The IT year in quotes

This year in IT has been anything but dull as industry titans Bill Gates and Scott McNealy prepared to exit stage right, long-time bitter foes Novell and Microsoft cuddled up and Hewlett-Packard saw a spying scandal shred its reputation.

There was plenty of commentary to accompany all that activity, so let's check out some of the most quote-worthy artifacts of the past year.

Good night and good luck

"I'm thrilled not to have to be CEO anymore. That was a temporary thing that I took on about 22 years ago." -- Scott McNealy on handing over CEO honors at Sun Microsystems to ponytailed whippersnapper President Jonathan Schwartz. McNealy appeared upbeat despite having failed to fully reverse the company's poor financial performance.

"The world has had a tendency to focus a disproportionate amount of attention on me." -- Bill Gates, claiming he won't be missed all that much as he steps away from his daily chief software architect role at Microsoft come July 2008 to focus on his charity organization. Gates will remain as company chairman "indefinitely."

Sure, we love Linux, we just love Windows more

"If you want something, I'm still going to tell you [to buy] Windows, Windows, Windows." -- Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, aiming to "bridge the divide" between open-source and proprietary software with a surprise partnership with Novell. Sounds like he hasn't got that whole co-opetition thing straight yet, ditto on what the whole lovefest means for patents, with the vendors differing on their interpretations of what the deal will mean.

"I prefer to be an optimist, and will happily take the option that not everybody needs to be enemies." -- Mr. Maverick himself, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, with his sunny take on Microsoft/Novell, at odds with the disgust voiced by many in the open-source community with the Suse distributor. 

Could've, would've, should've ... didn't

"I understand there is also a written report of the investigation addressed to me and others, but I did not read it. I could have, and I should have." -- Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard's embattled CEO, stating the obvious over his failure to peruse key information describing the company's bizarre attempts to unearth the source who leaked board-level confidences. 

"If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently." -- Patricia Dunn, HP's former chairman, testifying before a U.S. Congress subcommittee about those techniques Hurd didn't bother to look into, which included pretexting. Forced out of HP in the wake of the spy scandal, Dunn continues to maintain the methods were legal. After all, she was assured of their legality by HP's own lawyers. 

Touching evil