Steve Ballmer Quotations

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.

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

Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.

What we've gone through in the last several years has caused some people to question 'Can we trust Microsoft?' .

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.

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.

We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference..

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

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.

I think our leadership team is a highly accountable leadership team.

Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.

We will make our products work out of the box.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

One of the most competitive battlegrounds for our platform as we face the next five to ten years is the embedded space,

If we don't innovate, we don't have new versions. Nobody needs to upgrade. Nobody needs to buy. We have to have a variety of ways to innovate?We're at the beginning of 12 months of the greatest innovation pipeline that our company has ever had.

More than ever, Microsoft's growth opportunities abound as a result of our strong product innovation pipeline, ... Kevin's leadership of global technology, sales, marketing and services will help us ensure we harness this potential and fully realize the growth opportunities before us.

More of what we do will live on the Internet, ... Nobody will have software products in 10 years. Everyone will have products and services. It will be hard to tell the difference between software products and services.

People want hosted CRM, ... We will respond to and address that need. We expect to give Salesforce.com a very effective run for its money by having on-premise and hosted solutions over time.

Rick has worked closely with me analyzing the company's structure to determine how we could improve our internal processes and maximize opportunities for growth,

We're excited because acquiring UMT will help us meet customers' needs for deep portfolio management capabilities. By combining our software and expertise, we'll also create a new range of solution development opportunities for customers and partners.

My industry colleagues and I remain eager to work with the Department to support the homeland security mission. We look forward to working with you to pursue opportunities for technology to make cyberspace, and the homeland, more secure.

has not been building all its muscles evenly.

Given the excitement and enthusiasm from many of the game developing companies here in Japan, I expect us to do quite well,

Getting the most out of their people is on the mind of every business leader I speak with. (We) are passionate about the idea that the right software can provide the tools to empower workers to become the drivers of business success.

IBM is increasingly a services company ... and we are, at the end of the day, a software company.

IBM says we have a team of consultants and we can help you innovate. But at the end of the day, unlocking people potential is better. Having people collaborate to make the right decision is more productive.

Businesses are based on people. Software is a tool that can empower those people. I think Microsoft software is fairly unique in the way that it can do that.

to create effective organizations, manage a diverse set of products and businesses, and make the tough decisions that will keep Microsoft moving forward on our priorities.

Under Ray's technical leadership and weaving together both software and software-based services, I see incredible opportunity to better address the changing needs of our customers' digital lifestyles and the new world of work.

We expect to give Salesforce.com a very effective run for its money,

Mark's decision to leave was disappointing, ... and I urged him strongly to change his mind. But his characterization of that meeting is not accurate.

I see great opportunity for revenue growth for Microsoft coming from the mid market,

I see great opportunity for revenue growth for Microsoft in the mid-market. Mid-market customers might really not want to hear that.

Just as we succeeded on the on the desktop, we will strive to succeed in services on the Web,

Open source software does not today respect the intellectual property rights of any intellectual property holder. Some day, for all countries that are entering WTO, somebody will come and look for money to pay for the patent rights for that intellectual property.

I think this is a very meaningful way for us to concludes this litigation and to be able to really focus in on developing and delivering the innovative products and services that will benefit not only these students and these educators, but the population broadly and around the world,

It is clear that hackers did see some of our source code,

Our goal with this set of releases is to have something for everybody, ... We haven't forgotten the broadest set of developers we have, which are these Web developers, students and hobbyists.

Our workflow and Business Intelligence capabilities have been really worked on in Office 12, and they will work out of the box as well as with some other ERP and CRM applications,

I think he is right. We don't agree on much, but I think on that we would agree.

I think Office 12 will be the most exciting Office release we've had since Office 4,

It is not designed to address a short-term issue, it's designed for the long run,

I think that ought to lead to crisper, faster actions on certain kinds of decisions we need to make,

We have very strong momentum, particularly in the northern parts of Europe, United States, Australia ... I know for sure, 100 percent, we will do much better in Japan than we did with Xbox 1,

We need to have service offerings associated with each of our products that allow us to feed innovations that are appropriate to the market on, let's just call it a six-, probably more realistically a nine-month cycle,

We had too many products that we were trying to sell to too few customers in the mid-market.

We have an incredible opportunity...to revolutionize the Internet user experience. We need to deliver our next generation services platform in order to do that. And we need Bill Gates 100 percent focused on helping architect that.

Microsoft's collaboration with Cable & Wireless and Compaq will mean great new integrated messaging and collaboration tools, ... By basing a range of new services on the Windows platform, Cable & Wireless, Compaq and Microsoft will enable more reliable and more efficient IT services for small and medium-sized businesses.

We realized we needed to give our core leaders deeper control and accountability in the way they run their businesses, while at the same time ensuring strong communication and collaboration across business units.

We believe this has potential over time to be a major new revenue stream,

Well, I think there are experts who claim Linux violates our intellectual property. I'm not going to comment. But to the degree that that's the case, of course we owe it to our shareholders to have a strategy. And when there is something interesting to say, you'll be the first to hear it.

We have programs... with SAP to take market share from Oracle as the application and database platform in the largest enterprise.

We're about to kick-start a new growth engine for the mobile industry. To grow, the wireless industry needs to provide end-to-end solutions and innovative services. We're creating great new tools to do just that.

We have a pretty good reading of both Judge Jackson's decision and the law and a pretty good sense of the course that an appeal will take from our company over the conclusions of law, ... We remain entirely convinced that our behavior has been lawful, and we will appeal to establish that.

Today's announcements underscore our commitment to executing decisively and rapidly in the online services space by forming a seasoned management team that is dedicated to improving and facilitating commerce for consumers,

We recognize that some provisions in our existing Windows licenses have been ruled improper by the court, so we are providing computer manufacturers with greater flexibility and we are doing this immediately so that computer manufacturers can take advantage of them in planning for the upcoming release of Windows XP,

There are short-term deliverables, but this transformation ... will not happen in six months or a year, or two years,

With 18 per cent computer penetration in Malaysia, we hope that the new affordable multilingual Windows XP Starter Edition will attract more people in using computers, especially in their own native language.

This summit is a celebration of the exceptional innovation taking place throughout the advertising industry and its vital importance to Microsoft. Just as the ad community is enabling us to deliver more and better software services across Microsoft for consumers, we are dedicated to creating even more valuable business opportunities for advertisers via the world's largest, most comprehensive set of online services.

We have never really used the stock market itself as a barometer of our success,

We have no plan in place. We don't expect that to happen.

Throughout our history, Microsoft has won by making big, bold bets.

Through deep collaboration with our customers and partners, today we're delivering powerful new platform capabilities with unprecedented integration between the server infrastructure and development tools.

We know we need to evolve our platform from client and server all the way out to the cloud,

And we learned an important lesson: Today's business software doesn't look enough like today's businesses,

Bill brings to the company the idea that conflict can be a good thing,

Is there anyone who believes that the search experience isn't going to be dramatically different 10 years from now than it is today?

Things are working well. We're always trying to improve, though.

Turner's experience as a proven leader of people in Wal-Mart's incredibly dynamic sales environment; his IT background as CIO of a world-class company and his familiarity with our products and technologies as a Microsoft customer for more than a decade uniquely qualify him to serve as our COO,

We're talking about making people in business more productive every day. IBM is talking about doing a project.

The stuff AOL is doing now is unbelievably egregious. They're trying to get personal computer companies to delete features of Windows and not let people have the choice of using our software,

The small-business market is the biggest part of the computer market, ... We really need to get after that.

These changes are designed to align our Business Groups in a way that will enhance decision-making and speed of execution, as well as help us continue to deliver the types of products and services our customers want most.

We need to deliver a breakthrough version of Windows that allows PCs and servers to support these next-generation services and host them out there on the Internet,

I've never thrown a chair in my life.

There will be this kind of quantum leap forward in the way people use the Internet over the next several years. There will be ushered in a next generation Internet user experience. That will be marked not only by the introduction of additional devices that take advantage of the Internet, but it will be marked by a whole new set of ways for programs to work together, for users to share data with one another and with programs, and basically, almost a whole new user interface model of the world.

We're very confident about our growth outlook -- so confident that we announced today we're accelerating our stock-buyback plans,

Vista will be out next year. Vista has never been delayed. I mean, we had earlier conceptualizations, but the thing that is Vista is on its track.

We are still not getting in the manufacturing industry, ... We will provide the infrastructure that lets those in the manufacturing industry do their jobs.

We are very happy to be in this position to return almost $75 billion in capital to investors over four years, ... We're also pleased to be able to say that we put many of our legal issues in the rear view mirror so to speak, which affords us the opportunity to move forward with the cash management plan.

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,

offered far more choices and benefits to consumers.

When should a company take a position on a broader social issue and when should it not? What message does the company taking a position send to its employees who have strongly-held beliefs on the opposite side of the issue?

I've been around IBM, and I saw how IBM overdid it. Maybe we will, maybe we won't--but we have strategy control, we have technology control, we've got financial control.

Our customers have been intimately involved in the development process for Windows 2000 since its inception, and they expect nothing less than the highest-quality, most reliable platform on which to run their businesses.

People-Ready is a natural extension of our founding vision of empowering people through software. Today we take this to the next level by showing how these tools now work together in new ways to enhance innovation and drive greater value for business.

Powerful devices meet powerful networks in small forms.

There's no mission critical enterprise job today you should feel uncomfortable running on the Microsoft platform. There is no job that's too big to run on Microsoft and the Windows platform.

The phones that people have today are not the phones that people will want to use in the XML generation.