Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated.

Defect-free software does not exist.

The mistake that makes launching a venture expensive is when you try to make a disruptive technology so good that it can compete on a quality basis with an established product.

All software sucks.

The reality of most software development is that the consequences of failure are simply nonexistent.

There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.

Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like 'ID 02'. 'ID' is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates how many more months of testing the product should have had.

And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports on it, you know they are just evil lies.

The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.

There is a strong movement towards increased accountability for software developers and software development organizations.

When someone builds a bridge, he uses engineers who have been certified as knowing what they are doing. Yet when someone builds you a software program, he has no similar certification, even though your safety may be just as dependent upon that software working as it is upon the bridge supporting your weight.

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

When we got ready to ship out Firefox 1.0, the last set of things we did was to make it appealing to a consumer, to add the polish of a world-class product to it.

I think it's a combination of technical and social factors that leads to all the defects in deployed software.

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

Well, user feedback was excellent. Even when the software didn't work at all, there were few people who were avid users, and there were people who were just sending excellent feedback and excellent ideas.

Everyone wants an iPhone, but it would be impossible to design an iPhone in China because it's not a product; it's an understanding of human nature.

I'm not saying we purposely introduced bugs or anything, but this is kind of a natural result of any complexities of software... that you can't fully test it.

Testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

A very important part of game development is testing - something that a lot of developers don't do.

It's important not only to have the right timing of when the hardware is going to be released but also when we are going to be able to introduce quality software.

As you get to the end of the project you want to run all the tests cases against one version and make sure that you know that that version passed everything. And so as you get late in the project you get a little more conservative about making radical changes to the software.