

Great quotes from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds - iseff
http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=325

======
gm
RE: Bill Gates, 1983: "We will never make a 32-bit operating system."

I have to admire a guy that makes a mental mistake (or rather, limits himself,
as in this case), and then goes full-on to prove himself wrong.

I think if you were to look at quotes of people who failed, you would see
shortsighted statements like these, with the huge difference that they never
changed their minds. They held their ground all the way down to failure (Sun
comes to mind, there are countless others).

So I see these statements here as badges of honor of these greatly successful
people. It takes a big man to say something and hold your ground, but it takes
an even bigger man to recognize you were wrong and then pursue a course of
action that contradicts what you used to think. Not only that, but with the
conviction that they have. Cool quotes.

PS: And let him who has never guessed wrong cast the first stone.

PS2: The Linus quote about masturbating monkeys made me spit out my coffee :-)

~~~
unalone
The list has a BIT of bias against Gates. Jobs gets to be humorous and bright
and dead-on. Linus gets to be hilarious and geeky. Bill Gates gets to be evil
and dead wrong.

~~~
mattmaroon
Yes, I read that too. There are some pretty classic Gates quotes, but many
weren't on there. My favorite: "Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up
working for one."

~~~
unalone
Nah, that's not him. I forget who it's cited to, but that's a misquote.

Doesn't make it a lie.

------
ArcticCelt
I completely lost interest when I understood that the only quotes about Bill
Gates are those selected to make him look like a fool. How original another
hit job on Bill by some computer cheerleaders, yeah! I didn't even continue to
the Linus ones, there is no point.

------
apd
The quote "Do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own
device drivers?" by Torvalds is not from 2001. Its around the early 90s.

~~~
d0mine
Exactly.

    
    
      From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
      Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
      Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
      Message-ID: <1991Oct5.054106.4647@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
      Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
      Organization: University of Helsinki
       
      Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
      their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying

</quote> <http://www.educ.umu.se/~bjorn/linux/misc/linux-history.html>

2001 is a dead-tree version's reference:

 _Torvalds, Linus and David Diamond (2001). Just for Fun: The Story of an
Accidental Revolutionary, Collins._ </quote>
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds>

By the way,

 _Talk is cheap. Show me the code._ </quote>
<http://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/25/132>

This quote is not from 2006 but at least 2000.

------
ardit33
My favorite of all of them, from Linus:

1996

Some people have told me they don’t think a fat penguin really embodies the
grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin
charging at them in excess of 100mph. They’d be a lot more careful about what
they say if they had.

------
pavelludiq
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." is my favorite quote of all time and of all
people.

------
dangoldin
I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important "operating system, and
possibly program, of all time." - Bill Gates, 1987

This reminded me of an old t-shirt my dad had, wish I could find it: "Flight
4.0 to Chicago has been delayed, I'm taking off with OS/2"

The 4.0 and Chicago referring to Windows 95.

------
JesseAldridge
If Richard Stallman sees this, he's gonna be pissed :)

------
jasonlbaptiste
yeah lets go bash microsoft more and be one sided again! yeah! hey, hold on,
let me read that arrogant and unrealistic post by 37 signals in the
meantime...brb...

------
cbrinker
Linus Torvalds is my god now.

------
swilliams
Great quotes, illustrates the personalities of all three perfectly.

~~~
incomethax
Which incidentally also reflects the personalities of the three Operating
Systems

------
weegee
Looks like Bill and Linus are pretty similar, both hardcore coders with no
heart for competition, which explains why they have both been so successful.
Steve is just from another planet altogether!

~~~
ajross
To be fair, all of the "world domination" quotes from Linus (oddly, the
original didn't make the list) are made with tongue firmly in cheek. It's
really not possible or practical for an open souce project to "compete"
directly against another in the sense that Microsoft does. At worst, they
snipe at each other counterproductively; at best, they share code and
reimplement features trying to out-do the other.

The bit about OpenBSD is real enough though. Theo has a long history of being
... difficult, and over the past few years Linus seems to have lost patience.

------
Hexstream
Bill Gates, in 1998:

"Microsoft looks at new ideas, they don’t evaluate whether the idea will move
the industry forward, they ask, ‘how will it help us sell more copies of
Windows?’

[...]

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to
be rendered very well by other people’s browsers is one of the most
destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any
effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on
PROPRIETARY IE capabilities."

Such a great man. o_o

