Steve Ballmer Quotes

When a market isn't in transition, gaining market share is hard - you're fighting to take one or two points of share from competitors.

If there's a car company, and you have another car company, you don't stop building your car and company because there are others.

We have never worried about numbers. In the marketplace, Apple is trying to focus the spotlight on products, because products really make a difference. You can't con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.

Here's how Apple does marketing in a nutshell: Make a great product, then let people know about it. That's it. Neither aspect of that is easy, but the important thing is it has to happen in that order. It all starts with a great product.

The only people without problems are those in cemeteries.

When you see a Donald Trump and a Bernie Sanders, very unconventional candidates, have considerable success, then obviously there's something there that's being tapped into; a suspicion on globalization, a desire to reign in it's excesses, a suspicion of elites and governing institutions that people feel may not be responsive to their immediate needs. And that sometimes gets wrapped up in issues of ethnic identify or religious identity or cultural identity, and that can be a volatile mix.

I’m Armenian, and April 24th was another commemoration of the genocide of Armenia people by Turkey. The perpetrator never admitted the crime. I was raised with that, this question: how do you actually find the truth of such a traumatic event? I'm obsessed with that issue.

One of the things I've probably absorbed when I was in business school - and didn't know I was learning it - was about life cycles, that things begin, and they peak, and then they decline. So whether you look at life cycles of fashion, or you look at life cycles of things that people buy, designs, everything is in a life cycle. Getting out of the apparel businesses and into beauty and lingerie, those were very big bets, but they were very deliberately thought about and tested over time.

It seems to me to be kind of inescapable that one has to be interested in the issue of gender and gender equality. I don’t really expect any credit for going in that direction. It’s the only natural direction to go in. Why is it that some people don’t see that as so patently obvious as it should be?

Stuffing people into boxes is for those who have issues about their own box.

The problem I have with carbon as a bad thing issue, is that people go out and say they want to be zero carbon. You see it everywhere.

A lot of the issues I faced in junior high was what got me into animation. It was easier to sit on the side and draw cartoons than to engage with people.

Folk music has always contained a concern for the human condition. And since it brings people into it from different points of view, that can help illuminate what a consensus might be to important issues.

It's baffling why the issues relating to climate change - [which] have far more obvious and tangible and much more clear-cut evidence about the cause - have been slower for people to accept as a given.

I hope many of you will be people that question why things are and why we have to do them the way we have always done them. I hope you will take some risks, exert some real leadership on issues, and if you will, dance along the edge of the roof as you continue for life.

We slowly work on getting more markets. We slowly work on building relationships. And over time once we gain people's trust and they see what we do and they see what we deliver each and every show, more and more people are interested in jumping on the Ring Of Honour train. I definitely think the success will continue.

I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal, in ways that blind us to more important issues of life. I just think if we could take all the obsession with the personal (inaudible), and personal judgment and have people be concerned about the environment, what a different world we would live in.

There are people here [in South Africa] who, whatever the debate is on a particular issue, their dominating idea is that at the end of the debate we must emerge stronger than we were before and closer to one another.

I see the insurance issue, the coverage of people for healthcare in our country as a huge moral issue. The richest country in the world to have 47 million people without health insurance is ridiculous.

As we've focused more on our food and where it comes from, people now have greater awareness of what's being put onto our food, pesticides, labeling issues, and consumer health.

My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis, it's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act, that's a renewable resource, let's renew it.

It seems to me that making escapist films might be a better service to people than making intellectual ones and making films that deal with issues. It might be better to just make escapist comedies that don't touch on any issues. The people just get a cool lemonade, and then they go out refreshed, they enjoy themselves, they forget how awful things are and it helps them - it strengthens them to get through the day.

I make funny shows and put a positive message out there, showing people who have body image issues that... you don't have to look a certain way.

I think there's a fundamental moral issue about whether it's right for a machine to decide to kill a person. It's bad enough that people are deciding to kill people, but at least they have perhaps some moral argument that they're doing it to ultimately defend their families or prevent some greater evil.

People like to say, “Well, you’re a celebrity. You should really pick a cause.” I felt that’s like telling a doctor, “Well, you should focus on one area of the body.” Current issues, global issues, political issues, women’s issues—whatever one you want to talk about. It’s systemic, you know?