Top 80 Steve Ballmer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Developers, developers, developers, developers.”

— Steve Ballmer

Featured in: IT Quotes, Crazy Quotes

2. “Accessible design is good design – it benefits people who don’t have disabilities as well as people who do. Accessibility is all about removing barriers and providing the benefits of technology for everyone.”

— Steve Ballmer

Featured in: IT Quotes

3. “Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.”

— Steve Ballmer

4. “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

— Steve Ballmer

5. “It’s how tenacious you are that will determine your success.”

— Steve Ballmer

6. “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”

— Steve Ballmer

7. “I have four words for you: I love this company, yeah!”

— Steve Ballmer

8. “Accessible design is good design.”

— Steve Ballmer

9. “Great companies with the way they work, first start with great leaders.”

— Steve Ballmer

10. “I would love to see all open-source innovation happen on top of Windows.”

— Steve Ballmer

11. “I’d rather use Windows and Internet Explorer in Hell than I’d use Linux and Mozilla Firefox in Heaven!”

— Steve Ballmer

12. “This is all about having great leaders who can drive agile innovation and agile decision-making.”

— Steve Ballmer

13. “500 dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that is the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard. Which makes it not a very good email machine.”

— Steve Ballmer

14. “As a global company, our future growth and success requires that we constantly look at ways to improve our ability to serve customers worldwide.”

— Steve Ballmer

15. “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.”

— Steve Ballmer

16. “I’m going to f – ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f – ing kill Google.”

— Steve Ballmer

17. “Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that.”

— Steve Ballmer

Featured in: Strong Quotes

18. “Make hiring a top priority.”

— Steve Ballmer

19. “Analytics only goes so far. Basketball, more than baseball, for example, is really a team sport.”

— Steve Ballmer

20. “We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference...”

— Steve Ballmer

21. “I like to tell people that all of our products and business will go through three phases. There’s vision, patience, and execution.”

— Steve Ballmer

22. “Getting the big things right that make all the money, that’s long cycle, really executing in a way that allows you to do it, that’s short cycle.”

— Steve Ballmer

23. “I want people to understand the amazing, positive way our software can make leisure time more enjoyable, and work and businesses more successful.”

— Steve Ballmer

24. “I didn’t leave business school to go bankrupt.”

— Steve Ballmer

25. “Let’s face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone. That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications – they’re all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.”

— Steve Ballmer

26. “The stock market has always had its own meter. Sometimes it’s ahead of itself, sometimes it’s behind itself. A broken watch is right twice a day.”

— Steve Ballmer

27. “We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we’re in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There’s no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either.”

— Steve Ballmer

28. “A plane is a guilty pleasure. I have one. It’s a great luxury. I appreciate it. I couldn’t do what I do. It’s not something you can write down as anything other than, “Wow, I can’t believe I have this and I’m absolutely spoiled and entitled.” On the other hand, I have one and I use it.”

— Steve Ballmer

29. “Our people, our shareholders, me, Bill Gates, we expect to change the world in every way, to succeed wildly at everything we touch, to have the broadest impact of any company in the world.”

— Steve Ballmer

30. “Everyone likes to differentiate between business and consumers but I don’t see the difference really. Most people are people. I get personal and business mail and I have one set of contacts from my life. I don’t want to manage two sets. I want one view of my world.”

— Steve Ballmer

31. “We’re going to think big, we’re going to bet big.”

— Steve Ballmer

32. “Any idea that turns out to be truly great can be harvested for tens of years. On the other hand, if you want to continue to be great, you’ve got to bet on new things, big, bold bets.”

— Steve Ballmer

33. “My children – in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.”

— Steve Ballmer

34. “I think the biggest mistake most people make when they pick their first job is they don’t worry enough about whether they’ll love the work, and they worry more about whether it’s good experience.”

— Steve Ballmer

35. “Throughout our history, Microsoft has won by making big, bold bets. I believe that now is not the time to scale back the scope of our ambition or the scale of our investment. While our opportunities are greater than ever, we also face new competitors, faster-moving markets and new customer demands.”

— Steve Ballmer

36. “At Microsoft, we’re investing heavily in security because we want customers to be able to trust their computing experiences, so they can realize the full benefits of the interconnected world we live in.”

— Steve Ballmer

37. “There’s a huge crowd out there that basically will go nuts recommending to every coach on the planet, “Hey, coach, I’ve been playing with the analytics. I think you should do X, Y, and Z.””

— Steve Ballmer

38. “The world is changing, but so is Microsoft.”

— Steve Ballmer

39. “Our industry is going through quite a wave of innovation and it’s being powered by a phenomenon which is referred to as the cloud.”

— Steve Ballmer

40. “The Internet Was Designed For The PC. The Internet Is Not Designed For The iPhone.”

— Steve Ballmer

41. “This is a great opportunity for Don, and I wish him success. I am incredibly proud of the work and vision culminating in Xbox One. I’m particularly excited about how Xbox pushes forward our devices and services transformation by bringing together the best of Microsoft.”

— Steve Ballmer

42. “It’s always great when you get a lot of people pushing themselves to do better, be better, invent better, better serve, better lead customers in new directions.”

— Steve Ballmer

43. “I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life.”

— Steve Ballmer

44. “Our goal in making these changes is to enable Microsoft to achieve greater agility in managing the incredible growth ahead and executing our software-based services strategy.”

— Steve Ballmer

45. “Not only because the product wasn’t a great product, but remember it took us five or six years to ship it. Then we had to sort of fix it. That was what I might call Windows 7.”

— Steve Ballmer

46. “I have lots of sources of information about what’s going on at the company. I think I have a pretty good pulse on where we are and what people are thinking.”

— Steve Ballmer

47. “In many ways I think the company’s doing quite a good job. If you look at the transition to Office 365 we started when I was there, I’m excited about that and I think the company’s doing a great job on that.”

— Steve Ballmer

48. “I loved every minute of my time at Microsoft, but I had always envisioned having another phase of life just because I thought that would be interesting. It had never been my plan to work until I literally didn’t want to do anything and then hang it up.”

— Steve Ballmer

49. “I’m not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative.”

— Steve Ballmer

50. “You can have an Apple in the phone business, or a RIM, and they can do very well, but when 1.3 billion phones a year are all smart, the software that’s gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that’s sold by somebody who doesn’t make their own phones.”

— Steve Ballmer