STEVE BALLMER

'Steven Anthony Ballmer' (born March 24, 1956 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American businessman and has been the chief executive officer of Microsoft Corporation since January 2000. Ballmer is the first person 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. In its 2007 World's Richest People ranking, Forbes Magazine ranked Ballmer as the 31st richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $15 billion.

Contents

Career

Public persona

Viral videos

On competition

Portrayals

References

External links

Career

Ballmer has headed several divisions within Microsoft, including Operating Systems Development, Operations, and Sales and Support. In July 1998, he was promoted to president, and on January 13 2000, he was named chief executive officer when Bill Gates stepped down from that position.
While Gates retains control of technological vision, Ballmer handles company finances. 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, which had been instrumental in making early employees millionaires, with a stock grant program.^[1]
Ballmer is currently the longest-serving employee of Microsoft after Gates. Ballmer married Connie Snyder (an employee of Microsoft's public relations agency) and has three children. His wife is an aunt of former major league baseball player Ben Petrick.

Public persona

Ballmer's tendency to loudly and enthusiastically express himself is well known. A famous 1991 incident left his vocal cords requiring surgical repair after he screamed "Windows, Windows, Windows" continuously during a meeting in Japan.^[2] With the advent of Internet video, such incidents have become increasingly infamous.

Viral videos

Footage featuring Ballmer during on-stage appearances at Microsoft events have been widely circulated on the internet, becoming what are known as "viral videos". The most famous of these is commonly titled "Dance Monkeyboy", and features Ballmer dancing around and screaming erratically on a stage for about 45 seconds after being introduced at an employee convention. Another video, captured at a developers' conference just days later, featured a sweat-soaked Ballmer chanting the word "developers", fourteen times, in front of the bemused gathering.^[3]

On competition

Ballmer is also known as a vocal critic of competing companies and their products. He has referred to the free Linux software system as a "[…] cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."^[4] and earlier described it as having "[…] characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it."^[5] In 2004, he made headlines by claiming that the most common format of music on iPods is "stolen".^[6] During an interview with Fortune magazine, he was asked whether he used an iPod, and replied, "No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children—in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod."^[7]
According to one former employee's headline-grabbing allegations, this competitive nature has manifested itself more violently. In 2005, Mark Lucovsky alleged in a sworn statement to a Washington state court that Ballmer became highly enraged upon hearing that Lucovsky was about to leave Microsoft for Google. Lucovsky said Ballmer threw a chair across the room and shouted: "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google." Shortly after, he 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."^[8]

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 Di Maggio.

References

1. Microsoft to award stock, nix options Ina Fried
2. The Richest Of The Rich Davide Dukcevich
3. Why Ballmer's 'monkey boy' dance was a tour de force
4. Why Microsoft is wary of open source Joe Wilcox
5. MS' Ballmer: Linux is communism Graham Lea
6. iPod users are music thieves says Ballmer Andy McCue
7. The sleeping giant goes on the offensive Telis Demos
8. Microsoft CEO: 'I'm going to f---ing kill Google'

External links

★ Corporate biography

★ Forbes World's Richest People listing

★ South China Morning Post audio interview

★ "Monkey Boy" video

★ Ballmer's Speech In Sixth Annual Avenue A | Razorfish Client Summit

★
★ "Advertisers, advertisers, advertisers" video

★ Developers

★ Ballmer bursting out of a cake at Microsoft's 25th anniversary celebration

★ Steve Ballmer in a self-parody "ad" for Windows 1.0

★ Part of Business 2.0's List of "10 people who don't matter"

★ ''Show us the code'' campaign

★ Steve Ballmer inaugurates the Microsoft Innovation Center, Kuwait (April 25, 2007)