Say What? The Top 10 IT Quotes of 2010

“At what point will Google’s algorithm become self-aware and turn on its masters?”

A question Stephen Colbert posed to Google CEO Eric Schmidt during an episode of The Colbert Report. “Hopefully not in our lifetime,” Schmidt responded. (ColbertNation.com)

“I’ve never seen a document describing the ROI of restrooms and urinals. There are some things you are going to install because they are important to have in an enterprise.”

JP Rangaswami, CIO of BT Design, a unit of British telecom giant BT, commenting on the value of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, even where there may not be an obvious or direct return on investment. (CIO Update)

“For those of us who live outside of Apple’s distortion field, we know that seven-inch tablets will actually be a big portion of the market and we know that Adobe Flash support actually matters to customers who want a real Web experience.”

Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie, responding to Apple’s Steve Jobs’ dismissive comments about rival tablets, particularly of the seven-inch variety. (Enterprise Mobile Today)

“We’re going to have to deal with these new applications or IT is going to be left holding the bag.”

During his VMworld keynote, VMware CEO Paul Maritz raised the concern that cloud and SaaS-based applications are being adopted by enterprise users without IT’s approval or knowledge. Maritz noted that his own company uses 15 different SaaS applications, and pointed out, “I didn’t approve a single one.” (ServerWatch)

“There is a disconnect between traditional IT and the CEO.”

Forrester CEO George Colony, who also said that only 16 percent of CEOs of the world’s largest companies mention IT in their companies’ annual reports. Technology companies Microsoft, Dell, HP and IBM have no mention of internal IT in their annual reports, Colony said. (Computerworld UK)

“The cloud is being adopted by the biggest, stodgiest companies out there, whether they know it or not.”

Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez, CompuWare’ Web performance division, commenting on a recent the company’s analysis of 3,000 websites, finding that 19 percent, including those of many major corporations, use public cloud services. (Datamation)

“We are trying to reach that Star Trek dream. We spent decades investing in this technology. If you can put AI with mobility, it really, significantly expands the number of applications and services” conceivable.

Mazin Gilbert, executive director of technical research at AT&T Labs, commenting on work his group is doing to bring artificial intelligence to mobile devices. (Bloomberg BusinessWeek)

“Leisure surfing is critical to productivity (strangely enough). There are quite a few studies out there to back this up. We just thought it was interesting number-play!”

RescueTime founder Tony Wright, commenting on the 4.8 million in work hours he estimates companies lost because of Google’s decision to temporarily embed a playable version of Pac-Man at its main search page. Google said it made the move to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man. (Datamation)

“It isn’t about moving too fast — it’s about the future of moving too slow. It’s about understanding that market transitions wait for no one company and no one country.”

Cisco CEO John Chambers on the announcement of the new Cisco Cius tablet. (EnterpriseMobileToday)

“Why do people tweet? What is the driver of them spending time doing this? I think it’s because they think they have people giving them attention, and they do everything to play with that attention. The reason Twitter works so well is that they don’t have a feedback-loop, where people can realize just how little attention they’re getting. I’m not saying the system was set up that way deliberately, but it’s a very well setup system. People can fool themselves into believing that others are listening, which is not easy in real life. When you’re talking to other people on the street and nobody is listening, after a while you sort of have to stop talking. Not so on Twitter.”

Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon, currently a professor at Stanford. (Fast Company)

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.