Steve Ballmer
Full Name: Steven Anthony Ballmer
Birthdate: March 24, 1956
Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan, USA
Occupation: Businessman
Profile: CEO of Microsoft Corporation (January, 2000–February 4, 2014).
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer
Number of Quotes: 61
Accessible design is good design.
All companies of any size have to continue to push to make sure you get the right leaders, the right team, the right people to be
fast acting, and fast moving in the marketplace. We've got great leaders, and we continue to attract and promote great new leaders.
And then you take a look at Spaces, there is this great innovation that came out of nowhere.
We have the number one blogging site in the world because of the innovation that's there.
Anybody who ever left Microsoft to Amazon, we could count on them coming back within a
year or two, because it's not a great place to work to do innovative stuff as an engineer.
Apple is a failure
because they missed social? Nobody would say that, because they are having great success.
As a businessman, if you ask me what I'm proud of, I'm proud of the fact that I made $250 billion under my watch as CEO.
Bing is a decision engine.
Certainly, we continue to bring in new people. We'll hire, net new, over 4,000 people this year, and
attract great people into the company. I'm very bullish about the employee base and what it can accomplish.
Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.
Developers, developers, developers!
A passionate chant from a 2000s event highlighting Microsoft’s focus on developer support.
Diversity of form factor matters, and not compromising either form factor. You need diversity of price point. That's quite important.
From a client perspective, I really think the work Microsoft's doing with Surface, with HoloLens, with Xbox, that stuff's absolutely essential to the
company's future. Because innovation in the future will either be from the cloud out to all devices, or from devices as supported by software in the cloud.
Google's not a real company. It’s a house of cards.
A controversial remark about Google's business model during Microsoft's competition with the search giant.
Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of
criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that.
Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.
I come back to the same thing: We've got the greatest pipeline in the company's history in the next 12 months, and we've had the most
amazing financial results possible over the last five years, and we're predicting being back at double-digit revenue growth in fiscal year '06.
I don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.
I have lots of sources of information about what's going on at the company. I think I have a pretty good pulse on where we are and what people are thinking.
I have a hard time with businesses that don't make money at some point.
I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life.
I like to tell people that all of our products and business will go through three phases. There's vision, patience, and execution.
I liked football a lot, too, but basketball clearly is my first love.
I love Los Angeles. I love Seattle, too, which is where we have our home. But the notion of spending
a lot of time in Los Angeles has been exciting to me for years. The community down there is great.
I love this company!
I loved every minute of my time at Microsoft, but I had always envisioned having another phase of life just because I thought
that would be interesting. It had never been my plan to work until I literally didn't want to do anything and then hang it up.
I think Amazon is a place where people don't want to work.
I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft.
I think our leadership team is a highly accountable leadership team.
I'm all in on the Los Angeles Clippers. We're moving forward. We've got to work
to be the best we can be to take advantage of all the assets in the community.
I'm not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People
want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative.
I'm very, very bullish about our prospects, and as I tell our board, as I tell our employees, this is the
time to invest. There's so much opportunity. Let's just invest in that opportunity, and really get after it.
I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.
If we see an opportunity in the software/hardware seam, we're going to take it.
If you look at companies with upside potential, Twitter's right there. They've established a brand in a world where it's extremely
difficult to establish a brand. It's a global brand, people recognize it, people want to let you know what their Twitter handles are, etc.
In the case of music, Apple got out early. They
were the first to really recognize that you couldn't just think about the device and all the pieces separately. Bravo.
Life is nothing without passion.
Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.
A 2001 criticism of open-source software and the GNU GPL license.
Look at the product pipeline, look at the fantastic financial results we've had for the last five years. You only get that kind of
performance on the innovation side, on the financial side, if you're really listening and reacting to the best ideas of the people we have.
Microsoft is an enterprise company.
Highlighting Microsoft’s focus on business customers and enterprise solutions.
Microsoft's culture is very strong.
My children - in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least
on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.
One capability every business is expected to have is the capability to make money. It requires a certain kind of discipline, a certain kind of mindset.
Our company has to be a company that enables its people.
Our mail product, Hotmail, is the market leader globally.
Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to
change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world.
So, I think the output of our innovation is great. We have a culture of self-improvement. I know we can
continue to improve. There is no issue. But at the same time, our absolute level of output is fantastic.
Success is not a one-time event; it's a continuous process.
The Clippers are more valuable in Los Angeles. It's a phenomenal city, a phenomenal market, phenomenal everything.
The Clippers are the L.A. Clippers, and they will remain the L.A. Clippers. There
is no question about that. I live in Seattle. I will continue to live in Seattle.
The NBA has made it clear they want fan bases to be able to keep their teams.
The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets
people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn't think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.
Reflecting his belief in technology's role in enabling productivity.
The truth is that you can't really tell how anybody's doing in the tech business for at least five or 10 years.
There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.
A 2007 prediction about the iPhone's potential failure, later proven inaccurate.
We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we're in touch with our customers, our model of the world can
diverge from reality. There's no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either.
We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference.
We will make our products work out of the box.
We're all in on the cloud.
A statement underscoring Microsoft's commitment to cloud computing under his leadership.
We've grown from 18% of the profits of the top 25 companies in our industry to 23% of the profits of the top 25 companies in
our industry over the last five years. Profits are up over 70%, where the industry profit is up about 35%. Pretty good.
What we've gone through in the last several years has caused some people to question Can we trust Microsoft?
When you're running a company, you have employees - lots of them - that can interrupt your schedule. You have customers that can interrupt your schedule. You
have a certain obligation to wave the flag because people expect to get out and wave the flag. The number of ways that others can command your time is high.
Windows, Windows, Windows!
A rallying cry emphasizing Microsoft's flagship operating system.
You've got to remember there's intense competition between Microsoft and Amazon.
Last on Earth
