Steve Ballmer Quotes

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Steve Ballmer

Profession : Businessman

Birth : March 24, 1956

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.

Steve Ballmer

I liked football a lot, too, but basketball clearly is my first love.

Steve Ballmer

Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards.

Steve Ballmer

I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life.

Steve Ballmer

I don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.

Steve Ballmer

I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer

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

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

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

Our company has to be a company that enables its people.

Steve Ballmer

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

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

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

Our mail product, Hotmail, is the market leader globally.

Steve Ballmer

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

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.

Steve Ballmer

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

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.

Steve Ballmer

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

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.

Steve Ballmer