Quotes of the Week, February 10-14

"This is not a scare, this is not a panic. This is an early warning for our customers. Unlike our competitors we don't put out press releases about viruses because we don't want to cause a panic." - Mike Hill of Dr Solomon's on new virus strains.

"Speed Disk is the star of the show because Windows NT 4.0 doesn't have a defragger, as Microsoft originally said there wouldn't be a need for one." - Jeffrey Leeds of Symantec on the new Norton Utilities.

"I would describe it as a 'tweener'. It's not got complete PC functionality and it is too big on hardware resources. It really doesn't do too much in terms of PC functions: you can't send attachments by e-mail and with the spreadsheet you can only see like 20 cells." - Dell portables group director of marketing Ben Bentzin on Windows CE.

"We will have (Klamath-ready) products ready before the competition and ours will also be the smallest machine (to house the Klamath processor)." - Demetre Cheras of Elonex.

"We don't believe it is in the wild. I think it's largely a marketing tactic designed to frighten people. They're trying to show that they're ahead of the anti-virus community. To our perspective it's not entirely ethical. What we're seeing, particularly in the US, is increased competition between Symantec and McAfee." - Hill of Solomon's again, this time on the Linux virus scare.

"We intend to more than double to a $40 billion company by 2000 - that's 25 per cent growth a year. Our business mix, roughly 85 per cent commercial and 15 per cent consumer, will probably stay that way for years to come." - Compaq CEO and president Eckhard Pfeiffer.

" There's real demand out there." - Compaq's Lisa Clark on MMX.

"Some people are making brave statements about getting (MMX machines) in the shops. It's about grabbing headlines but I wonder if you ask for (an MMX machine) they'll be able to produce many. I'm very suspicious. Sales are very low at the moment." - Larry Smith of IBM.