Top 18 Kevin Rollins Quotes

It might take some here and there, but Apple‘s market share in the global computer business has really shrunk pretty far, and where they’ve been making success recently is not in the computer business but in the iPod music business.

I believe that one-product wonders come and go.

There would not be enough talent that’s educated, developed and ready to take on the next leadership challenge, and it would cap our growth. Now we’ve put programs in place not to have that happen, but that could be a weakness.

Intel‘s still our main partner. We have not announced anything with AMD and don’t have anything planned, but we’re constantly being aware to make sure our customers get the best technology.

When I was growing up there was a product made by Sony called the Sony Walkman – a rage, everyone had to have one. Well, you don’t hear about the Walkman anymore.

And our size: The company this year is going to be close to $50 billion, so if that’s the case and you can continue to grow that fast, I would rather put my energies to solving customer problems and growing our business than worrying about integrating and laying people off.

I think right now the jury is out on where and how much profit is available in the consumer electronics industry, because if you look at the current consumer electronics players, the biggest ones on the planet struggle to make profit consistently.

Most of the services staff is for the larger corporations, not so much for small and medium businesses because they cannot afford an extensive services army.

We are No. 1 worldwide by quite a margin on the client side and expanding, according to IDC and others, every single quarter. Our expectation is that the industry will consolidate and that more of our competitors will exit.

Well, you would have to say what is the criteria to determine the success of any merger? It would have to be that the companies are stronger financially, that they took market share, and they are on a very steady footing in terms of their performance.

We own 18 percent of just the PC business. Now that’s only about 60 percent of our business today.

So when we go into a large hardware bid, there is usually a services component that is part of that. So as we enter these deals, we tend to talk about the capabilities and what else needs to be done, and from there the bid might expand beyond hardware to the services.

I am sure there will come a time when we are going to use AMD. The products have been getting better. The acceptance is getting better. But we have not been suffering as a company for either growth or profitability because we haven‘t had AMD.

What we learned several years ago was that one of our weaknesses would be if we didn’t develop enough people with the know-how to run our company, it would come to the point where we would just stop.

I’m the one who made many of the bold comments that we’d seen the technologies from AMD as pretty good. Their technology in many areas was leading. But those are transient.

The weakness in the company is if we fail to execute.

Everyone wants to talk about it, and right now music, flat-panel televisions, a whole host of new handheld devices are fun to talk about and very exciting to look at.

Consumer electronics is a challenging one.