Quotes of the Week, May 12-16
"A lot of people are riding this push technology bandwagon and everyone and his brother claims to have push technology. It's more like automated pull. People doing push today are really doing broadcast. They don't care if you received the broadcast or even manage the connection [between the server and host]. They just want you to get the ads." - FTP's Andrew Ostrom.
"There are no plans at all to pull out of access. The volume of people who use us for access will fall, but we will always provide that. We're opening up the service to other providers like Demon, for example. The technology's already in place. [In effect] users will buy into bits of [the] CompuServe [service]." - CompuServe spokesman.
"Q. You do a lot of member profiling. What findings in the UK did you find most surprising and how do the stats compare to the US?"
"A. 29 per cent [of users] had cats!" - AOL UK boss Jonathan Bulkeley
Q. It is tough... people like Demon Internet looking around for friends..."
A. "Friends, rescuers..." - Bulkeley again.
"I just think the [MSN] service is slow and it drives me a little nuts. It's black, which is OK if you're 24, not so good if you're 60 years old." - And again.
"Yeah, ha ha! See what it feels like!" - And again, this time on the MSN outage.
"The reality is there's no $500 NC of any value." - Michael Stebel of Boundless.
"The next step, I guess, is we'll be looking at a hearing." - Intel spokeswoman on the Digital lawsuit.
"It really shows how underhand McAfee is being with its marketing tactics." - Mike Hill of Dr. Solomon's after the ASA found a McAfee ad "misleading and denigratory".
"The feeling is that it will be a difficult thing to appeal." - Amstrad spokesman on the Seagate case.
"I don't think anybody is making money out of consumer desktops. Companies line up in a dogfight and slash each others' throats and retailers look for a much bigger margin [than other resellers]." - Toshiba's Murray McKerlie on not going into consumer desktops.
"We sold it because the technology was too costly to build, it did not have upward mobility in terms of capacity or performance, and it had a boat anchor attached to it called backward compatibility [with orthodox floppy disks]. We sold that technology to the same triumvirate three years ago and they're still not building a chip in volume." - Iomega's Tim Hill on 120Mb floppy drives.
"We have been working with industry software developers this week to help them with their own investigations to determine if their software applications would be affected by the flag erratum. We will continue this effort to work with software manufacturers as needed to integrate workarounds into their future product releases." - Intel statement on that chip bug.