Steve Ballmer was the CEO of Microsoft from 2000 up until February of 2014. If you didn’t know he is quite the eccentric guy. Throughout his career has has said some pretty outstanding and rather funny things in interviews and presentations. I’m sure there are a whole lot we could list here, but here are 10 Incredibly Stupid Quotes By Steve Ballmer, enjoy!
10 Incredibly Stupid Quotes By Steve Ballmer
1. “I’m going to f*cking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f*cking kill Google.” (Sydney Morning Herald)
2. “Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That’s the way that the license works.” (The Register)
3. “Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers…. (Watch it on YouTube)
4. “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item.” (USA Today)
5. “I don’t know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me,” (USA Today)
6. “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.” (Fortune)
7. “We’ve had DRM in Windows for years. The most common format of music on an iPod is “stolen”.” (The Register)
8. “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.” (Seattle Times)
9. “You don’t need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows Phone. I think you do to use an Android Phone… It is hard for me to be excited about the Android phones.” (Web 2.0 Conference 2011)
10. “We [Microsoft] don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference.” (Unknown)
Just for disclosure.
#1 had been said many times by Steve Jobs and other moguls, so it’s stupid but not just a Balmer.
#4 was a reasonable assessment when the iPhone first came out. No one knew it’d turn out like it did.
#5 and #10 actually go along with the Supreme Court and DoJ when it comes to monopolies. A monopoly purely acquired by dominating the market through gaining market share – without collusion or other illegality – is perfectly legal.
#8 is also largely true. Google is a service company and the moment it hits a tipping point where customers’ good will turns negative it can easily fall by the wayside? Or are you forgetting such Tech-dominant companies like AoL and IBM?
The rest are still quite stupid though. So 5 stupid Balmerisms, 1 stupid CEOism, and 4 not stupids. Overall grade D-, more effort needed.
How Ballmer acts is more stupid than what he says.
The “developers developers developers developers” line was actually brilliant.
Without developers fleshing out the usefulness of your platform you really don’t have shit. You think Linux marketshare is so low cause MS cheated? It’s because Linux doesn’t have any exclusive killer apps. Imagine if Mac didn’t get so much cross platform development, it would be lacking marketshare too.
Well, it does in the server and software development markets, and in that market you actually find Linux dominant, open source application “developers” made it happen (Apache, GNU), go figure.
my favorite stupid quote of his was in a interview a guy handed him a macbook air and he grabs it and says “where the dvd drive?”