"It's either Segways or Strangeways"

September

"The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"
-- Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, giving his view of cloud computing at a company analyst day, as reported in the Wall Street Journal

"I think people have finally looked at the Mac and said this is a viable alternative to Windows. We've reached a tipping point where a lot of people are starting to feel that way."
-- Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, discussing Mac momentum in a CNBC interview

"Any CEO of any mobile phone company anywhere in the world would bite my hand off to have a contract with Apple."
-- Telefonica O2 UK, Ronan Dunne, in an interview with silicon.com

"It's either Segways or Strangeways."
-- Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik lobbying for Segway Personal Transporters to be allowed on the UK's roads

"[The] first reaction from Microsoft was 'no, no, no! Please stay Microsoft way, Windows way'."
-- Keisuke Kakoi, head of product and application planning, convergence unit at Sony Ericsson, explaining Microsoft's initial reaction to its decision to put Windows Mobile under a panel-skin on the Experia X1

October

"There was this hype about the grid replacing the entire internet. It was nonsense; it was just not true. We use standard products. We are not revolutionising technology. This was completely untrue. Take the stories about black holes - also, rubbish."
-- Cern CIO, Wolfgang von Rueden, discussing the most ridiculous reports he's read about the Large Hadron Collider in an interview with silicon.com

"Rarely would I advise anyone to be suspicious - you can be cautious of the message but not suspicious of the tools."
-- Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, on whether politicians microblogging should give us pause for thought in an interview with silicon.com

November

"Ultimately non-biological intelligence will be much more powerful than biological human intelligence but it's not an invasion of intelligent machines from Mars - it's coming from our own civilisation. And we will use it as we do today to expand our own reach - we will make ourselves smarter."
-- Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, speaking in an interview with silicon.com

"We've taken disks with bullet holes and got data off them."
-- Seagate CEO Bill Watkins on the difficulty of being sure data on a discarded hard drive can't still be accessed

"Nothing keeps me awake at night."
-- SAS CEO Dr Jim Goodnight speaking in an interview with silicon.com

"I don't really understand their strategy. Maybe somebody else does. If I went to my shareholder meeting, my analyst meeting and said, 'hey, we've just launched a new product that has no revenue model! Yeah. Cheer for me.' I'm not sure that my investors would take that very well. But that's kind of what Google's telling their investors about Android."
-- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer expressing confusion over Google's Android plan

"No, No, No!"
-- CIO of Ascend, Jacques René, responding to a silicon.com CIO Jury question on whether his company had any plans to implement Windows Vista

December

"I don't know if you know the old story about the two guys out in the woods who see a bear, and one guy says, 'boy, we'd better really run fast, or that bear is going to get us. We've got to run faster than the bear does'. And the other guy says, 'no, I've just got to run faster than you do'. In this economy, maybe that's the right way to think about it."
-- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer explaining his philosophy for surviving the economic downturn, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal

"[Lisa Simpson:] Mum! Dad! Our mall got a Mapple store. It's so sterile. MyPods, MyPhones, a Braniac Bar!"...

"[Mapple employee:] I see you're admiring our MyCube. It's fuelled by dreams and powered by imagination.
[Homer Simpson:] What does it do?
[Mapple employee:] You should ask yourself what can I do for it?"
-- The Simpsons lampoons the cult of Apple, clip via YouTube

What words of tech wisdom stuck in your mind in 2008? Tell us your quotations of the year by posting a Reader Comment below