Web address is more important than our telephone number". - Dell Computer boss Michael Dell on the importance of Net sales and marketing.
"Two years ago no one would have thought that the CEO of a company like Cisco would be giving a keynote at Comdex... Now the majority of the products on the show floor have connectivity and the Internet built in... In two years time they all will, whether they are low tech or high tech products." - John Chambers, Cisco boss keynotes Comdex.
"There are a number of vendors that have promoted thin clients, but they are flawed in that they are incompatible with PCs and their approach requires the use of a browser to run locally. Any machine that can run a browser is not thin. The browser has to be the thickest application man has ever invented." - Bill Gates, natch.
"With the agreement to acquire Visigenic, we now embark on the next major phase of our turnaround, which is aimed at providing enhanced long-term strategic growth opportunities for our shareholders and employees." - Borland CEO Del Yocam buying back into the big league.
"The model could be anything: you could sell the phone directly, tie up with ISPs or telco's could lease them." - Digital spokesman on the emerging market for Web-enabled phones.
"100Mb was fine two years ago but 1Gb is the next rung on the ladder." - SyQuest's Steve Jamieson puts his company's new SparQ in front of Iomega's Zip.
"Sun and all the NC camp require you to be connected to a network but it's useful to use local storage in terms of performance and in environments such as mobile computing. This will run on any x86 PC and you don't need the Windows legacy." - Peter Lee of Toshiba which designed the Java app OS, JexeOS.
"If anybody is offered cheap UK versions of Encarta without documentation, they are buying stolen goods, it's as simple as that." - Richard Teversham, Microsoft's consumer product marketing manager, after a huge robbery of Microsoft software.