2006: The Tech Year in Quotes

A roundup of the sage, the silly, and the storied in technology news of the past year.
China Martens, IDG News Service

Technology news in 2006 has been anything but dull as industry titans Bill Gates and Scott McNealy prepared to exit stage right, long-time bitter foes Novell and Microsoft cuddled up, and Hewlett-Packard saw a spying scandal shred its reputation.

Plenty of commentary accompanied all that activity, so let's check out some of the most quote-worthy artifacts from IDG News Service stories.

Good Night and Good Luck

"I'm thrilled not to have to be CEO anymore. That was a temporary thing that I took on about 22 years ago."

--Scott McNealy on handing over Sun Microsystems CEO honors in May to ponytailed whippersnapper President Jonathan Schwartz. McNealy appeared upbeat despite having failed to fully reverse the company's poor financial performance.

"The world has had a tendency to focus a disproportionate amount of attention on me."

--Bill Gates, claiming in June he won't be missed all that much as he steps away from his daily chief software architect role at Microsoft come July 2008 to focus on his charity organization. Gates will remain as company chairman "indefinitely."

Sure, We Love Linux, But We Love Windows More

"If you want something, I'm still going to tell you [to buy] Windows, Windows, Windows."

--Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, aiming to "bridge the divide" between open-source and proprietary software with a surprise partnership with Novell announced in November. Sounds like he hasn't got that whole co-opetition thing straight yet, ditto on what the whole lovefest means for patents, with the vendors differing on their interpretations of what the deal will mean.

"I prefer to be an optimist, and will happily take the option that not everybody needs to be enemies."

-- Mr. Maverick himself, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, with his sunny take on Microsoft/Novell, at odds with the disgust voiced by many in the open-source community with the Suse distributor.

Could've, Would've, Should've ... Didn't
"I understand there is also a written report of the investigation addressed to me and others, but I did not read it. I could have, and I should have."

--Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard's embattled CEO, stating the obvious in September over his failure to peruse key information describing the company's bizarre attempts to unearth the source who leaked board-level confidences.

"If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently." -- Patricia Dunn, HP's former chairman, testifying before a U.S. Congress subcommittee about those techniques Hurd didn't bother to look into, which included pretexting. Forced out of HP in the wake of the spy scandal, Dunn continues to maintain the methods were legal. After all, she was assured of their legality by HP's own lawyers.

Touching Evil

"We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil."

--Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, about the year-long soul-searching process that the company went through before deciding to offer a censored version of its services in China. Google famously espouses the "don't be evil" credo.

Telling It Like It Is

"I think my response was 'What idiot dreamed this up?'"

--Mary Ann Davidson, Oracle's chief security officer, in typical blunt manner, remembering her reaction to the company's scheme to brand its databases as "unbreakable."

"Anybody [in the Internet space] who wasn't interested in YouTube was either asleep or not being honest."

--Jonathan Miller, AOL chairman and CEO, in November, regretting that Google, not his company, bought the video-sharing startup. Less than a week later, Miller was out of a job as Time Warner replaced him with veteran television executive Randy Falco. Could the two events, perchance, be related?

The Batteries and the Bees

"It's kind of like impregnating someone. It only takes one, so the more of them there are, the more likely that you'll impregnate someone."

--Rick Clancy, a Sony spokesperson, indulging in some plain speaking in August as to how short circuits caused by microscopic metal particles in the vendor's lithium ion batteries led to a handful of laptops catching fire. The result? A series of major recalls of millions of Sony batteries.

Slicing off the Fat

"We had become bloated. It's like middle-age spread. You don't know how it happens, but one day you look down and it's there."

--Donald MacDonald, vice president and general manager of Intel's digital home group in July, as he patted his belly, graphically describing the chip giant's attempts to slim down its 100,000-strong work force.

Paul Krill at InfoWorld and Jim Dalrymple at Macworld contributed to this report.

Source: pcword.com