Author: Matt

“The problem meant you’d have an unmobile mobile phone, so that’s no good.”

BT spokesperson Roger Westbury, on a glitch that caused advanced 3G phones to go kaput while performing the decidedly 1G function of placing a voice call, Computerworld, 15 May 2001

“There were a lot of things done when the Internet was flying high that people think about differently in retrospect.”

Patti Hart, Excite@Home’s fourth CEO in five years, whose first week on the job was spent dealing with a teensy $75 million cash shortage that her new employer neglected to tell her about while she was being interviewed, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 May 2001

“The real lesson here is to recognize that the technology itself is of a transformational nature.”

Chunka Mui, DiamondCluster’s chief enervation officer, who’s still charging high hourly fees to tell people, yet again, that the Internet changes everything, The New York Times, 13 May 2001

“The reigning notion today is that the laws of economics are not, after all, suspended in cyberspace like the laws of gravity in outer space.”

Slate editor Michael Kinsley, showing that the comp-sci majors he’s hung out with for the past five years haven’t rubbed off on him, Slate, 10 May 2001

“People are claiming that they’re seeing the bottom. I don’t know where they’re getting that data. They certainly didn’t see the cliff, so how in the world can they see the bottom?”

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, on analysts who can’t tell their bottoms from a dot in dot com, News.com, 10 May 2001