Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, and one of the richest businessmen in the
world, punches the air with both arms and starts to bellow. “Come on! These
are going to be fun, fun years! I think about the next generation of what
people are going to be doing in their homes. This is going to be the best
three years for users in their home – of all time.”
It’s a typical Ballmer moment: flamboyant, articulate, but above all genuinely
excited by the products his company is producing or planning.
Not many CEOs of giant transglobal corporations become YouTube phenomena. But
not every CEO is 53-year-old Steven Anthony Ballmer.
Mr Ballmer, who assumed control of the world’s largest software company in
2000 from Bill Gates, has received over 400,000 hits on YouTube for each of
two video clips, in one of which he dances around a conference stage
screaming “Give it up!” before pantingly screaming, “I love this company!”
He has good reason to. When Mr Ballmer was first employed by his former
Harvard dorm-mate Mr Gates in 1980, his starting salary was in the region of
$5,000, plus stock options. In 2008, Mr Ballmer took home over $1.3m, and
his total personal worth stands at over $15 billion.
In the 20 years that he and Mr Gates controlled Microsoft, its annual revenues
went from around $12 million to over $20bn. Though Mr Gates was always the
public face of Microsoft, within the company Mr Ballmer was the driving
force behind its marketing and business deals.
His mixture of intelligence and pitbull-like aggression has long divided
opinion. “Gates is over the top, but Ballmer’s mad, he’s insane,” Bill Joy
of Sun Microsystems told Fredric Alan Maxwell, the author of an unauthorised
2002 biography of Mr Ballmer, while Linda Stone, a former Microsoft vice
president, told the same author: “People like Steve Ballmer because he’s
passionate, committed, brilliant, energetic, caring, authentic and
thoughtful.”
This is a man driven by passion for his company, whose passion can drive him
over the edge into chair-throwing, or screaming “Developers! Develoers!
Developers!” so loud on stage at a conference that he ruptured his vocal
cords.
This year, however, Mr Ballmer has had less to shout about. In July,
Microsoft’s quarterly results showed its first year-on-year drop in revenue
and profit for 23 years, hit by falling PC sales and the rise of cheap
netbooks running rival operating systems such as the open-source Linux,
which Mr Ballmer has in the past described as “a cancer”.
All of this makes the launch of Microsoft’s latest version of its Windows 7
operating system on October 22 absolutely crucial for the company. So
crucial, that Mr Ballmer has embarked on a whirlwind tour to encourage
people to buy it. He’s here in London today to discuss the company’s new
consumer focus, taking in everything from the Xbox 360 games console,
through the new Windows Phone system, to Windows 7 and Bing, the company’s
new search engine.
We meet in Wembley Stadium in a corporate box overlooking the empty pitch and
stands. In person, the 6'2” Ballmer exudes considerably more charm and
bonhomie than in any of his online clips. He's smartly dressed, as befits a
global leader who has that morning delivered a characteristically upbeat
speech to the Confederation of British Industry.
But surely, this must be one of the most difficult periods he has faced in his
long years in charge?
“Actually,” he says, “the most challenging time was one of two. Right during
the dotcom bubble. Rational decision-making was suspended for a period of
time, and there was a lot of churn in the system, and we almost lost a
generation of key people. The other time was probably the 1990 initial
falling out with IBM, followed by the time we just went through when we have
just had to make our first major reductions in workforce. That's tough to
do; it really is.”
Does the recent dip in Microsoft’s fortunes, then, add pressure to the
forthcoming release of Windows 7?
Mr Ballmer shrugs, and rests his hand on the arm of the Wembley mock-leather
sofa.
“You know, you can't control the economy. If you start feeling, 'I succeeded
because the economy was good', or 'I failed because the economy was bad',
you are not measuring yourself correctly. You have to measure yourself by
market share, customer excitement, customer satisfaction and enthusiasm. You
have to ask: 'are we growing our market relative to the opportunity?'
“I think that we are doing a pretty good job so far.”
He pauses, leans forward, smacks the sofa arm as if he wants to knock it
unconscious, then raises the volume to a trademark Ballmer roar.
“But with Windows 7 we're doing a great job! I think the product is pretty
fine!”
It needs to be. The last version of Windows, Vista, proved wildly unpopular at
launch compared with its predecessor, XP. In an environment that now
includes fresh competition from the likes of Google, as well as the
established players such as Apple, Windows 7 really needs to deliver.
“Look,” Mr Ballmer says, “I'm not trying to say now is easy. We have good
competitors today, but we had good competitors in the past: IBM was a good
competitor, Lotus was a great competitor, Netscape was a great competitor,
Oracle remains a great competitor, Apple remains a great competitor. But
that's part of what makes it fun. Apple does do good work and takes pride in
invention and innovation, but our engineers want to beat their engineers,
and when we do we feel pretty good, and when we don't (he sits back and
shrugs) – you know – we don't...”
And what about Google? Surely a company that is promising to license freely an
easy-to-use operating system constitutes a genuine threat to the Windows
way?
“I don't really know what their operating system is. They had one [Chrome];
now they have a second one [Android]. I don't know why they have two of
them, I haven't figured that out yet. But they are certainly a competitor,
there's no question about that. But Android is not the primary competitor we
worry about. We sold over 20 million Windows Mobile devices last year.
Google is selling what, maybe 1 million Android phones?”
But the current widespread interest in Google and Apple reflects the fact that
the devices that bear their names have an appeal to individual consumers,
rather than corporations with IT departments. Perhaps Mr Ballmer's presence
here today, to push the notion of Microsoft products as tools to empower the
individual user, is a belated recognition that the company has for too long
concentrated on business, rather than individual consumers.
“It depends who you talk to. You talk to some people and they say Microsoft is
an enterprise company, and you talk to others who say the opposite.
Certainly our most popular product is a consumer product – Windows. 200
million of the 300 million sold last year went to individual users. But [and
here we go back into Ballmer mode, with hand-slapping of the sofa and an
excited grin], if you take a look at what we've got coming up from Windows
7, through the Natal control system on the Xbox 360, through Windows Mobile
and the Bing search engine, we've got a lot of stuff to shout about to
consumers.”
The mission now, presumably, is to spread the word further through the 110
countries where Microsoft is active.
“Well, with a footnote China shows the best possibility for growth, but we
have to solve the problem of getting paid for our work. We have high market
share but we just don't get paid very often. We will keep working on it,
demonstrating value, trying to move it along. We will not abandon it, it's
too large an opportunity.”
And opportunities do not often slip through Mr Ballmer's fingers. Over the
years he has developed a reputation for aggression in business that has
resulted in Microsoft's involvement in anti-trust suits in the USA and
Europe, where an EU ruling due soon may oblige the company to separate the
Microsoft browser Internet Explorer from the Windows 7 operating system.
Does the old saying all's fair in love and war apply to business too?
“Noooo... There are some things that are OK to do and not OK to do. We are
definitely a competitive company. We compete hard. That's part of our job.
Hopefully we do that in a way that is aggressive but not rude. I will never
apologise for being aggressive, but I will always apologise if I am being
rude.”
But having personally overseen a company that has grown from revenue of $2.5
million to $60 billion must surely be disorienting in a way. One of the most
frequently levelled criticisms of Microsoft is that Gates and Ballmer still
treated the company as if it were a small one, adopting the tactics of a
smalltown bully to dominate an international market.
“I grew up with this company so my approach to it is wildly different from if
we had brought in someone else who was fresh to the job. It feels like my
baby. I can fairly say I am the only person who has been on top of a company
at all sizes between 30 people and 95,000 people. So I do have a unique
perspective. There is a school of thought that says that founder-led
businesses do tend to have a bit more 'persona' shall we say, than non
founder-led businesses. But I don't think that that's a bad thing.”
The Ballmer persona was on full display earlier the same day in his speech at
the CBI, where he told his assembled audience: “These next few years are
going to be the best yet!”
With Microsoft profits falling, and unemployment rising in all major
economies, Mr Ballmer seems to have taken it on himself to revive the
world's economy single-handed by infecting it with a touch of his
self-confidence.
“Look,” he says, leaning forward in preparation for a moment of excitement.
“I'm not going to tell you that the next few years are going to be the best
in world economic history, but this whole move from one computing device, to
cloud computing, to natural computer interfaces using speech and so on, and
innovations in commerce and communication. Come on! What’s not to get
excited about?”
And, for the hundredth time today, Steve Ballmer, the hardest-working
multi-billionaire on the planet, beams with excitement.
Your Comments
Order By: