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
We realized we needed to give our core leaders deeper control and accountability in the way they run their businesses, while at the same time ensuring strong communication and collaboration across business units.
More than ever, Microsoft's growth opportunities abound as a result of our strong product innovation pipeline, ... Kevin's leadership of global technology, sales, marketing and services will help us ensure we harness this potential and fully realize the growth opportunities before us.
I love the fact that Satya Nadella's checked the checkbox for cross-platform for a number of our services. I still think it's very important to do the right kind of innovative integration across Windows and our hardware platforms with our cloud services. I think the company's doing a lot of good stuff. Real competition in AWS. Real competition in terms of the clients, particularly from a hardware perspective, there's also [competition] from Chrome. But all in all pretty good.
Baseball is a set of individuals doing their thing in the same team, but it's much more individual. In basketball people are making real time decisions about who gets the ball, do we trust everybody out on the court, and the analytics certainly don't show you all those subtle dynamics, but they're very important.
Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards.
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.
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.
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.
I think PCs are going to continue to shift in form factor. The real question is: What's a PC?
We don't trounce our competition, ... We compete.
We're very confident about our growth outlook -- so confident that we announced today we're accelerating our stock-buyback plans,
I've never thrown a chair in my life.
These changes are designed to align our Business Groups in a way that will enhance decision-making and speed of execution, as well as help us continue to deliver the types of products and services our customers want most.
The small-business market is the biggest part of the computer market, ... We really need to get after that.