Author: Matt

“If people don’t tell you you’re stupid periodically, you lose your incentive to try hard.”

Microsoft research chief Rick Rashid, revealing that the secret purpose of his $3 billion-a-year division is to boost Bill Gates’s self-esteem by hiring university professors for him to insult, The Washington Post, 5 April 1999

“You can’t take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ‘open source,’ and have everything magically work out. Software is hard.”

Mozilla.org hacker emeritus Jamie Zawinski, on his resignation from the Netscape-backed open-source browser project, Jwz.org, 1 April 1999

“Every Internet-related IPO seems to go up with little regard for the company behind the stock.”

Keith Benjamin, an Internet analyst at BancBoston Robertson Stephens, who appears to be just now realizing what the Net stock rally is all about, Wired News, 1 April 1999

“In many ways we’re thrilled to see traditional media companies getting into the business.”

Ethan Zuckerman, vice president of R&D for Lycos’s Tripod subsidiary, on how hopes for a bailout of “community” sites have been lifted by the recent entry of old-media giants into the biz, News.com, 31 March 1999

“The world does not need another Yahoo!”

Lou Dobbs, president of CNN’s financial news division, on how his corporate parent, Time Warner, aims to make sure its next new media play learns absolutely nothing from anyone who’s been remotely successful online, The Wall Street Journal, 30 March 1999 (paid subscription required)