Quotes of the Week, December 9-13

"We've been overwhelmed with requests for [NC] pilots," - IBM's David McAughtry on the popularity of the NC.

"Intel and Microsoft don't have a monopoly on the PC anymore. That lasted 15 years which is terrible. Now's the time for computing for the other 80 per cent of the people." - Oracle's Nick Barley on the rise of the NC.

"We see a de facto standard emerging. There may be some tweaks to the chipset, but we don't see much of a problem." - Cirrus Logic's Chris Russell on its decision to license USR's 56Kbits/sec 'x2' modem technology.

"They're having [56Kbits/sec modem] standards meetings in the US every week. Various companies are going to implement proprietary solutions. Sure, a few players will make a few dollars at first, but there's a will to get the standardisation done on all sides." - Hayes' Bill Pechey.

"Jerry called about ten o'clock last night and said that after eight and a half years it was time to leave the operational side of the company." - Cyrix's Brendan Sherry on CEO Jerry Rogers stepping down from the helm.

"It's the upgrade Netscape Navigator users have been asking for." - Microsoft's Martin Gregory on its free Windows 3.1 version of IE 3.0.

"If we introduce flat rate pricing [in the UK], we have to be sure the level of service today is as good as it was last week." - AOL's Jonathan Bulkeley on the disaster of flate rate pricing in the US.

"I have expected this for 20 years. We have supplied information to all the companies and have been sad that they haven't taken us seriously." - Ergonomic keyboard specialist PCD Maltron's Stephen Hobday on the $5.3m US RSI case.

"[Java] is essentially a proprietary language at the moment. A question you should ask Sun is: are they going to release Java to a standards authority? ActiveX was [also] an evolving technology and in the end we took it to a standards body." - Microsoft's Mike Pryke-Smith having a dig at Sun's JavaSoft's 100% Pure Java scheme.