“I mean, do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1 a day? There’s no electricity in that house. None…. They’re not going to sit there and like, browse eBay or something.”
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, on whom it’s slowly dawned that computers are not going to cure world hunger, The New York Times, 3 November 2000
“Hewlett-Packard is working behind the scenes to bring you your favorite Internet experience.”
Hewlett-Packard marketer Maia Ozguc, on H-P’s role in running consumers’ favorite Internet experience — we haven’t yet figured out why the company’s ads mention Amazon, The New York Times, 2 November 2000
“The Napster service will be the Napster service. This is about file sharing, file sharing, file sharing.”
Napster CEO Hank Barry, on the company’s new pay-for-play service, designed to cooperate with music label executives who skipped their kindergarten lessons on what sharing was all about, ZDNN, 31 October 2000
“It’s not really about whether the economics are there or not. It’s about whether you have something good enough that people will want to watch it.”
Heavy.com CEO Simon Assad, displaying a lightweight understanding of his Web animation firm’s plans to make money, The New York Times, 30 October 2000
“I was given the brush-off at first, told to e-mail the story. Aside from the fact that I didn’t have e-mail at the time, I was not sending the story off into ether.”
Freelance writer Dan Forbes, on his technophobic, thoroughly Luddite pitch of a drug-control payola scandal to Salon.com …
“A friend of mine says that when they write the history of the Internet as a medium this story will be mentioned. How many real heavy-duty scoops have there been on the Internet prior to this?”
… and Forbes again, awakening to the Internet’s way new journalism about five years too late, High Times, December 2000 (issue date)
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