Steve Ballmer Software Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We think there is an aspect to what we do that has to be client, server, and software as a service,

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.

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.

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.