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Steve Ballmer shows us he’s still crazy after all these years

Trevor Mogg
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Former Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer showed he’s still as pumped as ever when he welcomed NBA stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George to his L.A. Clippers team at a press conference in the city this week.

The first sign that he was about to launch into one of his famously passionate outbursts came when he told the gathered reporters he was discarding a prepared speech before bellowing excitedly: “I’m just fired up to be here today.”

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Ballmer then turned the enthusiasm dial all the way to 11, shouting, “It’s pretty cool, it’s pretty damn cool,” before clapping his hands with such force that some of those watching probably wondered if they might suddenly detach from his wrists. Fortunately, they didn’t.

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Things have been kind of quiet at Microsoft since Ballmer stepped down as CEO in 2014. Well, quiet in terms of stage events hosted by the company, that is.

Ballmer was well known as the boss of the computer giant, though this was mainly because of the insane levels of energy that he displayed at company events and in TV ads; energy that sometimes left him sweating profusely through his shirt as he bounced manically across the stage with all the energy of a 5-year-old.

At one event, the former Microsoft chief told his audience that “developers” were key to building a successful tech company. In fact, he was so adamant about it that he said the word not once but 14 times in a row (possibly more), all while holding a facial expression that seemed to suggest he was about to lose his temper. Some in the crowd may well have been terrified.

Steve Balmer repeatedly says "Developers" at Windows Conference

Asked by Conan O’Brien four years ago how he manages to hit the stage in such a heightened state of insanity, Ballmer replied, “Iced tea, iced tea, iced tea.” If Conan was thinking there may have been something in that iced tea, he certainly didn’t say.

Ballmer

His ebullient manner may, however, have come at a cost, with a number of media reports suggesting that he once required surgery on his vocal cords after ripping them at a sales meeting while screaming, “Windows! Windows!” (We assume he was referring to Microsoft’s operating system rather than acknowledging the existence of glass panels in the room.)

Fortunately, the former tech guy’s voice box appeared to suffer no such calamity at this week’s Clippers press conference. It was great to see Ballmer back to his (not quite but almost) bonkers best.

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Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
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After more than a decade at the helm of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer announced on Friday that he will step down as CEO within a year. There are a lot of lessons to take away from Ballmer’s tenure at what was once the largest company in the world, but one of the biggest is the importance of marketing, and making sure to manage your own image. Ballmer was one of the most successful CEOs in technology over the last decade, but his image doesn’t reflect that; we see him for his failures and not his successes. Let me explain, and talk a little more about what Microsoft may look like after Ballmer.
Steve Ballmer’s track record
Ballmer had four problems he needed to deal with as CEO, but only two were on the table when he grabbed the reins from Bill Gates in 2000: billions of dollars in potential fines stemming from the Department of Justice’s ongoing antitrust lawsuit, and an organization that was more focused on infighting that competing. Later, he would also need to tackle two more: the rise of cloud computing and mobile devices.
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Of these four challenges, he succeeded at half. Ballmer managed to steer Microsoft out of its litigation with the company intact, and got on top of the cloud movement quickly with Azure and SkyDrive, both of which were successful. However, he waited too long to address the organizational infighting, which he only got to a few months ago, and clearly missed the mark on mobile devices. Of course, other than Apple, so did every other PC company on the planet. Blackberry and Palm, two companies solely focused on that business, also managed to miss, suggesting that was a lot harder than it looked from the outside.
That’s not a bad track record, but Ballmer’s reputation doesn’t reflect it. Had he not crippled corporate marketing, Ballmer’s successes would have gotten more ink, and Microsoft’s shares would have likely traded far higher. Recall that much of the reason Microsoft’s share value dropped was because he moved to buy Yahoo. Even though Microsoft didn’t buy the firm, the company’s shares never really recovered. That was clearly an image problem, because the Microsoft that existed before the Yahoo attempt was the same company that existed after, only the way we valued the firm changed.
Apple further pounded on Microsoft’s image during the Vista years, and the Zune was underfunded, but still very visible. But Microsoft remained one of the most profitable companies in the world, and Bill Gates the richest man, virtually throughout Ballmer’s tenure.
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Own your image
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In the end, the new Microsoft will likely specialize in cloud services, with products like Office365 and SkyDrive, and less in operating systems like Windows, and hardware like the traditional Xbox. It’ll be an interesting ride. Oh, one final thing, when the market makes the next move, if Microsoft doesn’t lead it, the next CEO will likely go the way Ballmer did. The new CEO needs to own Microsoft’s image and make sure the company leads the next big technology wave. We’ll see.

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