Success Quote by Steve Ballmer

Ballmer’s line is corporate jujitsu: it flips a legal accusation into a marketing metric, swapping a word that triggers regulators for one that flatters executives. “Monopoly” is a moral and statutory judgment. “Market share” is a scoreboard. By insisting “There’s a difference,” he’s not clarifying economics so much as rehearsing a defense strategy in public, the kind designed to sound reasonable on the evening news while sliding past the hard question: when does dominance become coercion?

The intent is to normalize power. A monopoly suggests exclusion; market share suggests choice. That rhetorical pivot quietly deputizes consumers as proof of innocence: if people bought it, it must be fair. It’s also a reminder of how Silicon Valley and Big Tech predecessors learned to speak in the language of competition while benefiting from network effects that make competition increasingly theoretical. In software, “share” isn’t just how many customers you have; it’s how many developers, file formats, IT departments, and habits you’ve locked into your ecosystem. The term sounds passive, even earned, while the underlying reality can be aggressively engineered.

Context matters: Microsoft spent years under antitrust scrutiny, accused of bundling, leveraging Windows to crush rivals, and turning platform control into a moat. Ballmer’s distinction tries to preserve legitimacy without conceding leverage. It’s a sentence built to be quoted in court filings and shareholder meetings alike: confident, tidy, and just slippery enough to keep the central charge at arm’s length.