Stories about: Stanford University

As Bill prepares to hand over the reins of Microsoft at the end of the month, here are some of his more notable comments, assembled from the Microsoft press site and the IDG News Service which, every day for almost two decades, has covered the man who revolutionised IT.

Diane Greene is the president, CEO and co-founder of VMware, a pioneer of x86 server virtualization and one of the most innovative companies to hit the IT world in the past decade. Greene was in Boston last week with her VMware team, briefing analysts on new technologies that haven't been made public yet. She took some time out to speak with Network World's Jon Brodkin about a range of topics.

Technology we take for granted today was new not so long ago, and somebody had to name it. Though sometimes it's hard to pin down exactly who deserves credit -- or blame -- here's a shot a some of the more familiar ones.

Artificial intelligence promised us great technology. But has it delivered?

Some of the most oft-repeated comments attributed to Bill Gates through the years were not uttered by Bill Gates. Take for instance "640K ought to be enough for anybody," which he supposedly said in 1981 to note that the 640K bytes of memory in IBM's PC was a significant breakthrough. Or his alleged comment that if General Motors "had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving [US]$25 cars that got 1,000 miles per gallon."

Late last year, the mobile phone industry passed a remarkable milestone, one that not so many years ago it didn't even expect to reach. Media sites and blogs around the world buzzed as the news was announced with equal measures of excitement, amazement and, in some cases, guarded jealousy. We'll never know who it was, or where it was, but on that day someone, somewhere bought a mobile phone and tipped global sales past the three billion mark. "More than half the world's population now own a phone" was a typical headline.

Patrick Gelsinger is an electrical engineer. He joined Intel in 1979, worked on the design of the 80286 and 80386 microprocessors, and was the chief architect for the 80486 chip.

Microsoft plans to shutter its book-scanning operation this week, the company said on Friday.

It's not often you read a book and find that, 10 years on, it remains central to your thinking. Ideas come and go, paradigms shift and many books -- particularly in the rapidly evolving "ICT for Development" space -- become dated and surpassed by new innovation, new models and new ways of thinking. Many earlier studies gather dust, becoming windows to a history of amazing success, glorious failure or a series of what-might-have-been's. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

MMORPGs -- massively multiplayer online role-playing games -- like World of Warcraft, Eve and EverQuest may be the best simulators of tomorrow's business environment. So say Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone and Tony O'Driscoll in this month's Harvard Business Review. The authors found that these games closely mirror the evolving world of business: distributed decision-making, rapid response, ad hoc teams, and leadership through collaboration rather than authority.

The late science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously said that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."