Steve Ballmer Quotes

In software speed to market, speed to learning is really key. In hardware if you screw it up you are dead. So accuracy really matters.

The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product.

I already am a product.

You've got to stay super focused on shipping product. There isn't a version two or three if there isn't a great version one.

Internet and mobile product development cycles are measured in months, not years. And the capital required to get a product built and into the market is less than $1 million. And the returns, when things work out, can be enormous.

'Instagram' is an app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship but was a product of over a year of work.

I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.

It's important not only to have the right timing of when the hardware is going to be released but also when we are going to be able to introduce quality software.

If you're not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long.

Get the 1.0 out as soon as possible...even if it sucks.

We plan to support Exchange 2003 as soon as it is released. We already have the prerelease versions from MSDN.

Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn't always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company's core business.

When a product is made, everyone hopes for the best. Whether it could have been better or not is more of an afterthought.

Most big companies work in stealth until they think they have a consumer product ready to go.

Our first product was Quicken, which is personal financial management on a PC. It had a tough start, and we ran some tracking surveys to understand who was using it. Half the users claimed to use it in some sort of office environment. We ignored that. I thought it was meaningless.

People are forgiving of v 1.0 of a product if it's truly innovative and useful. Then you can get away with a lot. But if you're merely marginally improving the status quo, then you better be rock solid.

No matter what, once the doors are open for business, the entrepreneur has no choice but to be directing multiple attacks at once - raising money, writing software, prototyping, selling, collecting, training, and marketing.

Even though Traf-O-Data wasn't a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft's first product a couple of years later.

Get your product into users' hands as quickly as possible and incorporate the crowd's feedback to iterate. Your customers will provide the data you need to chart the best course for your company and bury any competitor that goes it alone.

I used to think that deadlines should be ignored until the product was ready: that they were a nuisance, a hurdle in front of quality, a forced measure to get something out the door for the good of the schedule, not the customer.

Regardless of how Beautified turned out, it was a great experience, and it was an excellent product and one that people really appreciated in the space.

Fixing mistakes is one thing. Apple's bigger strength has been its ability to keep improving hit products.

You have to have great products out at the right time. It's difficult to go with one foot on the gas and the other a little bit on the brake.

In the Asian marketplace, we need to come out with products every nine months, not every two years.

If we launch a new product, we have to time it right. It's not about how soon you can do it but how well we can do it.