Top 116 Quotes & Sayings by Walt Mossberg

Though many people mistakenly credit IBM with the first PC in 1981, the Apple II came out four years earlier, in 1977.

The Secretary of the State at the time was James Baker, who had also been Secretary of Treasury and White House Chief of Staff: very powerful guy. And I went to see him in his very ornate office at the State Department to say I wasn't going to cover him anymore. It was just a courtesy call.

There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers.

For those still outside the cult of Slack, it's a service - available as a desktop or mobile app, or a website - which is essentially a series of public chat rooms (called channels) on topics relevant to a company or to teams within a company.

What we did with 'AllThingsD', though, was very different. We weren't taking a newspaper and putting it on the web; we were creating a digital native product, and we did it inside of a very old, stuffy newspaper company at the time.

Streaming TV shows, movies, and other types of video over the Internet to all manner of devices, once a fringe habit, is now a squarely mainstream practice. Even people still paying for cable or satellite service often also have Netflix or Hulu accounts.

Arguably Apple's least successful core hardware product in decades, the Apple Watch could have been nursed along, like a terminal patient.

I think Steve Jobs is a historic figure. He's not only a historic figure in business, but really in America.

When I walk into a Best Buy, I now see, right from the front door, a giant Apple logo. I see a giant Samsung logo. I see a giant Microsoft Windows logo. And those are stores within a store.

What's the third smartphone platform? Is it Windows phone? Is Windows Phone going to finally get off the mat in the developed world? Amazon believes their platform has a chance to become the third.

Microsoft's Windows 3.1, released in 1992, was the first truly successful edition of Windows and juiced the Redmond juggernaut. Apple's Macintosh System 7.5, released in 1994, was another in a string of versions that lacked key architectural features that the Mac didn't have until Steve Jobs returned and brought with him the code that became OS X.

I've been on the Web from the beginning of the Web. The good part about writing about technology is that you never run out of ideas, because it's changing so fast. The bad part is that it's changing so fast that there's a million new products and ideas every day and every week.

Jeff Williams, Apple's senior vice president of operations, has been called 'Tim Cook's Tim Cook' by some.

The textile industry became a huge deal in 19th century America, kind of like the tech industry is today. And that immigrant tradition continues, especially in tech, America's most dominant and dynamic industry today.

Back in May of 2008, the Kindle was still quite new, and we focused on that.

Apple very deliberately - and this was very much Steve Jobs' point of view - Apple has concentrated its cloud efforts on being invisible. So in other words, stuff just would sync and appear. You change your contacts on one of your devices, and it would appear on all your devices changed.

I believe that tablets - and especially the iPad - are extremely versatile and productive tools for consumers, schools and businesses and are better for many tasks than the PC or the smartphone.

When I first reviewed the iPad, I wrote that, to succeed, 'It will have to prove that it really can replace the laptop or netbook for enough common tasks, enough of the time, to make it a viable alternative.'

Lauren Goode and I have agreed that the next version of the Mac software - all of them are named after places in California - should be named either Bridgeport or Warwick.

Whether you are a consumer, a hardware maker, a software developer or a provider of cool new services, it's hard to make a move in the American cellphone world without the permission of the companies that own the pipes.

Classic cable TV may have hit its peak, but it's still a huge force, and the streaming apps of many cable networks still require you to authenticate that you're a paying cable customer every time you want to use a new such TV app.

People think of Apple as a maker of excellent premium hardware. In fact, many reviewers regard Apple devices as the best you can buy.

Taken as a whole, consumer technologies have made startling advances, but they still are not as easy to use as they should be.

Slack users I know, including me, love many things about the service. As the company likes to brag, it's fast, it's transparent, and it's great for brainstorming.

People always worry that buying tech products today carries a risk of obsolescence. Most of the time, that fear is overblown.

I try not to make snap judgments. I never, ever make conclusions about products I've never tried.

Many tech company execs who visit to pitch products take time to peruse the shelves and exclaim upon various devices they owned in younger days.

I was very proud to be at 'The Wall Street Journal'. I have nothing bad to say about it. I had a great run there. In what turned out to be the final years of my tenure there, 'AllThingsD' occupied me more and more and was much more fun.

There's always a mismatch between small entrepreneurial outfits and large companies, which often don't have the same outlook.

I believe... we were told that the 'Bluetooth AirPods', whatever they are, can be used on anything that supports Bluetooth audio.

Who have I picked fights with over the years? Bill Gates. Google. Mark Zuckerberg. Even - despite everything that's written about my relationship with Steve Jobs - we had yelling matches.

I spent 19 years as a Washington reporter covering a variety of beats.

I use my iPad many times a day, and it has cut my use of my laptop by more than half.

Slack spread through businesses like wildfire, initially in the tech and media sectors, but now much more widely. At its public launch in February 2014, it had 17,000 users. As of April 1st, 2016, that number had rocketed to 2.7 million daily active users.

My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.

I actually think it's against the rules at Vox Media to work there if you've never dropped an iPhone.

Everyone knows that Apple crushed Microsoft in the mobile era. But it was exactly the opposite in the PC Wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Has the smartphone begun to mature, plateau out?

Amazon makes mistakes, including launching a smartphone in 2014 that was a flop and to which I gave a poor review.

What could a smartphone do for me that would make people go out and buy another one?

Our lives and our culture have been significantly changed and improved by hardware, software, and services developed by immigrants.

Everyone looks adorable singing with James Corden.

Who co-founded Google? Sergey Brin, a Russian-born Jew whose family fled anti-semitism in the Soviet Union to settle here and who considers himself a refugee.

Email is a senior citizen. It's been around since at least the 1960s in one form or another. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a hot competition among consumer email services like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Gmail.

I have on my wall right now a front page of the 'Journal' from January 1991, when I co-wrote a front-page story about Iraq firing missiles at Israel. By October, I was writing about tech products.

Man, he could sell. As he liked to say, he lived at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. But there was a more personal side of Steve Jobs, of course, and I was fortunate enough to see a bit of it because I spent hours in conversation with him over the 14 years he ran Apple.

Though it has plenty of competitors, Slack claims to be the 'fastest growing business application in history'.

How you feel about the modern, multitouch tablet depends a lot on what you think Steve Jobs and company set out to do with the iPad back in 2010. If you believe he was out to make a bigger smartphone or to entirely replace the Mac and PC, you're wrong.

In the tech world, you can reel off great products in several ways. You can have the once-in-a-lifetime gut instincts of a Steve Jobs. You can have the brainiac coding skills of a Bill Gates, Larry Page, or Sergey Brin. Or, I learned, you can have the deep intellectual curiosity and stubbornness of a Jeff Bezos.

We need a wireless mobile device ecosystem that mirrors the PC/Internet ecosystem, one where the consumers' purchase of network capacity is separate from their purchase of the hardware and software they use on that network. It will take government action, or some disruptive technology or business innovation, to get us there.

There's a blizzard of metrics that social sites and messaging sites put out there.

The car is the ultimate mobile device, isn't it?

Apple is all-in on Apple hardware and still wants you to be all-in, too.

I wrote a lot about the need for an information appliance. I think we've pretty much arrived at one: the iPad. A child could figure out how to use it quickly. Compare it to a DOS computer or even an Apple II; it's no longer nearly as much of a hassle or a mystery.

You have giant Facebook, which wants people to be more engaged, and they also want to grow and trade different things, including content.

I see retirement as just another of these reinventions, another chance to do new things and be a new version of myself.

I actually looked at an Apple ad from 1978. It was a print ad. That shows you how ancient it was. And it said, 'Thousands of people have discovered the Apple computer.' Thousands of people.

The next time you're driving from New York to Boston on I-95, you should make a little detour in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to visit the Old Slater Mill national historic landmark. It's the site of what is considered to be the first successful water-powered textile spinning mill in America.

I shifted my career when I was 44 to quit the Washington beats. I had a great Washington beat, a series of them, and I quit to start my tech column, which was a different kind of tech column.

I've known Bezos for decades, since the very early days of Amazon, so it's no surprise to me that he's smart or willing to make big bets.