Steve Ballmer Quotations | Page 2

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offered far more choices and benefits to consumers.

After 22 years, it's time to let Bill hang up his bow-tie and pursue all his other passions, from his family foundation to his many civic duties to his love of baseball and fly-fishing,

This company, which has done so many great things for consumers and the American economy over the last 25 years, will not be broken up. No matter what the newspaper headlines say, absolutely nothing in the current case justifies breaking us up.

This agreement is a significant milestone for consumers and content owners, since it will greatly extend the reach and flexibility of digital entertainment in the home. By integrating our Windows Media(R) platform technologies with the DIRECTV service, we have created a pipeline for an incredible variety of premium digital entertainment to move seamlessly and securely throughout the home to anywhere a DIRECTV customer wants to enjoy it.

This is a big deal for us. The chance to have the kind of partnership where a customer can go in, experience the Internet, sign up and get the Internet easily installed in whatever form makes sense.

They don't have the resources to build custom solutions,

There will be much closer relationships with telecom equipment makers, telecom service providers, software companies and PC companies occurring over the next few years, ... When we invested in AT&T, we invested in a partnership to secure the future of video services.

This is the next generation of the Internet,

There's a whole set of decisions that might have had to percolate to Bill Gates and I because they crossed the seven ... business groups that are now contained in these three divisions, and I think that ought to lead to crisper, faster actions on certain kinds of decisions we need to make,

There's a lot of work that needs to happen. And as the Internet makes this transition, and as we try to transition our business with it, we know we need to have the same kind of long-term approach and patience that we had with Windows itself,

At least a little more rapid cycle time would be appropriate,

A breakup of Microsoft, I think, would be an awful thing for consumers and for the industry. The real issue in a possible breakup would be the harm it does to innovation,

It never matters where we are, ... We know we have to push, push, push, push, push to be better.

It's a real reflection of the respect that I have, and that many of our people have, for Kevin as a strong leader, ... There's a lot of great technical talent in that division.

It's the most tested, most widely-implemented product in the test phase of anything we've ever built. It's rock solid. We've got it deployed on literally hundreds of thousands of desktops. It's ready to go.

It's top priority for us to be an innovative company,

This is a very large business that still has incredible possibilities.

The thing I put in my pocket has got to do more for me. It's got to let me access more information than just my appointments and contacts.

In general, 50 percent of searches do not lead to the desired outcome. Does anybody not believe that the search experience is going to be dramatically better 10 years from now? Does anybody deny it would be nice to search within the enterprise and outside the enterprise?

I'm looking forward to the World Congress. It's a unique opportunity to share ideas with leaders from all over the globe and hear their perspectives on how the IT industry can change and improve.

IM interoperability is the right thing for our customers, our businesses and the industry as a whole, and Microsoft is delighted to help lead these efforts with Yahoo.

IM inter-operability is the right thing for our customers, our businesses and the industry as a whole,

If you can find a classic enterprise piece of software that sells for a few hundred dollars, then its maintenance, too, might have to be a little higher than the percent people think of as typical, ... I don't seriously propose it, but the way to get the percentage down would have been to raise the price of the original license, which I don't think anybody would have liked either. I think the Software Assurance price is a fair price.

If you look at the dollars, everything about our prices are quite different than classic enterprise software.

If you look at our track record over time, investors who have been with us long term are very happy with the kind of returns that they have received, ... I'd encourage investors to again take that long term outlook.

In this world, it should be very easy for me, the end user, to have a program that runs on my PC that tells my bank and my insurance company and my broker to all put their financial information about me in my virtual safety deposit box on the Web, and let me view my information under my control.

In this world, it should be easy for me to tell my travel agent Web site to make sure to update my calendar with my trip and to page my mother if my flight is going to be more than an hour late.

I know no better place to base the company than here, ... the center of mobility.

I know for sure, 100 percent, we will do much, much better in Japan than we did with Xbox I, but that wouldn't be too hard.

In the short term, I would be surprised if consumers saw any kind of immediate change.

In this era of the web and web services, and new technologies, there's many more opportunities to integrate and connect with systems from our partners, our competitors, and many, many others.

In the last year and a half we've done a lot of revamping of the engineering and the processes.

In terms of people taking advantage of the Internet, I think we can talk about this generation of browser essentially as about the equivalence of DOS.

In every other generation, the first guy to 10 million consoles was the number one seller in the generation.

But IT pros should ask one thing and one thing only: 'Am I getting the best products and services that allow me to run my business at maximum efficacy.' The answer for the lion's share of the time will be in favor of Microsoft products and solutions, and we feel you shouldn't have to think about Linux if you do not want to,

because we've heard what people had to say.

How are we going to go after the search market? The good old fashioned way, with innovation,

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.

By bringing together the software experience and the service experience, we will better address the changing needs of our customers' digital lifestyles and the new world of work.

I do think that there is such a strong interest in demand for improvements in information technology that we will continue to see a pretty strong information technology sector, no matter what happens with some of these global economic factors,

Cars come in all shapes and sizes.. I'll be the judge of this thing..

heard loud and clear, 'You will change some things.'

The lifeblood of our business is that R&D spend. There's nothing that flows through a pipe or down a wire or anything else. We have to continuously create new innovation that lets people do something they didn't think they could do the day before.

The key is that for every business we have is to offer the things that pop every six to nine months, things that pop every couple of years, and things that pop longer than that.

The hackers out there are really are smart and getting smarter. We all have to run in front of them.

The future of our business and telecommunications is increasingly linked, and our interest in the telecom field is broad,

The change in our stock price reflects this.

All of our major businesses can have a short-twitch capability every six to nine months to a long-twitch capability. We can't make customers wait three to four years for things they need every few months,

It's hard to invent a new thing, and it's just as hard to invent another new thing.

Ultimately progress is measured sort of through the eyes of users.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Any idea that turns out to be truly great can be harvested for tens of years. On the other hand, if you want to continue to be great, you've got to bet on new things, big, bold bets.

In a sense technology is a tool of sort of individual choice, individual creativity, individual empowerment, individual access. My kids will never understand that it used to be kind of hard to access and find things, and know what the world knows and see what the world sees. Yet it becomes easier and easier every day.

I think good ideas are usually better done quickly than slowly.

I don't have a lot of experience running basketball teams.I'm just trying to get smart enough even to understand everything going on. As much of a fan as I am, I haven't played the game since ninth-grade. If you told me when I bought the team that there were 12 kinds of pick and rolls, I would've told you I have no frickin' clue about that.

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. I think it's important for Microsoft to participate both ways.

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.

I'm not an insider. I'm not on the board. I'm an outsider. That implies a certain kind of separation ... because the company can't, without an appropriate nondisclosure and trading rules, share confidential data with me that it would not share with any other shareholder. You could say that implies a certain kind of separation.

I'm a shareholder in Microsoft Corp. of some size, and while I don't work for the place anymore, I think a lot about that investment, how - as an outsider - might I add value or not add value? Do I believe that things are headed in a good direction? So I wouldn't say I spend the majority of my time on that, but I spend some time on that as well.

"There's no CEO for the government." But if you were CEO for a day at the government, would you have tools and reports and wherewithal to look at government the way a business would look at its lines of business, its spending, its revenue? I've actually been working, first by myself and then with a group of people, on then on and off, and now much more on, almost since the I time left Microsoft.

It actually turns out to be much harder to really understand government across state local and federal.

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.

I love the fact that Satya Nadella's checked the checkbox for cross-platform for a number of our services. I still think it's very important to do the right kind of innovative integration across Windows and our hardware platforms with our cloud services. I think the company's doing a lot of good stuff. Real competition in AWS. Real competition in terms of the clients, particularly from a hardware perspective, there's also [competition] from Chrome. But all in all pretty good.

Baseball is a set of individuals doing their thing in the same team, but it's much more individual. In basketball people are making real time decisions about who gets the ball, do we trust everybody out on the court, and the analytics certainly don't show you all those subtle dynamics, but they're very important.

Analytics only goes so far. Basketball, more than baseball, for example, is really a team sport.

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.

I think there are lots of opportunities to improve the product. When you read the press, people say, "Oh, the product needs improvement." I look at that and say, "Hey, that's an exciting thing to get behind!" Because they can improve that product. That leaves more upside from an innovation and revenue potential than you're gonna find in [a] lot of places. So you could say that's a downside, I see that as an opportunity.

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

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.

I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.

Ford shared this vision. We are inviting more players to join in.

It's how tenacious you are that will determine your success.

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.

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.

Most people still steal music.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The company [Microsoft] really has to chart a direction in mobile devices. Because if you're going to be mobile-first, cloud-first you really do need to have a sense of what you're doing in mobile devices. I had put the company on a path. The board as I was leaving took the company on a path by buying Nokia, they kind of went ahead with that after I told them I was going to go. The company, between me and the board, had taken that sort of view. Satya, he's certainly changed that. He needs to have a clear path forward. But I'm sure he'll get there.

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.

Eventually the Internet will be accessed by PC, television, and wireless devices.

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.

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.

You don't need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows Phone. I think you do to use an Android phone,

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.

We'll get a chance to go through this [Apple versus Microsoft debate] again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

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.

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.

This is all about having great leaders who can drive agile innovation and agile decision-making.

I have four words for you: I love this company, yeah!

No. 1 thing is that life is just not as interrupt-driven as when you're running a company.

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.

The lifeblood of our business is that R&D spend. There's nothing that flows through a pipe or down a wire or anything else. We have to continuously create new innovation that lets people do something they didn't think they could do the day before.

I want people to understand the amazing, positive way our software can make leisure time more enjoyable, and work and businesses more successful.