Good software, like wine, takes time.
Impute People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc. ; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.
We didn't really start the company to go build an enterprise software company.
We are still in the infancy of naming what is really happening on software development projects.
Modern cyberspace is a deadly festering swamp, teeming with dangerous programs such as 'viruses,' 'worms,' 'Trojan horses' and 'licensed Microsoft software' that can take over your computer and render it useless.
When we started off we didn't know how to spell software.
People will realize that software is not a product; you use it to build a product.
There is this thing called the GPL (Gnu Public Licence), which we disagree with. . . nobody can ever improve the software.
Software and hardware design is less different than software designers think, but more different than hardware designers think.
Second law: The complexity barrier. Software complexity (and therefore that of bugs) grows to the limits of our ability to manage that complexity.
Red Carpet Enterprise has been really well received since one guy can install it in about an hour, and it makes it trivial to deal with software management issues like deploying updates and creating standard package sets for your various machines.
In software, the chain isn't as strong as its weakest link; it's as weak as all the weak links multiplied together.
I develop artificially intelligent technologies, along with educational and game software and let the business people take it where they will.
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.
High-quality software is not expensive. High-quality software is faster and cheaper to build and maintain than low-quality software, from initial development all the way through total cost of ownership.
Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine.
If I say I've got two versions of Word - that old one from 1982 that's perfect, with zero defects; or the new one that's got all this cool new stuff, but there might be a few bugs in it - people always want the new one. But I wouldn't want them to operate a plane I was on with software that happened to be the latest greatest release!
It turned out that building mobile software was a lot more like building hardware. . . where you had 1 shot and you had to get it right, right out of the gate.
[We in Microsoft] are not the only software company but we are a great software company doing some unique work.
Experience doesn't necessarily teach anything.