Steven Sinofsky Quotes

I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was when I gave up.

We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better.

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

Macs are not intuitive. It's intuitive to the person who created it. It's not intuitive to me.

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.

Workflow and usability are not afterthoughts; they impact the core of any project and dictate how it should be engineered.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.

One of the problems with computers, particularly for the older people, is they were befuddled by them, and the computers have gotten better. They have gotten easier to use. They have gotten less expensive. The software interfaces have made things a lot more accessible.

I've been using a computer for quite some time, and I don't understand everything.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

It's very hard to explain to people who don't program, but the object-oriented programming system made programming the Mac and iPhone so easy.

Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.

I enjoy evangelizing Java. In my heart of hearts, I'm an engineer, and what makes me happy is building something that works and having someone use it. That's cool.

Every time I can find another engineer to add to the Chrome OS platform, I'm going to hire him.

The interesting thing about Android's design is how little we modified the kernel.

Eventually I found it had been working all along-but didn't show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said 'hEllO woRlD'. An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better!

With concerted effort, I can follow written instructions, but don't ask me to simply grasp how to operate a smartphone.

There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.

Windows is probably the most important product in the entire PC industry. Everything we do in terms of supporting touch, new hardware, accessibility has incredible impact.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.

Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run.