A few weeks ago, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, addressed students at Stanford and shared his insights into innovation, which are so good I wanted to share some of Ballmer’s quotes:
“I did meet Bill Gates at Harvard, and our sophomore year at school we lived down the hall from each other. And his friend from high school, they had started actually a company when they were in high school that did software that processed traffic tape. I don’t know if you notice when you drive down the road you sometimes see these rubber tubes across the road. Well, it turns out in the old days when you drive over one of those, it would punch holes in a paper tape in a box at the side of the road. And you would have to ship them back to Maryland. And Bill and Paul said, gee, let’s buy one of these new Intel microprocessors. At the time it was something called the Intel 4004, just to show you how olden days that was, and they started a business processing these tapes for cities in the State of Washington.”
“…when our sophomore year in college, the cover of Popular Electronics magazine, there was a picture of the first microprocessor-based computer, something called the Altair. And Bill and Paul decided to ‘write all the software the machine would ever need.’”
“It was all programmers when I joined the company in 1980. I came in to ‘be a business person,’ whatever that meant. I didn’t know much. Frankly, all I’d ever really done was interview for jobs, and market brownie mix. I wasn’t exactly well-credentialed. I’d taken the first year in Stanford Business School, so I could read a balance sheet. That was really important. We didn’t have that much money back then, so there wasn’t much to read. But, anyway, those lessons were important.”
“…we kind of just kept grinding and grinding, a few bits of inspiration, a lot of perspiration.”
“I just spent an hour with a group of venture capitalists, and they said, hey, look, if you’re going to tell entrepreneurs – I said, I’m going to go talk to some entrepreneurs – what would be your lessons from the early days? They were simple. Hire good people. We actually didn’t have very good people when I started. Bill was good. There were like four or five very good people, and I went into Bill’s office after I’d been there a month or so, and I said, we’ve got to hire 18 more people on top of the 30 that we had. He said, Steve, our people aren’t even very good. Why do you want to hire 18 more? And you’re going to bankrupt us…and so we just really worked hard at getting good people, smart people.”
“Success is…(a) great idea, a lot of hard work, and then you work at it for a year, two years, three years, four years, five years, six years, seven years, eight, nine, 10. Some things that actually wind up being really important take more than 10 years to get popular. You wouldn’t believe it reading the popular press, but it’s really true. It’s really true. It’s true with Windows. It’s true with SQL databases, for guys like Oracle. The Google guys were at it for a number of years before that thing really took off. There’s a few exceptions, but most things you’ve got to really grind up. And certainly that was kind of the history of Microsoft in the early days.”
“You know, if you say today, OK, is all the good stuff in the days gone by? This is one of the questions I get a lot from people who are just starting out who say, wow, technology has changed so much in the last five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. Are all of the
great companies created? The answer is no, not even at all.”
“Today you learn to speak the computer’s language, if you want to write programs you learn to write programs in the computer’s language. If you want to control programs, file, open, copy, paste, not get me ready for my trip to Stanford. My secretary is able to process that command, my computer cannot process that command. The kinds of things that are going to be invented over the next several years is just to me outstanding, and particularly for somebody who’s got skills in software.”
“You don’t even have to be interested in the tech field, software is going to change so many fields. It will change energy, environmental science, the impact of software will be broadly felt. So I’m a bit of a zealot on that, as a particular expertise, but the chance for entrepreneurship is really, really high.”
“We live in a world where I think things are really also changing based upon the fact that we’re still quite early in the presence of the Internet. People say, well, the Internet, we’ve had that for 15 years. So much has been invented. And yet really the whole world of
technology is being redone as we speak. Technology grew up with the computer, and now it’s the computer, the PC, and maybe the smart TV. The computers, phones, and TVs, didn’t grow up assuming the Internet. And frankly the Internet didn’t grow up assuming tomorrow’s PCs, phones, and TVs. And so the whole mode of how software gets written to run intelligently in PCs, phones, and TVs, to talk to the Internet cloud, that’s all going to get redone.”
“…now we’re in sort of a Web 2, Web 3 kind of generation. Smart phones, smart PCs, smart TVs, talking to a smart
Internet, and that creates a whole generation of opportunities to disrupt the businesses that are to there. To create new businesses that people couldn’t dream of before. We talk about the cloud, the cloud is kind of that smart Internet presence talking to those smart clients.”
“Your world needs to be brought together, the consumer, you have one identity on the phone, you’ve got another on the Internet, you’ve got another at work, you’ve got another at home. You may want them separate, but you may not want to manage the cacophony of things that you deal with today.”
“In our business you’ve got to be inventing new things, because software doesn’t wear out. It doesn’t break, or at least if it breaks it was broken when you finished it, it doesn’t break over time the way physical goods do. So the opportunity and need to invent, just like
any other startup, or entrepreneurial activity remains strong.”
“I think it’s just a phenomenal time to be starting all kinds of companies.”
“Entrepreneurs who invent, who create, who really add to the level of innovation, the productivity in the economy, will change the world, will create economic value, will drive jobs, and will have a heck of a lot of fun doing it. So I think despite everything else now is the time.”
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Well, I totally agree with Mr. Ballmer, now is the time to create great companies. It’s an era entrepreneur’s are going to change the face of the world, and not just any entrepreneur but entrepreneurs who have the zeal to make a difference and believe in the ideas they come up with. They are the ones who are going to tell the world how innovation impacts the world everyday.