Steve Ballmer

"Google’s not a real company. It's a house of cards."

"Now how much do you think Microsoft Windows is worth? Don't answer! Wait until you see Windows Write, and Windows Paint, and then listen to what else you get at no extra charge: the MS-DOS executive, an appointment calendar, a card file, a notepad, a clock, a control panel, a terminal, a print spooler, a RAM driver, and can you believe it? Reversi! That's right! All these features and Reversi, all for just … How much did you guess? 500? 1000? Even more? No, it's just 99 dollars! It's Windows from Microsoft!"

"When we tell the story about what's happening today with browsers ten years from now, I want the thing that replaces Windows to be Windows. I don't want to wake up in a position one day where the guys at Netscape say, "Isn't Windows just that little thing that we use to put up menus and draw lines? Let's just write our own and suck it up into our client.""

"I think it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible for anyone to try and break up Microsoft."

"Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Come on! Get up, get up! Come on! Come on, give it up for me! Whoo! Whoo! Come on! Who said 'sit down'? I have four words for you. I. Love. This. Company. Yes!"

"We've had DRM in Windows for years. The most common format of music on an iPod is "stolen"."

"Most people still steal music."

"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."

"I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod."

"I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value."

"Developers, developers, developers (repeats many many times)."

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance... Right now we're selling millions and millions and millions of Windows Mobile phones a year. Apple is selling 0 phones a year..."

"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..."

"[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."

"Whatever device you use... Windows will be there. … Windows will be everywhere on every device without compromise."

"We are in the Windows era — we were, we are, and we always will be."

"I don't think anyone has done a [tablet] product that I see customers wanting."

"We like our model, as we are evolving it. In every category Apple competes, it's the low-volume player, except in tablets. In the PC market, obviously the advantage of diversity has mattered since 90-something percent of PCs that get sold are Windows PCs. We'll see what winds up mattering in tablets."

"Not the consumer cloud. Not hardware-software innovation. We are not leaving any of that to Apple by itself. Not going to happen. Not on our watch."

"Computer science is the operating system for all innovation."

"I think fully accepting that things are not the way they need to be, and going to work on those issues in a way that people understand you are serious about, as opposed to the tech industry generally appearing arrogant, I understand that."

"Is there fake news on Facebook? Of course there is. I could go right now on Facebook and say there’s an earthquake, Richter scale 7, in Washington, D.C. And should I be allowed to do that or should that be something that somehow Facebook has a way to control? I don’t know. I get how Facebook could control advertising. I don’t get how they’re a value proposition, which people – the world does like. I don’t understand how it works at all if you have no freedom of speech, even if you are saying things that are patently false."

"My dad said, "What the heck is software?" and my mom said, "Why would a person ever need a computer?" They said, "OK, OK, we hear you, but if it doesn't work out, you'll go back to business school right?" And I said "Right," and I never came back."

"Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google."

"„Es gibt andere mobile Ökosysteme. Wir werden sie zerstören.”"