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 never sensed really bad blood between Microsoft and Apple. A lot of Macintosh users feel badly about PCs and do have some bad feelings. I call them Macintosh bigots a little. They say, oh, no, only the Macintosh is the good one, and I don't like to be that way.
The Olympic Games are highly commercialised. They purport to follow the traditions of an ancient athletics competition, but today it is the commercial aspect that is most apparent. I have seen how, through sport, cities and corporations compete against each other for financial gain.
One of the biggest lies in capitalism is that companies like competition. They don't. Nobody likes competition.
Coming from Google, you don't exactly spend a lot of time at Microsoft.
Apple isn't the next Microsoft, you see. Apple is not the next anything because the role it aspires to transcends anything imaginable by Microsoft, ever. Google is the next Microsoft, so Google is seen by Ballmer as the immediate threat - the one he has a hope in hell of actually doing something about.
There's a lot of Google fascination out there and we share it, and we're going to compete, we're going to compete very, very hard.
In the business world, everyone is always working at legitimate cross purposes, governed by self interest.
Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.
When I started at Puma, you had a restaurant that was a Puma restaurant, an Adidas restaurant, a bakery. The town was literally divided. If you were working for the wrong company, you wouldn't be served any food; you couldn't buy anything. So it was kind of an odd experience.
Customers don't care about rivalries between corporations, they care about getting the best value for their money.
I am not out to destroy Microsoft, that would be a completely unintended side effect.
I don't really think anything Microsoft does puts pressure on Apple.
If there's any elements that you see or don't see in the series it will only be because of some legal thing. Not all of the companies like each other. Some are like, "Don't use this, don't use that." We don't have control over the whole thing.
Everyone has always underestimated a company headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. The New York boys thought they could take me on, that nobody out here has any knowledge or wisdom.
Google is a fierce competitor. I wish I was worth a bazillion dollars; that would be really nice. They're a fierce competitor, and they're very good in search. They're very good with their global map thing.
