Hasso Plattner quotes:

At Stanford, we teach 'design thinking' - that is, we put together small, interdisciplinary groups to figure out what the true needs are and then to apply the art of engineering to serve them.

In the '80s, when Gretzky came to the World Championships in the second or third game, you'd see this guy skating circles around the other ones. Unbelievable.

It's not good if owners of sports teams are talking to sports journalists, bypassing the manager. That goes in the wrong direction wherever it happens. Therefore, I'll refrain from doing this at all.

Thirty percent of Americans have German blood in their family. I don't see any major difference in the engineering abilities of Americans and Germans.

I would have liked to grow up in Liverpool and become a rocker. I would have put my boots on, jeans and a leather jacket, and long hair and played the guitar.

Successful companies obviously have people with ideas and energy.

The software industry has to become better in componentization. That's a clear focus for most of the software companies. How components look, how they are maintained, the ability to maintain them separately.

Managers are important: they are leading the company and guiding and have to provide vision and manage the daily business.

Americans are not afraid of the future.

I made my money with software - encoded knowledge without which few products and services can exist today - and so it seemed imperative that this would be the field where I would give something back.

I'm a Berliner - fast, loud, obnoxious, industrious, brutally open.

Business reporting is not dealing with objects, it is dealing with relationships between objects.

This is where the world is going: direct access from anywhere to any type of data, whether it's a small piece of data or a small answer but a long algorithm to create that answer. The user doesn't care about this.

Please, please, please, my dear competition. We can beat each other and fight each other as much as we want and argue, but do not predict how a system really works when you really don't know and don't want to know. Either be better informed, or don't do it.

I believe that whoever is successful should help ensure that the next generation can be successful, too.

Kids only learn that the stove is hot when they put their finger on and they burn it. This, unfortunately, is the limitation of our precious brain.

You cannot make money with a hockey team. You cannot make money with a hotel, either, and you cannot make money with a golf club. I have all three of them. When you have a certain amount of money, you do silly things - because it's pretty to have a golf course and it's interesting to have a hockey team.

I create, for whatever reason, a busy schedule, but I watch hockey, all the games, either on the PC or TV. The world is now HD, and this is very good.

I am grateful for the great education at a public university that Germany gave me, and that - added to a little luck - allowed me to achieve. Education is the key to a career, and its basis has to be provided by government.

There is this permanent hope in America that there is some new technology around the corner that will change the world.

The Y2K problem is not caused by technical limitations. We simply forgot to think of the problem.

New applications will have to deal with big data. We have to analyze it on the fly, so we have to have a system that is transactional and analytical at the same time. We cannot have a multi-stage system. This is too slow for modern applications.