It was a tough job rounding down from all the interviews we have carried out and the many news stories we’ve covered, but here is our selection of the best quotes this year:
"We haven’t noticed [open source BI] a lot. Most of our companies need industrial-strength software that has been tested; put through every possible scenario or failure to make sure everything works correctly. That’s what you’re getting from software companies like us – they’re well tested and it scales to very, very large amounts of data."
Dr Jim Goodnight, SAS founder and CEO, dismisses the impact of open source data integration.
"It’s PR bullshit. One of the specific advantages of open source is that we have a wide community who help us test the software and add improvements."
Yves de Montcheuil, VP of marketing at open source data integration player Talend responds to Goodnight’s claim that open source faces less thorough testing than commercial software.
"There are lots of terms for cloud. Lots of technology that is 10+ years old has been rebranded as cloud. Needless to say, we agree with [the] Amazon [definition of cloud computing]. It’s a platform for standards-based applications. Salesforce has a weak security model – everyone’s data co-mingles on the same platform and if that goes down, everyone goes down. It is not fault tolerant, it’s not virtual and it’s not elastic."
Larry Ellison lays in to salesforce.com during Oracle’s OpenWorld event in San Francisco as he launches Exalogic Elastic Cloud.
"I want to thank Larry for that great advertising on Sunday night. We’re not going to show you computers taller than you. We’re not going to show you a cloud in a box because clouds don’t come in a box! They never have! That’s the whole idea!"
Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff fires back during his speech at the same event.
"I realised there were instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP."
Mark Hurd’s statement after leaving HP after being accused of sexual harassment and falsifying expenses.
"The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs. In losing Mark Hurd, the HP board failed to act in the best interest of HP’s employees, shareholders, customers and partners. The HP board admits that it fully investigated the sexual harassment claims against Mark and found them to be utterly false."
Larry Ellison fires off a missive to the New York Times following his friend’s exit from HP.
"Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he’ll do even better at Oracle. There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark."
Ellison – again – after hiring his tennis partner to replace Charles Phillips as co-president at Oracle.
"It’s a great enterprise software soap opera."
Marc Benioff has his say on the HP/Hurd/Oracle/Phillips managerial merry-go-round.
"IPad is our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price. IPad creates and defines an entirely new category of devices that will connect users with their apps and content in a much more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before."
Apple boss Steve Jobs launches the iPad.
"It is meaningless, unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of the present size. Apple’s done extensive user-testing on touch interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touch screen before users cannot reliably tap, flick or pinch them."
Jobs dismisses rumours of a 7-inch tablet following the huge success of the (slightly larger) iPad.
"I don’t want to hear any crap — I don’t want to hear any crap about something magical [like an iPod or iPad that Yahoo could have gotten into] that the fine people of Yahoo are supposed to do in this short time [17 months since she joined]. So fuck off. And that one I meant. Lunch time! We’re way over. End on a high."
Yahoo! boss Carol Bartz lets fly at TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington at the end of a particularly provocative interview during which she repeatedly defended her running of the company.
"I’ve worked with some of the best software engineers in the world, people who turned down jobs at Microsoft because they thought they were too good for the place. It’s fantastically important for me personally to work with people like that. I need that sort of individual around – even though they can be total pains in the arse."
David Jack, CIO at Thetrainline.com explains to CBR the importance of surrounding himself with people who can really make a difference, even if they can be a pain in the backside.
"The HPs, HDSs and IBMs? They are watching us take market share off them. The established storage firms high end product lines shrank by about 20% while we grew at 10. They just don’t have the same clustered and modular technology as we do, in things like being able to manage a very wide mix of unpredictable, mixed workloads; they are playing catch-up and though they are trying, they haven’t figured it all out yet. My mission this year as CEO is in fact to re-ignite growth and we will be making significant investment in sales and marketing to do help do that."
David Scott, CEO of 3PAR rubbishes the opposition and sets out his stall for the year… just before the firm was acquired by HP.
"The ICO has completed a full reversal of its position… In our view the ICO is incapable of fulfilling its mandate. The Google incident has compromised the integrity of the Office. We can think of very few substantial privacy issues over the past ten years that the ICO has championed. In most cases the Office has become part of the problem by either ignoring those issues or by issuing bizarre and destructive rulings that justify surveillance rather than protecting privacy."
A letter from privacy groups to the Information Commissioner’s Office after it was announced no action would be taken against Google for capturing data from unsecured wireless networks via antenna on its Street View cars.
"I do believe that Oracle has no real reason to support MySQL. I don’t think the competition between them was enormous, but it is growing and has been growing for a number of years. I don’t think it’s healthy for Oracle to continue to grow it. I doubt they’d ‘kill’ anything. Will they aggressively sell to companies that Oracle can sell to? Never. Will it hurt the current MySQL customers? Probably not. There’s no money to be made for them there. Upselling current MySQL customers to Oracle would be tiny money. Stopping Oracle customers from downgrading to any open source database will be lots of money."
MySQL’s co-founder David Axmark gives his reaction to the Oracle/Sun deal, and what it means for the open source database, to CBR.
"As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good. The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I’ve had the privilege to work with over the years. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting."
James Gosling, the Father of Java, quits Oracle.
Drop us a line if you can think of any more quotes that should have made the list, we’d be happy to include them.
Thanks to altemark on Flickr for the image.
