Fredric Alan Maxwell - Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft

To Howard Roarke, for living a life that nobody ever could.

To my kid sister Carla, for living the life that she did.

And to my librarian mom, Mignonne Marie Maxwell,who, when I was young and scared as only a kid can be, sat down on my bed, took my trembling hand in hers, held it,and, in a soothing voice, said, Family. F-A-M-I-L-Y. It means Fredric Alan Maxwell I Love You.

The people who govern the Brave New World may not be sane (in what may be called the absolute sense of the word); but they are not madmen, and their aim is not anarchy but social stability. It is in order to achieve stability that they carry out, by scientific means, the ultimate, personal, really revolutionary revolution.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

CONTENTS

Good Boy, Bad Boy, Monkey Boy

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

In the Beginning

Birmingham

Harvard

THE WAY OF THE WORLD

Procter & Gamble and Stanford

Bill and Steves Excellent Adventure

Get Out of Jail Free

POSTCARDS FROM THE BORG

The Borg

Passing Go

Windows 95!

Grieving Son

The Trial

The Avalanche

Millenniums End

Sunshine in Seattle

Tomb of the Unknowns

S teve Ballmer can remind you of many people. The beefy, bald-headed, big-boned Ballmer bounces onto the stage, looking like a cross between Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura and The Addams Familys Uncle Fester. Hes acting like John Belushi on coke. Hes totally in the moment in front of a bunch of computer folk. Singer Gloria Estefans voice blares over the sound system, in the large auditorium packed with Microsoftians, eliciting the crowd to Get on your feet. The boisterous, bellicose, sometimes belligerent Ballmer does just that. He runs and jumps and shouts, Give it up for meeee! He shoots across the floor like a banshee or Tasmanian devil. His arms are flailing. Turning at the wall, he jigs all the way back. Then he circles the stage again before running to its center. There he stands, behind a black podium bearing the word Microsoft, sucking air deeply, making Robin Williams seem laid back, an intense force of nature. Catching his breath, Ballmer screams, I have four words for you! I! Love! This! Company! Yesssss!

Look past the fact that he spoke five words. Steve Ballmer is on a roll, and he has been for over two decades. Since 1980, Ballmer has been the right-hand man of the famous company co-founder Bill Gates. And much more than thatBallmer runs Microsoft when Gates doesnt. He has for a while. On January 13, 2000, Bill Gates officially stepped aside and gave the responsibilities and title of chief executive officer to his best friend, while he retained his chairmanship and gave himself the new position of chief software architect. Time magazine ran a cartoon of the event, showing Gates and Ballmer in running gear, with Gates handing Ballmer not a baton but a lighted stick of dynamite. Rarely does an American president comment on corporate personnel changes, but when President Bill Clinton was asked about the shift, he said, Ballmers obviously an able man. In many ways, he is more than able. Steve Ballmer often gets up and makes things happen. He truly loves his work, and the moneys pretty good, too.

Twenty-two years ago Ballmer found the Maltese Falcon of jobs, the stuff financial dreams are made of. In his first eight thousand days working for Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer made around two million dollars a day. About eighty thousand dollars per hour. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. Fifty-two weeks a year. For twenty-two years. About fifteen billion, three hundred ninety-six million, twenty-three thousand nine hundred and fifty-six dollars, plus benefits. (An hourly tally can be found at www.cnet.com/investor under its CEO WealthMeter.) While many people railed about American CEOs salaries averaging about 120 times that of their average worker, Ballmer was paid more than twenty thousand times what the average working American makes. The forty-six-year-old Ballmer has amassed one of the largest fortunes, if not the largest, ever made by somebody working for somebody else. Not bad for the son of a high-school-educated Swiss immigrant. Or so he says. Providing factual information isnt Steve Ballmers strong suit. Nor is it Microsofts.

When a streaming video of Ballmers I-love-this-company antics suddenly appeared on the Web in August 2001 (www.globnix.org/ballmer/dancemonkeyboy.qui), people writing in on-line chat rooms wondered if it was Ballmers screen test for the new movie Planet of the Apes. Another viewer compared Ballmers footwork to the jig Hitler danced when his Nazis captured Paris in 1940. A third pointed out that a Microsoftian in the front row looks scared. An on-line editor wrote, Its surreally disconnected from the impression that hes trying to createone of simple, over-the-top enthusiasm. Is this a victory scream or a cry of feara sort of soul-searching wailing that occurs before a baited, trapped animal begins to chew off its own foot to escape the jaws of the trap. Is this a football rally or a Nuremberg rally? A short while later, a second video appeared on the Web of Ballmer at another group meeting. He is wearing a solid blue shirt with huge sweat stains stretching from his armpits to his gut, which may have been computer-enhanced (www.ntk.net/ballmer/mirrors.html). On the tape, Ballmer shouts, Developers! Developers! Developers! over and over while maniacally clapping his hands together.

The Web site geekculture.com ran a cartoon parodying both videos. Picture two people looking at a Monkey Boy Ballmer Action Figure. A woman says to a man holding the toy Hmmm... The sweat stains are a nice detail, but really... Dont you think a Ballmer action figure is just a little too scary for kids? They also listed a poll of the favorite features of the Ballmer Action Figure: People liked the realistic sweat stains, the maniacal look on his face, his patented Flailing Limbs movements, and his vocabulary of four words. They also liked the fact that you can bend and manipulate him for a change.

The life of Steven Anthony Ballmer is the incredible story of tremendous ambition, genius, and charisma, of intense drive and merit, of insatiable greed and blatant arrogance. Its the up-by-the-bootstraps saga of how a young man born of modest means wrapped his need for great achievement in formal education, only to risk it all when he dropped out of Stanford Business School and threw his fate into the chaotic crap shoot called the computer industry with his Harvard dropout friend Bill Gates.

Ballmer adjectives abound. Steves described as richly experienced, hyper-competitive, hardworking, relentless, a bully, Mr. Loud, quick-witted, impatient with fools, and sharply critical. Hes Microsofts chief coach, cheerleader, and hatchet man who focuses with laser intensity. Sun Microsystems co-founder and Java programming language co-inventor Bill Joy told me, Gates is over the top but Ballmers mad, hes insane. A former fellow executive says his impact is felt in every molecule of Microsoft. The Economist pronounced him maniacal... a rapid fire intervention force [with] relentless dynamism whos mean and brutal enough to make, then implement, the tough decisions necessary to guide Microsoft through their antitrust litigation. This Ballmer does.

Out of all of Ballmers truly extraordinary accomplishments, probably his greatest is putting up with Bill Gates for over two decades. Paul Allen couldnt, nor could any other Microsoftian. In fact, Ballmer is Microsofts longest-serving employee. During the antitrust trial and appeals Paul Allen resigned from Microsofts board of directors, for the second time, and quietly sold over 130 million shares of his company holdings, making Microsofts second-in-command Ballmer its second-largest individual stockholder; he owns some 240 million shares.