Steve Ballmer

“The Clippers are more valuable in Los Angeles. It's a phenomenal city, a phenomenal market, phenomenal everything.”

“I think Amazon is a place where people don't want to work.”

“You've got to remember there's intense competition between Microsoft and Amazon.”

“The Clippers are the L.A. Clippers, and they will remain the L.A. Clippers. There is no question about that. I live in Seattle. I will continue to live in Seattle.”

“We will make our products work out of the box.”

“I have a hard time with businesses that don't make money at some point.”

“I think our leadership team is a highly accountable leadership team.”

“And then you take a look at Spaces, there is this great innovation that came out of nowhere. We have the number one blogging site in the world because of the innovation that's there.”

“From a client perspective, I really think the work Microsoft's doing with Surface, with HoloLens, with Xbox, that stuff's absolutely essential to the company's future. Because innovation in the future will either be from the cloud out to all devices, or from devices as supported by software in the cloud.”

“Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”

“I don't know what a monopoly is until somebody tells me.”

“I'm very, very bullish about our prospects, and as I tell our board, as I tell our employees, this is the time to invest. There's so much opportunity. Let's just invest in that opportunity, and really get after it.”

“Microsoft's culture is very strong.”

“When you're running a company, you have employees - lots of them - that can interrupt your schedule. You have customers that can interrupt your schedule. You have a certain obligation to wave the flag because people expect to get out and wave the flag. The number of ways that others can command your time is high.”

“My children - in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.”

“Anybody who ever left Microsoft to Amazon, we could count on them coming back within a year or two, because it's not a great place to work to do innovative stuff as an engineer.”

“I'm not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative.”