Steve Ballmer Quotes

It's fantastic that Microsoft in the cloud space is one of very few companies that's got the critical mass, the particular emphasis on helping business customers get up to that cloud with all the unique requirements they have. It's very exciting.

As IT enters the mobile-cloud era, IT providers need to be more innovative about addressing customers' fast changing needs. Over the past two years, Cisco and Citrix have collaborated to deliver significant innovation into the market. Now we are excited to accelerate our partnership into cloud, networking and mobility.

Choose a firm cloud before it fall, and in it Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute.

I really worry about everything going to the cloud.

The good news is we had this idea of cloud computing. The bad news is we were 10 years too early.

Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use.

After years of telling corporate citizens to 'trust the system,' many companies must relearn instead to trust their people - and encourage their people to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

I'm always open. I try not to have a closed mind. In fact the only reason why I'm able to continue to make films since 1986 is I have been adaptable. If I weren't flexible I sure wouldn't be making films this many years as I've been doing it. I've been making a film a year almost since 1986 and that's hard. That ain't easy.

My 12-year-old daughter said to me, "Enough with the subtitles, Daddy, for crying out loud." Because they always seem to cloud the issue rather than clarify it.

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness.

80% of all products and services that will be on the market in five years do not exist today. So therefore, always be innovative, always be creative, always think, 'What new products or services could I create, could I represent, could I joint venture?" Sometimes you can find someone else that has a fabulous product or service that you can use your existing business or resources to sell and you can double your income or sales in your business by selling somebody else's product to the same customers that are buying yours.

The avant-garde has always existed throughout the history of mankind. The good things from the avant-garde last and eventually, after many years, become tradition and people forget they were ever part of the avant-garde. The kitchen is a living discipline, always evolving, and there will always be cutting edge things that over the years, ends up being part of tradition.

The thing that drives me and my colleagues at both Apple and Pixar is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don't quite know how to get to it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it's within your grasp. And it's worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence.

I didn't know what we would be selling in the year 2000 but whatever it was we would be selling the most of it.

Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

For the last 15 years, Microsoft’s master business plan seems to have been, “Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it.”

When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.

Part of our brand is that we're pretty understated in what we do. If you look at other technology companies, they might preannounce things, and it will be a couple years before they really happen, and they don't happen in the way they said they would.

People are free or cheap. Marketing: using Twitter or blogs. Cheap or free. Infrastructure: call up Amazon, call up Rackspace, terabytes of data in the clouds, thousand dollars, two thousand dollars.

Many years from now, what would you like people to line up and thank you for?

During the past two centuries, innovation has more than doubled our life span and given us cheap energy and more food. If we project what the world will be like 10 years from now without continuing innovation in health, energy or food, the picture is dark.

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.

Beneath the violet pillar, in the vacuum before the roar of the cloud, there came a soft sound that might have been heard by those who listened closely: the gentle sigh of an idea unbound.