Top 185 Microsoft Quotes

Everyone knows that Apple crushed Microsoft in the mobile era. But it was exactly the opposite in the PC Wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

The regulation picture has gotten a lot clearer in the U.S. and most of Europe. And that’s fantastic. I think that’s why you’re seeing companies like Microsoft and Dell accepting Bitcoins.

I think we have a tax policy that was designed before Microsoft even went public. I think we’ve got to change – we’re at a huge disadvantage around the world.

Onstage at Build, Phil Spencer said the Xbox is an open platform – which surprises me, because you have to get your game concept approved before you start developing it. Then you have to get every update approved. Microsoft has absolute control.

Proprietary software grew up, starting really in the 1980s, as an alternative and that became the dominant model with the rise of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and the like.

As a team, we have a lot of work ahead of us in FY16 and beyond, but I am confident that, working together, we will make Microsoft a leader in the mobile-first, cloud-first world.

In 2005, MTV Networks considered buying Facebook for seventy-five million dollars. Yahoo! and Microsoft soon offered much more. Zuckerberg turned them all down.

If a company has a navigation system or a database or a virtual assistant they like better, Microsoft will meet them in the middle.

A photo app is a utility. It’s like comparing ‘Twitter’ to Microsoft Word. If you want to be an author, you’re not always going to constrain yourself to 140 characters.

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are building their own versions of the future. And they get bigger and bigger.

If Microsoft had never existed… The industry would probably be very fragmented.

This paradox of vision – the genius of youthful ignorance – is nothing new. Had Bill Gates not been in diapers in the early days of computer software, he might have understood that there could never be a market for consumer software – but the 19-year-old Gates went ahead and cofounded Microsoft.

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

Carefully calculate the potential size of your market to make sure you can grow. Before starting Mint, I knew that there were about 20 million people who had purchased ‘Quicken’ or ‘Microsoft Money’ over the years, and 80 million people using online banking in the U.S. alone.

If it hadn’t been for our Traf-O-Data venture, and if it hadn’t been for all that time spent on UW computers, you could argue that Microsoft might not have happened.

Our philosophy is that we want to be an ecosystem. Our philosophy is to empower others to sell, empower others to service, making sure the other people are more powerful than us. With our technology, our innovation, our partners – 10 million small business sellers – they can compete with Microsoft and IBM.

Not all of Microsoft’s businesses are successful, but they have every technology possible.

I think the idealism has always been marketing. Even back in the early days of Apple and the ‘pirate’ mentality, they were building a computer that they wanted to differentiate from IBM and Microsoft.

To me, Microsoft is about empowerment… we are the original democratizing force, putting a PC in every home and every desk.

When I talk about that Apple ecosystem, the ability to get one application to run across those five platforms is very difficult. In the future of Microsoft, using HTML5, IE9 and 10, the scalable OS, the ability to do that gets much, much easier.

I will say that Surface has been a big disappointment for us and for Microsoft. Both of our expectations from the product were much greater than what came to be and not only that. We invested enormous amount into research and development and spent a lot of time and energy into it.

When I heard about the Microsoft Kinect, though, I felt an urgency rising in me. A game you played without touching any machinery? A chance to wave your hands around, Minority-Report style, and move things around on a screen? This sounded like almost too much fun, with gadget-y pizzazz that sounded astonishing.

Microsoft is one of those rare companies to have truly revolutionized the world through technology, and I couldn’t be more honored to have been chosen to lead the company.

We expect the launches of Skylake, Microsoft’s Windows 10 and new OEM systems will bring excitement to client computing in the second half of 2015.

I think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they’re going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to speak.

What Microsoft is really good at is endlessly iterating and revving – incrementally improving things that already exist – and those things that already exist are generally acquired from the outside.

I don’t really think anything Microsoft does puts pressure on Apple.

I’ve been using email since 1983. I started with MH and Rmail, then cc:Mail, then Microsoft Mail, with Compuserve mixed in. Eventually, I ended up using Pine for non-Windows stuff and Outlook for Windows stuff. For a while.

I’m never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.

We have design capability, which everyone thought we sold to Microsoft, but we didn’t sell it. We will maintain the Nokia feel in all our products. We can’t have different products, each feeling different, in the market.

I find that it’s not the numbers but the quality of the audience. That’s why it got to be such a big thing when I left Microsoft, because I had an interested audience; not huge, but passionate. The passionate ones are the ones who change society.

I have spoken to a whole group of millionaires, head executives at Microsoft. Boy did I chew those guys out.

In the Mac vs. PC ads, Apple bills itself as the antidote to Microsoft. To love Apple wasn’t to sell out. It was to buy in. Most people use PCs, but Apple has the mindshare.

Before Mint.com, I was a long-time user of ‘Microsoft Money’ and Intuit’s ‘Quicken.’ Both were powerful tools, loaded with features and functionality around taxes, investment, budgeting – too feature-laden, in fact. They took hours to set up, forever to learn, and an hour a week to maintain.

Microsoft does platform, not really infrastructure, and they do a little bit of Saas.

Over the near term there is clearly the opportunity to work with Microsoft to do to a better job of creating a more secure Windows experience for users around the world.

Samasource’s largest clients are technology companies such as Microsoft, Google, Getty Images, and TripAdvisor, which contract with my company rather than a traditional outsourcing company in order to participate in ‘impact sourcing’ – conscious efforts to reduce poverty by moving money into places that need it.

Is it possible for Apple or anyone else to rule in the mobile realm the way Microsoft did on the desktop? The way to do this is to go mass-market with a device that can do anything the others can do.

As the leadership team, we’re taking bold and decisive action to evolve our organization and culture. This includes difficult steps, but they are necessary to position Microsoft for future growth and industry leadership.

My guess is that Apple won’t just pass Microsoft in market capitalization, but will go way beyond it.

My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking.

Epic Games and Microsoft have been close partners for more than 25 years.

Microsoft could help Facebook with one of the biggest challenges, namely monetizing its traffic without reducing the user’s experience. It’s obvious that Microsoft needs traffic and Facebook needs search.

Globalised manufacturing and procurement mean that a lot of high-polluting, heavy duty jobs are transferred to China. We will ask major companies, such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft and IBM to put pressure on their Chinese suppliers.

Early versions of Microsoft Word left a lot to be desired. However, to the company’s credit, it quickly learned where Word fell short, made the necessary changes, and repeatedly introduced new versions of the software.

Microsoft, Disney, Ford, Facebook, and a hundreds and thousands of other companies that affect us daily all began life as baby companies, aka start-ups.

When you think about the guys who started Twitter, and the Google guys, and the Facebook guys and the Napster guys, and the Microsoft guys, and the Dell guys and the Instagram guys, it’s all guys. The girls, they’re being left behind.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the Obamacare tech nightmare is how wholly predictable it all was. Anyone who has been involved in building the most rudimentary of web operations knows nothing ever works as it’s supposed to. Even awesome Apple, mighty Microsoft, and gargantuan Google miss deadlines.

My dad’s a biophysicist. My brother is a computer guy. His wife works at Microsoft.

After more than 23 years working on a wide range of Microsoft products, I have decided to leave the company to seek new opportunities that build on these experiences.