The Steve Ballmer Interview

Bullish:

• $MSFT - Steve Ballmer expresses confidence in Microsoft's enterprise business, cloud strategy, and overall growth potential. He highlights the company's strong foundation in IT departments, the successful transition to new leadership for cloud development, and the importance of gross margin growth over revenue.

  • “My biggest hit from my time running sales to president to CEO is establishing us with IT departments, IT professionals. You can call that the enterprise, if you will, and putting in the framework from a sales and marketing perspective, the staff. It's a capability we had to develop. Nobody developed that software model but us.”

    Steve·1:41:46

  • “When I wrote my letter of goodbye to the board, I did say, hey. Look. This is a unique opportunity. There's a lot of things in our brand, in our image that would only be able to be reset by a new CEO, by having a new CEO.”

    Steve·1:54:25

  • “I knew it was a good time to let the new person sort of build from what we had to sort of the next generation of all the machinery that would have to happen to make cloud happen.”

    Steve·2:15:00

  • “I don't really pay much attention to Microsoft's revenue. I pay attention to the gross margin growth.”

    Steve·2:14:59
• $CLOUD - Steve Ballmer demonstrates a strong understanding of cloud computing's business model and its long-term potential. He emphasizes the volume-based strategy to offset lower margins and Microsoft's early recognition of cloud importance.

  • “We are in probably 02/2005, '2 thousand '6. AWS has a little lift off. I think AWS comes to market in what Around then. Around then. And it's not like the cloud is some surprise to us.”

    Steve·1:17:51

  • “You want us to have lower gross margins going forward, but we'll make it up in volume. Right? I mean, that that is the whole proposition of the cloud.”

    Steve·2:15:21
• $SPORTS - Steve Ballmer indicates a strong belief in the value of advanced analytics in sports management, suggesting potential growth in this area.

  • “We have a PhD, physicist who, you know, is a key part of our our analytics group, focuses on our analytics systems.”

    Steve·2:42:29
• $PAYMENTS - Steve Ballmer expresses enthusiasm for frictionless payment systems, indicating potential growth in this technology sector.

  • “Let's just do this completely frictionless. So if you register your face, you just walk in, grab what you want, and leave. If not, you can just tap your phone on the way in, grab your stuff, and leave. There's no checkout.”

    Steve·2:51:02