Steve Ballmer
Steve Ballmer
Steven Anthony "Steve" Ballmer is an American businessman who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft from January 2000 to February 2014, and is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. As of May 11, 2015, his personal wealth is estimated at US$22.7 billion, ranking number 21 on the Forbes 400. It was announced on August 23, 2013, that he would step down as Microsoft's CEO within 12 months. On February 4, 2014, Ballmer retired as CEO and was succeeded by...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth24 March 1956
CityDetroit, MI
CountryUnited States of America
I've found three or four things that are quite interesting to me that I'm focused on. That's been fun.The Clippers is obviously one of them.
I don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.
The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen.'
Maybe I'm an emblem of an old era, and I have to move on.
Every NBA arena has six cameras in the ceiling. The question is what does the software do with video feeds? How to surface that in a set of analytics? There are some "playbooks," but in most sports these days what you really want to share out with coaches and players is a set of video that lets you visualize what's going on and what's the best way to do things.
Only our company and a handful of others are poised to write the future.
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.
[Apple and RIM] are probably restricted, in some sense, to a certain maximum. ... If you want to reach more people than that, you sort-of have to separate the hardware and the software issue.
All the consumer market mojo is with Apple and to a lesser extent BlackBerry. And yet, the real market momentum with operators and the real market momentum with device manufacturers seems to primarily be with Windows Mobile and Android.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think anyone has done a [tablet] product that I see customers wanting.
In general, I'm pretty busy with the other things I charted ... I bought a piece of a sports-tech company. We do a lot of work with at the Clippers. I think that'll be great. We're really looking at the possibility of extending and building a real over-the-top distribution channel with value-added services for the Clippers, that could lead to other partnerships and investments. But most of the stuff I'm looking at isn't because I say, "Hey, I want to invest." It sort of comes around from the work we're doing with the Clippers.