Microsoft, every mention

The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired Jun 2, 2025 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 25:10 Steve Ballmer So, we kept going with Windows, we kept going with OS two, and then May, 1990, they come along and shoot us.
• ▶ 25:28 David Rosenthal I thought the story was you all windows was getting gathering strength and you all thought like, you know, maybe we can step out from the little brother.
• ▶ 25:46 Steve Ballmer He was getting frustrated with us because we were still selling windows.
• ▶ 25:49 Steve Ballmer We were still promoting windows and they, I mean, look, this was our first antitrust problem.
• ▶ 26:03 Steve Ballmer What's windows good for?
• ▶ 29:21 David Rosenthal Basically they kicked you out, kicked Microsoft out, said we're, we're taking OS two in-house.
• ▶ 29:30 Ben Gilbert And so you're sitting there, Windows isn't powerful Windows yet.
• ▶ 29:33 Ben Gilbert Windows is this fledgling kind of idea.
• ▶ 29:53 Ben Gilbert You don't really have confidence in Windows yet.
• ▶ 30:34 Ben Gilbert So who's using Windows and how are you selling to them at this point?
• ▶ 30:55 Steve Ballmer Buy a copy of Windows, buy a copy of Excel, like at an egghead software, it was a software retailer at the time, and bring them in and use them.
• ▶ 30:55 Steve Ballmer Buy a copy of Windows, buy a copy of Excel, like at an egghead software, it was a software retailer at the time, and bring them in and use them.
• ▶ 31:49 David Rosenthal Not DOS.
• ▶ 32:23 Steve Ballmer The Air Force was the first big, uh, Windows customer.
• ▶ 32:30 Steve Ballmer Our first big Windows customer, at least as I remember it, was the US Air Force, and they were buying single copies of Windows.
• ▶ 33:37 Steve Ballmer And what windows could deliver to the apps quite, quite appropriately.
• ▶ 33:53 Steve Ballmer And, you know, we had DOS and windows and whenever talking to Cutler about coming here, he says, I don't want to work any toy operating systems.
• ▶ 34:14 Steve Ballmer You know, we said, look, you got to build an operating system whose API looks like Windows and whose user interface looks like Windows.
• ▶ 37:10 Steve Ballmer I mean, look, the analogy now is a little bit Microsoft working with open AI, you know, when the big company works with the new company.
• ▶ 37:55 Steve Ballmer The liftoff there, though, is mostly on Windows and applications.
• ▶ 39:03 Steve Ballmer And now I just find it cuckoo that, you know, all Microsoft is characterized as, as an enterprise company, which I'm not, I mean, I think it's more complicated than that, but I'm, I'm not gonna say that that's not the primary muscle.
• ▶ 39:17 Steve Ballmer But, you know, I, I, me, the company, I mean, I, I was hell-bent and determined to prove we were an enterprise company.
• ▶ 41:04 Ben Gilbert And that's of Windows, that's of Office, that's of.
• ▶ 41:04 Ben Gilbert And that's of Windows, that's of Office, that's of.
• ▶ 41:07 Steve Ballmer Windows typically by then came with the hardware.
• ▶ 41:13 Steve Ballmer For Windows, yeah.
• ▶ 41:59 Steve Ballmer The company was headed to a world where its revenue was half of its existing revenue.
• ▶ 43:14 David Rosenthal But you were still picking and choosing, oh, I want Excel, oh, I want, you know, server.
• ▶ 43:17 Steve Ballmer We were encouraging you to buy Office.
• ▶ 44:18 Ben Gilbert We talked about it a lot in our Microsoft episode and then in our Epic episode.
• ▶ 44:42 Ben Gilbert oh wait, actually we get that from Microsoft for free as a part of our, the thing we're already doing.
• ▶ 45:03 Steve Ballmer Let's start with Office.
• ▶ 45:05 Steve Ballmer When we created Office, that bill really drove, drove that in a great, I mean, we're selling Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and then we put these things together, and people would complain, and we didn't always sell Office because people say,…
• ▶ 45:05 Steve Ballmer When we created Office, that bill really drove, drove that in a great, I mean, we're selling Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and then we put these things together, and people would complain, and we didn't always sell Office because people say,…
• ▶ 45:05 Steve Ballmer When we created Office, that bill really drove, drove that in a great, I mean, we're selling Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and then we put these things together, and people would complain, and we didn't always sell Office because people say,…
• ▶ 45:05 Steve Ballmer When we created Office, that bill really drove, drove that in a great, I mean, we're selling Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and then we put these things together, and people would complain, and we didn't always sell Office because people say,…
• ▶ 45:22 Steve Ballmer So we don't want Excel included.
• ▶ 47:02 David Rosenthal So at a certain point along the way, you get to, well, I want to say the Holy Trinity, but I think there are more than three pieces of this, but the real killer suite in enterprises, which is Windows, Windows Server, Active Directory,…
• ▶ 47:02 David Rosenthal So at a certain point along the way, you get to, well, I want to say the Holy Trinity, but I think there are more than three pieces of this, but the real killer suite in enterprises, which is Windows, Windows Server, Active Directory,…
• ▶ 47:29 David Rosenthal You know, your users, they do their email on Outlook, which is part of Office, which runs on Windows, which uses Exchange, which uses Active Directory.
• ▶ 47:29 David Rosenthal You know, your users, they do their email on Outlook, which is part of Office, which runs on Windows, which uses Exchange, which uses Active Directory.
• ▶ 47:29 David Rosenthal You know, your users, they do their email on Outlook, which is part of Office, which runs on Windows, which uses Exchange, which uses Active Directory.
• ▶ 47:39 Ben Gilbert Which uses SQL Server.
• ▶ 47:41 David Rosenthal SQL Server, all these things.
• ▶ 49:38 Steve Ballmer I wanted it to call it the back office because you needed to buy the office and the back office, and the user, the consumer, saw the office, and the back office were the things that were in
• ▶ 50:18 Ben Gilbert What is missing from this clip is all the context around Microsoft and what's going on in the world at this time, and what you need to accomplish as a leader of this company.
• ▶ 50:47 Steve Ballmer Linux is competing with Windows, and there's a thing called OpenOffice.
• ▶ 50:51 Steve Ballmer Open source software for Office is competing with Office.
• ▶ 51:58 Steve Ballmer I mean, people say that they might mean Azure, AWS, or in the old days, Windows, or Windows Server, or Unix, uh, then Linux.
• ▶ 51:58 Steve Ballmer I mean, people say that they might mean Azure, AWS, or in the old days, Windows, or Windows Server, or Unix, uh, then Linux.
• ▶ 52:12 Steve Ballmer But you also extend Office.
• ▶ 52:26 Steve Ballmer And part of the issue, I think for Microsoft is if you see yourself as just a platform company.
• ▶ 52:48 Steve Ballmer Office was the best first party app on windows, and that's how things get good.
• ▶ 52:48 Steve Ballmer Office was the best first party app on windows, and that's how things get good.
• ▶ 52:54 Steve Ballmer Outlook was the best first party app on exchange.
• ▶ 54:26 Steve Ballmer And you, you got different opinions inside Microsoft.
• ▶ 54:35 Steve Ballmer And you know, who's Windows number one client?
• ▶ 54:39 Steve Ballmer Is it Office or is it all developers?
• ▶ 54:50 Steve Ballmer You have to be able to communicate that you really care about developers who are not your own, that you really want these things because they may think, oh, it's all about running Microsoft office.
• ▶ 55:50 Steve Ballmer We need you, we need you guys on Windows.
• ▶ 56:56 Steve Ballmer No, it was my Windows video.
• ▶ 57:13 Steve Ballmer We're trying to get our people pumped up about Windows.
• ▶ 58:31 Steve Ballmer We could lose windows on the client.
• ▶ 58:34 Steve Ballmer We have to, you know, and in the company, we weren't like really self-confident.
• ▶ 59:26 Steve Ballmer Uh, you guys call it sticking with windows too long, but that may be it, but I think, I don't think we stuck with windows too long.
• ▶ 59:34 Steve Ballmer I think what we did is we tried to put windows in places that it didn't, it didn't naturally go, and we tried to be too windowsy, both in the API and the UI in some things.
• ▶ 59:52 Steve Ballmer Uh, we did a layer on windows that when you hooked your,
• ▶ 1:00:09 Steve Ballmer To some degree, paranoia and some degree confidence, you know, okay, well, our birthright here comes from windows.
• ▶ 1:00:23 Steve Ballmer So there was both a, like a fear and a, you know, overstated confidence in trying to take windows, uh, everywhere.
• ▶ 1:02:41 Ben Gilbert You have Windows, this amazing piece of software with this tremendous multi-sided network effect around it.
• ▶ 1:02:48 Ben Gilbert The logical thing to do is to continue to try and extend it and say, geez, wouldn't it be nice if the next great technology wave was also Windows?
• ▶ 1:03:28 Steve Ballmer We're going to add networking to windows.
• ▶ 1:03:31 Steve Ballmer You still call it windows.
• ▶ 1:03:33 Steve Ballmer It's related, but new SQL server, for example, was that for a while.
• ▶ 1:03:38 Steve Ballmer It was related because we had a backend platform dynamics, somewhat related our accounting, et cetera, stuff.
• ▶ 1:04:17 Steve Ballmer Microsoft's a major hardware design company now.
• ▶ 1:04:26 Ben Gilbert Surface.
• ▶ 1:04:27 Steve Ballmer Xbox, Surface, phone.
• ▶ 1:04:31 Steve Ballmer They use that mostly now in Azure data centers.
• ▶ 1:04:57 Steve Ballmer Okay, let's try to keep the comfortable Windows user interface, because people understand it.
• ▶ 1:05:18 Steve Ballmer Sort of a fear that this was our permission to, to exist, and out of a self-confidence that, you know, we had to put windows everywhere.
• ▶ 1:06:32 Steve Ballmer The company, you know, AI, if we hadn't built Bing, company wouldn't have capability.
• ▶ 1:06:32 Steve Ballmer The company, you know, AI, if we hadn't built Bing, company wouldn't have capability.
• ▶ 1:07:00 Steve Ballmer Well, some, some with Azure, some certain, even more than Azure, even more than Azure to get started.
• ▶ 1:07:08 Steve Ballmer The office three, what's now M three, 65, the office backend, because that got critical mass as a cloud infrastructure before Azure did.
• ▶ 1:07:08 Steve Ballmer The office three, what's now M three, 65, the office backend, because that got critical mass as a cloud infrastructure before Azure did.
• ▶ 1:07:08 Steve Ballmer The office three, what's now M three, 65, the office backend, because that got critical mass as a cloud infrastructure before Azure did.
• ▶ 1:07:19 Steve Ballmer And even more so with Bing.
• ▶ 1:07:22 Steve Ballmer So we developed the capabilities, but then you look at the product and what was our strategy for Bing?
• ▶ 1:07:28 Steve Ballmer Well, there's too much based upon Windows integration.
• ▶ 1:07:34 David Rosenthal Before the Bing rebrand, it was like Windows Live, right?
• ▶ 1:08:02 Ben Gilbert Thank God we have Windows to be able to have some way we can, you know, attack them from the side.
• ▶ 1:08:07 Ben Gilbert And with Windows integration, maybe that gives us a fighting chance.
• ▶ 1:08:41 Steve Ballmer And, you know, we had some, uh, guys in Microsoft Research who
• ▶ 1:08:47 Steve Ballmer We took talent that was doing other things in Microsoft.
• ▶ 1:10:50 Steve Ballmer Uh, we, we have permission to come from behind in a certain way here because we've got windows.
• ▶ 1:12:11 Steve Ballmer We couldn't use the Windows user interface.
• ▶ 1:12:15 Steve Ballmer I mean, there were a bunch of things, but you have to go all the way, and yet we had a Windows Everywhere slide.
• ▶ 1:12:33 Ben Gilbert On our episode, we threw out the idea that Microsoft's competitor, like the truest form that it should have taken on mobile, was not actually Apple.
• ▶ 1:12:51 Ben Gilbert I mean, they were monetizing it a different way through advertising and through giving away for free, and Microsoft always monetized through licensing revenue.