Steven Sinofsky quotes:

Disruption is a critical element of the evolution of technology - from the positive and negative aspects of disruption a typical pattern emerges, as new technologies come to market and subsequently take hold.

Knowledge created a new culture of business derived from the information gathering and analysis capabilities of first the mainframe and then the PC.

While my friends were busy listening to the Talking Heads, Police, and B-52s, I was busy teaching myself to program on the Atari.

With the general availability of Windows 8/RT and Surface, I have decided it is time for me to take a step back from my responsibilities at Microsoft.

When you build a product, you make a lot of assumptions about the state of the art of technology, the best business practices, and potential customer usage/behavior.

After more than 23 years working on a wide range of Microsoft products, I have decided to leave the company to seek new opportunities that build on these experiences.

As much as we think of performance management as numeric and thus perfectly quantifiable, it is as much a product of context and social science as the products we design and develop.

The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time.

The cloud-powered smartphone and tablet, as productivity tools, are transforming the world around us along with the implied changes in how we work to be mobile and more social.

When you delegate work to the member of the team, your job is to clearly frame success and describe the objectives.

Groups tend to believe their work is harder, more strategic, or just more valuable while underestimating those contributions from other groups.

From a product development perspective, choosing whether a technology is disruptive at a potential moment is key.

People love to play expectations games, and that is always bad for collaboration internal to a team, with your manager, or externally with customers.

Assuming a specific resource is high cost is often a path to disruption when someone makes a different assumption.

When faced with something complex, spend the time to think about some structure, write down sentences, think about it some more, and then share it.

Nothing called the "Gang Of Four" ends well.

Innovation and disruption are the hallmarks of the technology world, and hardly a moment passes when we are not thinking, doing, or talking about these topics.

Things will absolutely go wrong. In a healthy team, as soon as things go wrong, that information should be surfaced. Trying to hide or obscure bad news creates an environment of distrust or lack of transparency.

Management, at every level, is about the effort to frame challenges, define end states, and allocate resources to navigate between them.

It is impossible to count the blessings I have received over my years at Microsoft. I am humbled by the professionalism and generosity of everyone I have had the good fortune to work with at this awesome company.

Despite demand, the BlackBerry avoided offering generalized web browsing support.

A moment of disruption is where the conversation about disruption often begins, even though determining that moment is entirely hindsight.

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.

I've always advocated using the break between product cycles as an opportunity to reflect and to look ahead, and that applies to me, too.

My father, an entrepreneur but hardly a technologist, was looking to buy a computer to 'automate' our family business. In 1981, he characteristically dove head first into computing and bought an Osborne I.

Data is great, but strategy is better

I always feel great. I get to come to work every day and see the build from the night before, and every day we do more stuff.

At some point, a group of people working towards similar goals will exhibit a distribution of performance.

A mouse has the precision that your finger can't approach.

If the work requires smart, talented, creative people, then more than anything, you want to enable folks on the team to create.

The best work for creative folks on the team is when the problem is big and the solution escapes everyone.