Top 100 Steve Ballmer Quotes
#1. When Steve Ballmer calls me wacko, I consider that a compliment.
Scott McNealy
#2. The Internet Was Designed For The PC. The Internet Is Not Designed For The iPhone
Steve Ballmer
#3. I like to tell people that all of our products and business will go through three phases. There's vision, patience, and execution.
Steve Ballmer
#4. I have four words for you: I love this company, yeah!
Steve Ballmer
#5. In many ways I think the company's doing quite a good job. If you look at the transition to Office 365 we started when I was there, I'm excited about that and I think the company's doing a great job on that.
Steve Ballmer
#6. Maybe I'm an emblem of an old era, and I have to move on.
Steve Ballmer
#7. We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference.
Steve Ballmer
#8. It's how tenacious you are that will determine your success.
Steve Ballmer
#9. I would love to see all open-source innovation happen on top of Windows.
Steve Ballmer
#10. I want to make sure (a user) can't get through ... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad.
Steve Ballmer
#11. As a global company, our future growth and success requires that we constantly look at ways to improve our ability to serve customers worldwide.
Steve Ballmer
#12. Only our company and a handful of others are poised to write the future.
Steve Ballmer
#13. Our mail product, Hotmail, is the market leader globally.
Steve Ballmer
#14. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#15. Great companies with the way they work, first start with great leaders.
Steve Ballmer
#16. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#17. Throughout our history, Microsoft has won by making big, bold bets. I believe that now is not the time to scale back the scope of our ambition or the scale of our investment. While our opportunities are greater than ever, we also face new competitors, faster-moving markets and new customer demands.
Steve Ballmer
#18. [At Microsoft] I had many years of experience and history and seeing connections. With my direct reports, the job at Microsoft was to delegate and then be able to properly review, but not to micromanage. To have a way of connecting and integrating without getting in the way.
Steve Ballmer
#19. No. 1 thing is that life is just not as interrupt-driven as when you're running a company.
Steve Ballmer
#21. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#22. There's a huge crowd out there that basically will go nuts recommending to every coach on the planet, "Hey, coach, I've been playing with the analytics. I think you should do X, Y, and Z."
Steve Ballmer
#23. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#24. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#25. I want people to understand the amazing, positive way our software can make leisure time more enjoyable, and work and businesses more successful.
Steve Ballmer
#26. Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards.
Steve Ballmer
#27. As a shareholder I have expressed my frustration with not getting more information about revenue and margins from the cloud.
Steve Ballmer
#28. Our industry is going through quite a wave of innovation and it's being powered by a phenomenon which is referred to as the cloud.
Steve Ballmer
#29. The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen.'
Steve Ballmer
#30. Since I'm not a seller of the stock, I don't really care what it is today.
Steve Ballmer
#31. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.
Steve Ballmer
#32. Analytics only goes so far. Basketball, more than baseball, for example, is really a team sport.
Steve Ballmer
#33. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.
Steve Ballmer
#35. This is all about having great leaders who can drive agile innovation and agile decision-making.
Steve Ballmer
#36. You get some success. You run into some walls ... it's how tenacious you are, how irrepressible, how ultimately optimistic and tenacious you are about it that will determine your success.
Steve Ballmer
#37. What we've gone through in the last several years has caused some people to question 'Can we trust Microsoft?'
Steve Ballmer
#38. Everyone likes to differentiate between business and consumers but I don't see the difference really. Most people are people. I get personal and business mail and I have one set of contacts from my life. I don't want to manage two sets. I want one view of my world.
Steve Ballmer
#39. I don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.
Steve Ballmer
#40. If the CEO doesn't see the playing field, nobody else can. The team may need to see it too, but the CEO really needs to be able to see the entire competitive space.
Steve Ballmer
#41. We will make our products work out of the box.
Steve Ballmer
#42. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#43. I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs,and yet there's a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.
Steve Ballmer
#44. I'm going to f
ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f
ing kill Google.
Steve Ballmer
#45. A plane is a guilty pleasure. I have one. It's a great luxury. I appreciate it. I couldn't do what I do. It's not something you can write down as anything other than, "Wow, I can't believe I have this and I'm absolutely spoiled and entitled." On the other hand, I have one and I use it.
Steve Ballmer
#46. In terms of the public positioning of the company, Satya's [Nadella] done a very good job. He sort of pivoted in a way that I don't think would have been possible for me to do even if I'd seen it that way, to really talk about this mobile-first, cloud-first world.
Steve Ballmer
#47. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#48. I want to express my deepest condolences at the passing of Steve Jobs, one of the founders of our industry and a true visionary. My heart goes out to his family, everyone at Apple and everyone who has been touched by his work,
Steve Ballmer
#49. Accessible design is good design - it benefits people who don't have disabilities as well as people who do. Accessibility is all about removing barriers and providing the benefits of technology for everyone.
Steve Ballmer
#50. We're going to try to do more to communicate the value of activation to customers in addition to making the process simpler and more consistent.
Steve Ballmer
#51. The company I invested in is probably a leader in that area. They're a company called Second Spectrum, which happens to be based in LA but was started by two USC computer-science professors. It's filled with guys who love sports, who played sports, but really look like programmers.
Steve Ballmer
#52. It's hard to invent a new thing, and it's just as hard to invent another new thing.
Steve Ballmer
#53. It actually turns out to be much harder to really understand government across state local and federal.
Steve Ballmer
#54. Ultimately progress is measured sort of through the eyes of users.
Steve Ballmer
#55. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#56. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#57. I'd like to own Microsoft shares until I either give something to charity or I die.
Steve Ballmer
#58. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#59. [Apple and RIM] are probably restricted, in some sense, to a certain maximum ... If you want to reach more people than that, you sort-of have to separate the hardware and the software issue.
Steve Ballmer
#60. Not only because the product wasn't a great product, but remember it took us five or six years to ship it. Then we had to sort of fix it. That was what I might call Windows 7.
Steve Ballmer
#61. I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft.
Steve Ballmer
#62. Ford shared this vision. We are inviting more players to join in.
Steve Ballmer
#63. Getting the big things right that make all the money, that's long cycle, really executing in a way that allows you to do it, that's short cycle.
Steve Ballmer
#64. The stock market has always had its own meter. Sometimes it's ahead of itself, sometimes it's behind itself. A broken watch is right twice a day.
Steve Ballmer
#65. There's a lot of Google fascination out there and we share it, and we're going to compete, we're going to compete very, very hard.
Steve Ballmer
#66. Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.
Steve Ballmer
#67. I don't think there is one size that fits all [] I've been to too many meetings with journalists who spent the first 10 minutes of the meeting setting up iPad to look like a laptop.
Steve Ballmer
#68. I think PCs are going to continue to shift in form factor. The real question is: What's a PC?
Steve Ballmer
#69. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#70. All the consumer market mojo is with Apple and to a lesser extent BlackBerry. And yet, the real market momentum with operators and the real market momentum with device manufacturers seems to primarily be with Windows Mobile and Android.
Steve Ballmer
#71. I think our leadership team is a highly accountable leadership team.
Steve Ballmer
#72. There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category. It is bad for the long-term worth of the economy.
Steve Ballmer
#73. I think the biggest mistake most people make when they pick their first job is they don't worry enough about whether they'll love the work, and they worry more about whether it's good experience
Steve Ballmer
#74. Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.
Steve Ballmer
#75. 500 dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that is the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard. Which makes it not a very good email machine.
Steve Ballmer
#76. I'd rather use Windows and Internet Explorer in Hell than I'd use Linux and Mozilla Firefox in Heaven!
Steve Ballmer
#77. I didn't leave business school to go bankrupt.
Steve Ballmer
#78. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#79. You can have an Apple in the phone business, or a RIM, and they can do very well, but when 1.3 billion phones a year are all smart, the software that's gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that's sold by somebody who doesn't make their own phones.
Steve Ballmer
#80. Our goal in making these changes is to enable Microsoft to achieve greater agility in managing the incredible growth ahead and executing our software-based services strategy.
Steve Ballmer
#81. I've found three or four things that are quite interesting to me that I'm focused on. That's been fun.The Clippers is obviously one of them.
Steve Ballmer
#82. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#83. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#84. Whatever device you use ... Windows will be there ... Windows will be everywhere on every device without compromise.
Steve Ballmer
#85. I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value.
Steve Ballmer
#87. At Microsoft, we're investing heavily in security because we want customers to be able to trust their computing experiences, so they can realize the full benefits of the interconnected world we live in.
Steve Ballmer
#88. Our company has to be a company that enables its people.
Steve Ballmer
#89. This is a great opportunity for Don, and I wish him success. I am incredibly proud of the work and vision culminating in Xbox One. I'm particularly excited about how Xbox pushes forward our devices and services transformation by bringing together the best of Microsoft.
Steve Ballmer
#90. I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life.
Steve Ballmer
#91. We're going to think big, we're going to bet big.
Steve Ballmer
#92. There are other ways I think of myself as spoiling myself ... I ... get a massage once a week. Other people can, I didn't used to, and I can now.
Steve Ballmer
#93. Let's face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone. That's why they've got 75,000 applications - they're all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.
Steve Ballmer
#94. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#95. Eventually the Internet will be accessed by PC, television, and wireless devices.
Steve Ballmer
#96. 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.
Steve Ballmer
#97. The way I do things I usually always prefer to have a very clear strategy and be very focused. At the same time to be very rock solid, and crisp in execution.
Steve Ballmer
#98. I think good ideas are usually better done quickly than slowly.
Steve Ballmer
#99. I can tell you first-hand from my experiences with Sacramento, the league does try to honor the fan bases it has, and encourage teams to stay in their home markets.
Steve Ballmer
#100. It's always great when you get a lot of people pushing themselves to do better, be better, invent better, better serve, better lead customers in new directions.
Steve Ballmer
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