Not having a schedule is OK if it's your PhD and you plan to spend 14 years on the thing, or if you're a programmer working on the next Duke Nukem and we'll ship when we're good and ready. But for almost any kind of real business, you just have to know how long things are going to take, because developing a product costs money.

Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don't pay any attention to the competition. They're not relevant to you.

Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way.

If you are a programmer working in 2006 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I’m going to punish you by making you peel onions for six months in a submarine.

Good software, like wine, takes time.

Listen to your customers, not your competitors.