Steve Ballmer Quotes

There is a healthy competition as there would be in any business. But we do not spend our days thinking about what Marvel is doing.

We’re far behind [Microsoft]. They are 3 time bigger than we are. They have a monopoly and we don’t—darnit!

Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.

All competitors are fierce competitors; Vodafone is the world's second largest company. We fight it each day. Idea Cellular is big and successful, too. Competition is competition; we are used to it.

Whatever you're selling, storage or networking or security, you're going head to head with the incumbent players.

… great contest for commercial supremacy.

Someone is out there looking to put you out of business. Someone is out there who thinks they have a better idea than you have. A better solution than you have. A better or more efficient product than you have.

We got bigger, much scarier competitors. We ended up with Microsoft, a company with all the money in the world, the way I look at those guys. And IBM, another company that, historically, dwarfed us.

I was ringside for Amazon and Google.

All things can be done by every company in the world. Apple builds a phone, and so does Samsung. It's not about being different but about being better at what you do.

Tomorrow I will have new competitors such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook coming into my garden. I'd rather focus on the competition of tomorrow than combine with the competition of today.

We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.

It's really hard to compete with Apple on pure coolness, and if you do, you're probably going to use some of the things they pioneered.

If you choose a market that already exists, say, networking equipment, you have to compete with an established company like Cisco. Even if your product is marginally better, Cisco can fudge it and outsell you.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running, if you stand still, they will swallow you.

In the economic competition, in the technological competition, we are competitors; we are not allies.

He who puts ... a product upon the market as it demands, controls that market, regardless of color. It is simply a survival of the fittest.

The competition principle does not mean a competitive edge, comrades

Sometimes, for businesses, competition can be inconvenient, because competition means that the race is never over, the game is never won. No matter how well you were doing in the past, there's always someone who are out there wanting to take your place. So the temptation to avoid competition is powerful. It's rooted in motives as old as Adam and Eve: in greed for yet more money, in fear of losing your position in the market and all the benefits it brings.

Market share is key.

We've got a great value proposition against Chromebooks, we are not ceding the market to anyone.

Of course I'm not stupid enough to think that we could take on WWE head-on and win, because they're too big of a monster.

In business, what do we do? We compete.