John Naughton famous quotes

Appeasement, said Winston Churchill, consists of being nice to a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last. At the moment, the biggest crocodile in the world is Microsoft, and everybody is busy sucking up to it.
-- John Naughton

#Nice #Lasts #Microsoft

To say that Sputnik gave rise to some concern in the United States would be the understatement of the century. The truth is that the US went apeshit
-- John Naughton

#United States #Would Be #Sputnik

A paradigm is a powerful theoretical and methodological framework which defines the working lives of thousands of intelligent and disciplined minds. And paradigms do not attract the loyalty of such minds unless they 'work'. One of the first things a graduate student learns is that if there is a discrepancy between the paradigm and what he or she has discovered, then the automatic assumption is that the paradigm is right and the student wrong. Just as a good workman never blames his tools, so the diligent student never blames his paradigm
-- John Naughton

#Loyalty #Powerful #Intelligent

Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes
-- John Naughton

#Intellectual #Three #Lines

Computer programmers tend, by and large, to be quirky and highly individualistic. Trying to organize or manage such awkward characters is normally as thankless as herding cats
-- John Naughton

#Character #Cat #Awkward

What worries me is that we are increasingly enmeshed in incompetent systems, that is, systems that exhibit pathological behaviour but cant fix themselves.
-- John Naughton

#Worry #Behaviour

Nostalgia isn't a business model
-- John Naughton

#Nostalgia #Models #Business Models

My immune system has always been overly welcoming of germs. It's far too polite, the biological equivalent of a southern hostess inviting y'all nice microbes to stay awhile and have some artichoke dip.

The extras are a nice bonus feature, but the main incentive is the musical experience.

The last day of your life is still going to be a day.

Freedom is the last, best hope of earth.

When your last breath arrives, Grammar can do nothing.

The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.

What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.

Bill Gates finds people in Russia to hire them to Microsoft. That's the Russian interest in this process.

I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.

Microsoft unapologetically will make sure ActiveX works best on Windows