Software Quotes

252 Sourced quotes

Steve Jobs

Lawrence Lessig

Alan Kay

Fred Brooks

Norman R. Augustine

Bill Gates

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

Law Number XVII: Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.

Norman R. Augustine

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible. Once a company that produces a certain product goes out of business, it has no simple way to uncover how its product encoded data. The code is thus lost, and the software is inaccessible. Knowledge has been destroyed.

Lawrence Lessig

Brooks's Law:

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

My opinion is that the only two computer companies that are software-driven are Apple and NeXT, and I wonder about Apple.

We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.

There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. … I'm saying we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.

The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.

About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better.

It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.

It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.

There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.

A computer is the most incredible tool we've ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer.

The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don't understand the software parts of it. And so you really can't make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple's the only company that has everything under one roof.

Analytical software enables you to shift human resources from rote data collection to value-added customer service and support where the human touch makes a profound difference.

The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.

If something is expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?

What we're saying to people is that every idea about ease-of-use, we can develop in software, for the PC, without asking them to buy new hardware, without asking them to throw away their old applications.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.

All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent.

Marshall McLuhan

Nowadays, all students have access to and indeed most own computers and are comfortable with the software used to compose music. There are probably too many musical options for them now and the trick is to limit the number of musical ideas so as to develop structure and continuity in their work.

In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer or the programmatic music compositions of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis transposed systems theory from the sciences to the arts. By the 1960s, artists as diverse as Roy Ascott, Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Sonia Sheridan, and Stephen Willats were breaking with accepted aesthetics to embrace open systems that emphasized organism over mechanism, dynamic processes of interaction among elements, and the observer's role as an inextricable part of the system. Jack Burnham's 1968 Artforum essay Systems Aesthetics and his 1970 Software exhibition marked the high point of systems-based art until its resurgence in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century.

Edward A. Shanken