The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
Ballmer: Bill Gates and I did not speak for a year after I became CEO
“I think it was basically from sometime in about March or April of 2000 to 2001. I mean, literally we weren't speaking. I didn't know what it meant to be his boss and he didn't know what it meant to work for me.”
Ballmer: Microsoft wasn't seen as an enterprise company until late 2000s
“It was the late 2000. You know, certainly it wasn't before 2005. It wasn't the beginning of my tenure. We were still trying to prove that we were an enterprise company.”
Ballmer: Gates strongly disagreed with Microsoft making Surface, phones, and HoloLens
“Disagreed about whether we should do hardware. That was a big one. We did, you know, surface was a big disagreement. Phone, big disagreement. HoloLens. Big disagreement.”
Ballmer: Visiting NBA teams shoot lowest free throw percentage against The Wall
“I saw data that said that the- Lowest free throw shooting percentage of the league for the visiting team is against the wall.”
Ballmer: Microsoft's first antitrust inquiry came from FTC over IBM collusion
“This was our first antitrust problem. I don't know if you guys know this, is the FTC at the time thought we and IBM were working to divide the market because we had done some positioning. What's windows good for? What's always too good for? We and IBM had done…”
Ballmer: Office backend hit cloud infrastructure scale before Azure did
“The office three, what's now M three, 65, the office backend, because that got critical mass as a cloud infrastructure before Azure did.”
Ballmer: Verizon Chose Android Because Microsoft Missed Product Window
“Look, they would've taken our stuff cause they could put pressure back on the manufacturers, but we didn't have the stuff they wanted at the right time. They went Android.”
Ballmer: Microsoft was the first major company to replace options with RSUs
“And we transition then from stock options to stock awards. Which, if you notice, I think we were the first to make that as a major transition, but everybody's made the same transition.”
Ballmer: Neither Gates nor I ever attended a quarterly analyst call
“Bill never went to a quarterly analyst call and I never went to a quarterly analyst call.”
Ballmer: Satya Nadella volunteered to report to Qi Lu to recruit him
“God, there's a lot, and I don't know who throws the idea out at first. Maybe Satya. We should hire Chi, and I should work for him. So Harry, and Harry was all in. Harry worked for Satya, who worked for Chi. No. We flipped it around.”
Ballmer: Microsoft initially charged fixed fees before switching to per-unit licensing
“We didn't charge for the operating system on an ongoing basis. We charged for it one time. If you got a new version, we charged another time and we did the same thing for basic and everything else because At the time, you could think we were like a substitute …”
Ballmer: Microsoft lacked confidence in controlling the PC ecosystem until the 1990s
“So I would say no sense of confidence about controlling the ecosystem well into the nineties before I think any of that, or at least for me.”
Ballmer: US Air Force was Microsoft's first big Windows customer
“Our first big Windows customer, at least as I remember it, was the US Air Force, and they were buying single copies of Windows.”
Ballmer: Microsoft's upgrade model threatened to cut company revenue in half
“We were selling upgrades and new licenses. And upgrades were, I can't, less than half the price of new licenses. So what does that mean? The company was headed to a world where its revenue was half of its existing revenue.”