Steve Ballmer

Steve F. Ballmer
File:Steve Ballmer at CES 2010 cropped.jpg Ballmer in January 2010
Born	Steven Anthony Ballmer (1956-03-24) March 24, 1956 Detroit, Michigan, United States
Alma mater	Harvard University (A.B., 1977) Stanford University (Dropout)
Occupation	CEO of Microsoft
Awards	Legion of Honour
Website	Steve Ballmer - Microsoft.com

Steven Anthony "Steve" Ballmer (born March 24, 1956) is an American businessman who currently serves as the CEO of Microsoft, having held that post since January 2000. As of 2012, his personal wealth is estimated at $15.7 billion, ranking number 19 on the Forbes 400.

Early life

Ballmer was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Beatrice Dworkin and Frederic Henry Ballmer, a manager at the Ford Motor Company. His father was a Swiss immigrant and his American mother was Jewish. He grew up in the community of Farmington Hills, Michigan. In 1973, he attended college prep and engineering classes at Lawrence Technological University and graduated from Detroit Country Day School, a private college preparatory school in Beverly Hills, Michigan, with a perfect score of 800 on the mathematical section of the SAT. He now sits on the school's board of directors. In 1977, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a A.B. in mathematics and economics.

At college, Ballmer managed the football team, worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the Harvard Advocate, and lived down the hall from fellow sophomore Bill Gates. He then worked for two years as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble, where he shared an office with Jeffrey R. Immelt, who later became CEO of General Electric. In 1980, he dropped out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business to join Microsoft.

Microsoft

Steve Ballmer joined Microsoft on June 11, 1980, and became Microsoft's 30th employee, the first business manager hired by Gates.

Ballmer was initially offered a salary of $50,000 as well as a percentage of ownership of the company. When Microsoft was incorporated in 1981, Ballmer owned 8 percent of the company. During the subsequent 20 years, Ballmer headed several Microsoft divisions, including operations, operating systems development, and sales and support. In January 2000, he was officially named Chief Executive Officer. As CEO, Ballmer handled company finances, however Gates still retained control of the "technological vision". He served as President of Microsoft from July 1998 to February 2001, having previously served as Executive Vice President, Sales and Support since February 1992. Ballmer led Microsoft's development of the .NET Framework.

In 2003, Ballmer sold 8.3% of his shareholdings, leaving him with a 4% stake in the company. The same year, Ballmer replaced Microsoft's employee stock options program.

In 2009, and for the first time since Bill Gates left Microsoft as full-time chairman, Ballmer made the opening keynote at CES.

In May 2012, hedge fund manager David Einhorn called on Ballmer to step down as CEO of Microsoft. "His continued presence is the biggest overhang on Microsoft's stock," Einhorn said in reference to Ballmer.

In a May 2012 column in Forbes magazine, Adam Hartung described Ballmer as "the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company", saying he had "steered Microsoft out of some of the fastest growing and most lucrative tech markets (mobile music, handsets and tablets)".

On June 19, 2012 Ballmer revealed Microsoft's new tablet device called Microsoft Surface at an event held in Hollywood, Los Angeles.

Ballmer has also served as director of Accenture Ltd. and a general partner of Accenture SCA since October 2001.

Persona

Ballmer is known for his energetic and exuberant persona, which is meant to motivate employees and partners. His flamboyant stage appearances at Microsoft events are widely circulated on the Internet as viral videos. One widely circulated video, captured at a developers' conference, features a perspiring Ballmer chanting the word "developers".

Bill Gates steps down

The Wall Street Journal has reported that there was tension surrounding the 2000 transition of authority from Bill Gates to Ballmer. Things became so bitter that, on one occasion, Gates stormed out of a meeting in a huff after a shouting match in which Ballmer jumped to the defense of several colleagues, according to an individual present at the time. After the exchange, Ballmer seemed "remorseful", the person said. Once Gates leaves, "I'm not going to need him for anything. That's the principle," Ballmer said. "Use him, yes, need him, no."

On competing companies and software

Apple

Speaking at a conference in NYC in 2009, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer criticized Apple's pricing, saying; 'Now I think the tide has turned back the other direction (against Apple),' Ballmer said. 'The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment — same piece of hardware — paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.'

Free and open source software

He has referred to the free software Linux kernel as a "cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." Ballmer used the notion of "viral" licensing terms to express his concern over the fact that the GNU General Public License (GPL) employed by such software requires that all derivative software be under the GPL or a compatible license.

Google

In 2005, Mark Lucovsky alleged in a sworn statement to a Washington state court that Ballmer became enraged upon hearing that Lucovsky was about to leave Microsoft for Google, picked up his chair, and threw it across his office, and that, referring to Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who previously worked for competitors Sun and Novell), Ballmer vowed to "kill Google" in an expletive-laden tirade then resumed trying to persuade Lucovsky to stay at Microsoft. Ballmer has described Lucovsky's account of the incident as a "gross exaggeration of what actually took place".

During the 2011 Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, he said: "You don't need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows Phone and you do to use an Android phone ... It is hard for me to be excited about the Android phones."

Sports

Steve Ballmer taking a seat at the KeyArena to watch the Seattle SuperSonics

On March 6, 2008, Seattle's mayor announced that a local ownership group involving Ballmer made a "game changing" commitment to invest $150 million in cash toward a $300 million renovation of Key Arena and were ready to purchase the Seattle SuperSonics in order to keep them in the City of Seattle. However, this initiative failed, and the Sonics have since relocated to Oklahoma City, now performing as Oklahoma City Thunder.

In June 2012, it was announced that Ballmer was an investor in Chris Hansen's proposal to build a new arena in the Sodo neighborhood of Seattle and bring the Sonics back to Seattle.

Media portrayals

• Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft (2002), Fredric Alan Maxwell, ISBN 0-06-621014-3 (unauthorized biography)
• The 1999 docudrama Pirates of Silicon Valley features Ballmer as a major character; he is played by actor John DiMaggio.

Wealth

Ballmer was the second person after Roberto Goizueta to become a billionaire in U.S. dollars based on stock options received as an employee of a corporation in which he was neither a founder nor a relative of a founder. Ballmer is the 44th richest person in the world according to Forbes, with an estimated wealth of $15.7 billion. While CEO of Microsoft in 2009, Ballmer earned a total compensation of $1,276,627 which included a base salary of $665,833 a cash bonus of $600,000, no stock or options, and other compensation of $10,794.

Personal life

In 1990, he married Connie Snyder. They have three sons.

External links

• Corporate biography
• Forbes World's Richest People listing
• South China Morning Post audio interview
• Steve Ballmer Playlist Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler radio show February 23, 2005
• Forbes.com's Billionaire List