Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

115 quotes in 2012 categories

• Software sucks because users demand it to.
• The NeXT purchase is too little too late. The Apple of the past was an innovative company that used software and hardware technology together to…
• Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.
• Most decisions are seat-of-the-pants judgments. You can create a rationale for anything. In the end, most decisions are based on intuition and faith.
• The ever-growing size of software applications is what makes Moore's Law possible: 'If we hadn't brought your computer to its knees, why would you go…
• I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I…
• I wanted to figure out how long to cook things. I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat…
• The NeXT purchase is too little too late. Apple is already dead.
• 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…
• If people don't get paid for their inventions, that's not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren't in…
• If you had a really good - battery, it wouldn't matter that the sun goes down at night and the wind stops blowing sometimes. But…
• If you have two steaks, one that's an inch thick, one that's 2 inches thick, how much longer does the thicker one need to cook?…
• In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per…
• In politics, religion and other areas of culture, people disagree on the worth of competing ideas. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that…
• It's very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing -…
• Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle…
• I was good at math and science, and I got lots of degrees in lots of things, but in a parallel universe, I probably became…
• Nuclear energy is a baseload - meaning it's power that you can run any time you want, day or night - and carbon-free.
• Risk is the sort of word that is easy to discuss upfront but tough to handle when it comes time to pay the piper. There…
• Elections, for their part, are typically popularity contests rather than measures of candidates' relative competency or effectiveness. Imagine if scientific truth were determined according to…

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