Part IThe Story
The Leap at the Twenty-Fifth
The stage was ordinary, and so was the occasion. It was a corporate birthday party in September 2000. Microsoft was turning twenty-five, nine months after Bill Gates had handed the chief executive's title to his college friend, and the company that had once been a hyphenated partnership in Albuquerque now employed tens of thousands of people and was fighting the United States government and twenty states in federal court. Then a heavyset man in a dress shirt came running out from the wings. He didn't walk to the podium. He jumped, loped, and pumped his fists across the stage, his face slick and red, and he shouted the sentence that would follow him for the rest of his life: "I love this company!"
People laughed, then they watched it again, and then they kept watching. Within a few years the clip was a staple of what the internet had not yet learned to call viral video. It joined another one, filmed at a Windows 2000 developers' conference, in which the same man, visibly sweating, chants the single word "developers" over and over until it stops sounding like a word. Taken together they became the public image of Steve Ballmer: a salesman with a damaged volume knob, a man who shouted so much that he eventually needed surgery on his vocal cords.
The clips did not show the boy who had been so shy he hyperventilated before Hebrew school. They did not show the valedictorian with a perfect 800 on the math section of the SAT, or the Harvard student who outscored Bill Gates on the Putnam, the notoriously punishing national mathematics competition. They did not show the man who joined Microsoft as its thirtieth employee, on June 11, 1980, for a salary of $50,000, no equity, and ten percent of whatever profit he could generate, and who would leave it thirty-four years later as one of the richest people alive. A video can capture volume. It can't capture terms.
The sentence carried everything anyway. I love this company. It wasn't a slogan, or not only one. It was a confession of a particular kind of attachment: total, unembarrassed, a little frightening, and in its way old-fashioned, the attachment of a company man in an industry that was learning to worship founders, dropouts, and disruptors. Ballmer was none of those things. He was the man the founder hired, the manager who stayed. Most of what made him a great executive, and most of what made him, by the reckoning of a hedge fund manager, a Forbes columnist, and the BBC, a failed one, can be traced back to that leap across the stage and to what it meant to love a company that much.
The year he shouted it, his father died. Frederic Henry Ballmer, born Fritz Hans in a Swiss town called Zuchwil, had spent his working life as a manager at the Ford Motor Company. His son, the Guardian would report years later, still drove Fords.
By the Numbers
The Ballmer Ledger
30thEmployee at Microsoft, hired June 11, 1980, as the company's first business manager
8%Ballmer's stake when Microsoft incorporated in 1981, swapped for his profit-sharing deal
$25B → $70BGrowth in Microsoft's annual revenue during his tenure as CEO
16.4%Annual profit growth under Ballmer, versus 11.2% for Jack Welch at GE
$2BPrice paid for the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014
$1BEstimated annual Microsoft dividends after the payout rose to $3 per share
$145BEstimated net worth, Bloomberg Billionaires Index, February 2026
A Manager From Zuchwil
Start with the father, because Ballmer always seemed to. Fritz Hans Ballmer came to the United States in 1948, three years after the war, from a small industrial town in the canton of Solothurn, and he did what ambitious immigrants of his generation did in Michigan: he went to work for the car company. He married Beatrice Dworkin, born in 1920, a Jewish woman whose family tree also produced the comedian and actress Gilda Radner, Ballmer's second cousin. Radner made a career on Saturday Night Live playing characters who couldn't stop talking, who said too much, too loudly, with too much conviction. The family resemblance, if there is one, isn't in the face.
Steven Anthony Ballmer was born in Detroit on March 24, 1956, and grew up in Farmington Hills, a suburb northwest of the city. The usual telling of the story skips straight from there to Harvard, but there's a detour worth keeping. From 1964 to 1967, when Steve was between eight and eleven, Fritz Ballmer's work moved the family to Brussels, and the boy attended the International School of Brussels. It's a small fact, but it fits a pattern: a child of a transatlantic marriage, an American by birth and a European by temporary address, learning early that the company decides where you live. Ford sent the family overseas. Ford brought them back.
Back in Michigan, the shy boy became a formidable student. In 1973 he took college-prep and engineering classes at Lawrence Technological University. He graduated as valedictorian from Detroit Country Day School, a private preparatory school in Beverly Hills, Michigan, with the perfect math score, and was named a National Merit Scholar. He was, by the record, the first in his family to go to college.
What he did at Harvard is more revealing than the fact that he went. He studied applied mathematics and economics and graduated magna cum laude in 1977. But the extracurricular résumé reads like an apprenticeship in a particular role. He was a manager of the Harvard Crimson football team, not a player. He worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper and on the Harvard Advocate, the literary magazine. He joined the Fox Club. And he lived down the hall from a fellow sophomore named Bill Gates, a pale, rocking, combative young man from Seattle who would drop out to start a software company in New Mexico.
Manager is the word to underline. At an age when most ambitious young men want to be on the field, Ballmer was on the sideline holding the clipboard, organizing the equipment and the schedules and the logistics of other people's performances. When he joined Microsoft three years later, the company's own records describe him as "the first business manager hired by Gates." He was a manager before he was anything else, and he would be one, with all the strengths and blind spots of the role, for the rest of his career.
Before that, though, there was cake. Ballmer's first job after Harvard was at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, where he spent two years as an assistant product manager on Duncan Hines Moist & Easy cakes and brownies. His officemate was a young man named Jeff Immelt, the son of a General Electric manager, who would later run GE for sixteen years. Two sons of corporate men from the industrial Midwest, sharing a cubicle and selling boxed brownie mix: it's hard to invent a better picture of the American management class of the late 1970s, or of what it was about to lose its grip on.
Then came a detour that doesn't fit the tidy narrative: Ballmer went to Hollywood and tried, briefly, to write screenplays. Nothing came of it. He enrolled instead in the MBA program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where one of his classmates was Mukesh Ambani, heir to an Indian textile and petrochemical business that he would turn into Reliance Industries. Decades later the two men would trade places on the global billionaire lists, and Indian financial journalists would run headlines asking whether the Stanford classmate would overtake the Microsoft man.
In 1980, Gates called. The fledgling Microsoft had run into problems, BusinessWeek later reported, and Gates persuaded his friend to drop out and give him a hand. Ballmer left Stanford. He didn't finish the degree.
Ten Percent of Everything He Made
The terms tell you who Ballmer was in 1980 and who he would become.
He joined at a salary of $50,000, plus ten percent of the profit he generated. No equity. In a startup, that's an odd structure, closer to a commissioned salesman's deal or a partner's draw than to the stock-option lottery the software industry would later make standard. It was a bet on himself and on the business, not on a valuation. Ballmer would be paid for results.
The results arrived faster than anyone had modeled. That November, IBM awarded Microsoft the contract to supply an operating system for its forthcoming personal computer. Microsoft bought a CP/M clone called 86-DOS from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products for less than $100,000, delivered it to IBM, and kept the rights to license it to everyone else. Thirty-five of the company's roughly one hundred employees worked on the IBM project for more than a year. When the IBM PC launched in August 1981, Microsoft was the only company offering an operating system, programming languages, and applications for it. A business manager on a profit share at that company, at that moment, was standing in a rising river.
His share, in the phrasing of the record, "started to balloon out of control." The fix came from Dave Marquardt, a venture capitalist who was advising the company, who proposed that Microsoft reorganize from a private partnership into a corporation and that Ballmer's profit share be canceled in exchange for eight percent of the new entity. Paul Allen, Microsoft's co-founder, objected. Allen, a gentle, deliberate programmer who had spotted the Altair on a magazine cover in Harvard Square in 1974 and talked his friend into the business, had his own grievances about equity; the dispute that soured his partnership with Gates months later was over exactly this kind of division. The impasse broke when Gates agreed to fund an outsized majority of Ballmer's stake himself.
Read that again. To bring his friend inside the ownership structure, Bill Gates, famously unsentimental about money and control, paid for most of it out of his own share. When Microsoft incorporated on June 25, 1981, Ballmer owned eight percent of it.
That number would eventually make him one of the richest people in the world. By 2003, even after selling 39.3 million shares for about $955 million, he still held roughly four percent of one of the largest companies on earth. In 2023, after Microsoft raised its annual dividend to $3 per share, CNN calculated that Ballmer would collect about $1 billion a year in dividends alone, and ran the story under the headline that he was "set to make $1 billion a year for doing nothing." In the summer of 2024, as the AI boom lifted Microsoft's stock, Ballmer passed Gates on the billionaire indexes. The employee had outrun the founder who hired him.
There's an irony in it that Ballmer, a man with a mathematician's eye for compounding, must have appreciated. The deal that made him rich was a fix for a deal that made him too rich. He had asked to be paid for what he produced; the company couldn't afford to keep that promise, so it made him an owner instead. And an owner, unlike a salesman, can't walk away from the house.
In 1985 Microsoft began selling directly to corporate customers. Ballmer spent his first twenty years moving through divisions: operations, operating-systems development, sales and support. In February 1992 he became executive vice president for sales and support, the job that best fit the man in the viral clips and the one that taught him how Microsoft actually made money. Not in research labs, not in visionary memos, but in volume license agreements signed by chief information officers at banks, insurers, governments, and manufacturers who needed Windows and Office on every desk and who would, if handled correctly, renew. He led the company's development of the .NET framework. In July 1998 Gates named him president, the de facto number two.
In 1986, the year Microsoft went public, Ballmer appeared in a parody video made for employees: a send-up of the frantic local-TV commercials of Crazy Eddie, the New York electronics chain, in which he hollered the features of Windows 1.0 at the camera like a man unloading inventory before a fire sale. Windows 1.0 was by most accounts a dud. One of Microsoft's own people, Chris Pratley, would later recall that "Windows was still considered a joke. Betting the company on it was a big, big bet." Ballmer was selling the joke at the top of his lungs. Four years later, Windows 3.0 sold more than 100,000 copies in two weeks, and the joke became the most important software franchise in history.
In a 2005 interview about his management style, Ballmer cited exactly that episode: the original Windows, he said, was proof that a company must keep pursuing new technologies even when the first attempts fail. Hold on to that. It will matter later, in a context where it cuts both ways.
A Marriage, Then a Drift
When Bill Gates married Melinda French in 1994, Ballmer was his best man. The two men described their relationship as a marriage. Another Microsoft executive called it a mind meld.
They were complements in the clean, almost diagrammatic way that great partnerships often are. Gates was the technologist, the reader of white papers and writer of strategy memos; when he sent the "Internet Tidal Wave" memo on May 26, 1995, assigning the internet "the highest level of importance," the company turned on its axis. Ballmer was the operator and the salesman, the man who knew which customer was about to defect and which product manager wasn't hitting his numbers. Microsoft's culture of combative debate, meetings in which ideas were attacked with a ferocity outsiders mistook for personal animosity, ran straight through the relationship. They shouted at each other because that was how Microsoft thought.
The handoff came on January 13, 2000. Ballmer became chief executive; he would drop the president title in February 2001. Gates remained chairman and created a new title for himself, chief software architect, keeping control of what the company called its "technological vision." On paper, the division of labor was elegant: Ballmer ran the finances and daily operations, and Gates ran the future.
In practice, two people can't both own the future. The Wall Street Journal would later report that the transition was tense, and that the tension at times turned bitter. In one meeting, according to a person who was there, Ballmer leapt to the defense of several colleagues Gates was attacking, the two men had a shouting match, and Gates stormed out. Afterward, the witness said, Ballmer seemed "remorseful." It's a telling detail. The loyal friend had defended his people against his friend, and then felt bad about it. Loyalty pulled in two directions, and he couldn't fully satisfy either.
When Gates announced in June 2006 that he would leave day-to-day work over two years, Ballmer framed the coming change with a mathematician's precision and a son's resolve.
— Steve Ballmer, on Bill Gates's departure from day-to-day management, as reported by The Wall Street Journal (2008)I'm not going to need him for anything. That's the principle. Use him, yes, need him, no.
Gates stepped down as chief software architect on June 27, 2008. Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, had already taken the title. Only then, by most accounts, did Ballmer gain the autonomy to remake the company in his own image: he replaced most of the major division heads in an effort to break down what Businessweek called "talent-hoarding fiefdoms."
The marriage didn't survive the separation. In October 2014, a few months after Ballmer left Microsoft, a Vanity Fair profile reported that he and Gates no longer spoke, estranged over the circumstances of his departure. Two years later Ballmer said publicly that they had "drifted apart," that the relationship had always been "brotherly," and that his push into hardware, specifically into smartphones, which Gates did not support, had helped drive the break.
That's the cruelest fact in the story. The partnership that built Microsoft broke over a phone.
The Man Who Settled
Ballmer inherited a company at war. In April 2000, three months into his tenure, a federal judge ruled in United States v. Microsoft that the company was an abusive monopoly and ordered it split in two. An appeals court overturned part of the ruling, but the litigation, the twenty state attorneys general, the class actions, and the rivals' complaints remained. It was widely said that Gates, whose deposition had become a public humiliation, would have kept fighting. Ballmer chose to settle, and the case was resolved with the Justice Department in 2001.
His explanation is worth reading in full, because it isn't the explanation of a lawyer or a strategist. It's the explanation of a man who cared what people thought of the place he worked.
— Steve Ballmer, on settling the government's antitrust caseBeing the object of a lawsuit, effectively, or a complaint from your government is a very awkward, uncomfortable position to be in. It just has all downside. People assume if the government brought a complaint that there's really a problem, and your ability to say we're a good, proper, moral place is tough. It's actually tough, even though you feel that way about yourselves.
A good, proper, moral place. This is the language of the company man, someone for whom an employer is not just a contract but a community with a character that can be defamed. The Gates instinct was to argue the law. The Ballmer instinct was to protect the reputation of the family. The settlement didn't end Microsoft's legal troubles; the European Union fined the company €497 million in March 2004 and another €899 million in February 2008. But it moved the company out of the existential frame of the breakup ruling and back into the business of selling software.
He brought the same temperament inside. Upon becoming chief executive, Ballmer required detailed business justifications before approving new products, ending a habit of letting hundreds of projects proceed because they sounded interesting or trendy. In 2003, the year Microsoft paid its first dividend, eight cents a share, he replaced the company's employee stock-option program, the instrument that had minted an estimated 12,000 Microsoft millionaires and given the company's slang the acronym FYIFV, "Fuck You, I'm Fully Vested," for employees who no longer needed to work. The options had made people rich; in a flat stock market they made people restless. Ballmer, who had once traded a profit share for equity, understood better than anyone what compensation structures do to behavior.
In 2005 he went shopping at Walmart for an operating chief. B. Kevin Turner was the president and chief executive of Sam's Club, a man who had started at Walmart as a cashier in Arkansas and climbed through its legendary logistics machine, and Ballmer brought him to Redmond to run sales, marketing, and services and, in the words of later coverage, to instill process and discipline. Turner would be described as having a strong grasp of business and operations but lacking technological vision, an assessment that, for better and worse, could have been applied to the company he joined. From 2001 to 2006, Ballmer also sat on the board of Accenture, the consulting giant whose entire business was the professionalization of management.
You can see the outline of the Ballmer project here. Microsoft under Gates had been a brilliant, chaotic, adolescent company, a place where smart people chased smart ideas and fought about them. Ballmer wanted it to grow up: to settle its lawsuits, justify its products, discipline its sales force, and behave like the large, mature, moral enterprise he believed it was. It's the instinct of a man raised by a Ford manager, a man who knew what a well-run industrial company looked like.
And it's a story with an asterisk the size of Detroit, because the well-run industrial companies of Fritz Ballmer's America were, at that very moment, being dismantled by competitors who didn't play by their rules.
No Chance, No Keyboard
On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage in San Francisco and introduced a phone with no keyboard. Ballmer's response that year has become one of the most quoted misjudgments in the history of business.
— Steve Ballmer, 2007iPhone is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't have a keyboard... There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance...
It is easy, and a little cheap, to mock this. The more interesting question is why a brilliant man said it. Ballmer's own later explanation is revealing in its precision. The reason he said it, he argued in 2016, was price: at $600 or $700, the phone was simply too expensive. What he hadn't anticipated was that Apple would get carriers to build the cost of the handset into customers' monthly bills. It was, he said, "a business model innovation."
There's something touching about the answer, and something damning. Ballmer was right about the arithmetic and wrong about the world. He analyzed the iPhone the way a P&G product manager analyzes a new cake mix: price point, features, shelf competition. He did not, at least by his own account, see that the product had rewritten the terms of the sale. For a man whose own fortune had come from a renegotiated contract, it's a strange blind spot. Critics at the time, including Recode, argued that even the later explanation missed the point, that subsidies didn't explain why people wanted the thing in the first place.
He kept at it. In March 2009, with the economy in free fall, he told a New York audience that the tide had turned against Apple, and mocked the idea of paying "$500 more to get a logo on it." In October 2011, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, he turned on Google's Android: you didn't need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows Phone, he said, but you did to use an Android phone. "It is hard for me to be excited about the Android phones." In January 2016, Microsoft's share of the U.S. smartphone market was 2.7 percent.
The pattern is loyalty pointed outward as contempt. Ballmer's enemies weren't merely competitors; they were affronts. In July 2000 he called Linux, the free, open-source operating system, "a tough competitor" with "characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it." In June 2001, in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, he called it a "cancer … in the intellectual property sense," a reference to the license terms requiring derivative software to stay open. In 2006 he claimed Linux infringed Microsoft's intellectual property.
The Linux war produced the single strangest scene of his tenure. In April 2003, Munich's city government was weighing a switch from Windows to Linux for its municipal computers. Ballmer was on a skiing holiday in Switzerland, the country his father had left fifty-five years earlier. He interrupted it, traveled to Munich, and pleaded personally with the mayor, offering a discount of thirty-five percent. Munich switched to Linux anyway, to a distribution it called LiMux. I keep returning to the picture: the son of an emigrant from Zuchwil coming down from the Alps to make a sales call in a Bavarian city hall, offering a third off the price, and losing. It's the purest Ballmer gesture imaginable. The CEO of the most valuable software company on earth, on vacation, still unable to stop closing.
The war with Google had its own scene, preserved under oath. In 2005, Microsoft sued Google over the hiring of Kai-Fu Lee, a Microsoft vice president it said was bound by a one-year non-compete. In the litigation, Mark Lucovsky filed a sworn affidavit. Lucovsky was a veteran engineer who had come over from Digital Equipment Corporation in November 1988 with Dave Cutler to build what became Windows NT, the kernel on which every modern Windows still runs, and who had left for Google in 2004. He swore that when he told Ballmer he was leaving, Ballmer became enraged, picked up a chair and threw it across his office, and vowed to "kill Google," using an expletive about its chief executive, Eric Schmidt. Ballmer called the account "a gross exaggeration of what actually took place." Nobody disputes that Lucovsky left.
In 2015, with Apple the most valuable company in the world, Ballmer described Microsoft's 1997 investment in a nearly bankrupt Apple as "the craziest thing we ever did." The hostility didn't end with his career at Microsoft. In September 2014, a month after taking over the Los Angeles Clippers, he said he would bar the team from using Apple products like iPads. It was reported that he had previously barred his own family from using iPhones.
Then, in March 2016, he changed his mind about Linux. He said he supported his successor Satya Nadella's open-source commitments, and that his 2001 comments had been right at the time but times had changed. In November of that year Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member, at $500,000 a year. The cancer had become a dues-paying partner.
The Most Profitable Disappointment in America
Here is the problem with writing about Steve Ballmer: the numbers refuse to cooperate with the story.
During his fourteen years as chief executive, Microsoft's annual revenue grew from about $25 billion to about $70 billion. Net income rose 215 percent, to $23 billion. The company kept roughly seventy-five cents of gross profit on every dollar of sales, double the margin of Google or IBM. Its total annual profit growth of 16.4 percent beat Jack Welch's 11.2 percent at General Electric, the run that made Welch the most celebrated manager of his generation, and Lou Gerstner's 2 percent at IBM, the run that made Gerstner a legend for rescuing it.
He didn't just milk the franchises. He defended Windows and Office against Linux and Google Docs, and he built new businesses around them. There was an enterprise business worth about $20 billion a year, made up of products like Exchange, Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, System Center, and Dynamics CRM, each of which faced an uphill fight for acceptance and each of which became a leader or the leader in its category. There was a data-center division. There was Azure, Microsoft's entry into cloud computing, launched on October 27, 2008. There was the Xbox, released in 2001 into a console market owned by Sony and Nintendo; by 2013 the entertainment and devices division brought in $8.9 billion. The Kinect motion sensor sold 8 million units in its first sixty days after launching on November 4, 2010, an average of 133,333 a day, and was certified as the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history, outpacing the iPhone and the iPad over the same post-launch period.
By April 2013, when Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 were still stuck in the single digits of market share, Microsoft could report profit up 19 percent because its business division, including Office 365, and its server and tools division, the cloud, were each bigger than Windows. In 2012 Businessweek said the company "arguably [had] the best product lineup in its history."
And the stock didn't move. Microsoft's shares had peaked in late 1999 at around $119, or about $61 adjusted for splits. Through the Ballmer years they went nowhere. The company that had made 12,000 employee millionaires became a utility that paid dividends. In January 2014, Microsoft's market capitalization was $314 billion, eighth largest in the world.
The market's verdict was that Microsoft was harvesting the past while missing the future, and the critics lined up behind it. In May 2011 David Einhorn, the Greenlight Capital founder who had made his name betting against Lehman Brothers before its collapse and who prided himself on spotting balance-sheet rot before anyone else, called for Ballmer to step down: "His continued presence is the biggest overhang on Microsoft's stock." In 2012 Adam Hartung wrote in Forbes that Ballmer was "the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company." The BBC put him on its list of the worst chief executives of 2013. Vanity Fair ran a long piece by Kurt Eichenwald in 2012 under the headline "Microsoft's Lost Decade," calling it corporate America's most spectacular decline. A biography from the height of his power had already set the tone with its title: Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft.
The most precise indictment came from The Wall Street Journal in August 2013, the week he announced his retirement.
"In many cases, Microsoft latched onto technologies like smartphones, touchscreens, 'smart' cars and wristwatches that read sports scores aloud long before Apple or Google did. But it repeatedly killed promising projects if they threatened its cash cows [Windows and Office]."
That sentence connects the two halves of the Ballmer story. The business-justification discipline he imposed in 2000, the end of chasing products because they sounded interesting, was exactly the discipline that killed the interesting projects. The loyalty that made him defend Windows and Office against Linux and Google made him defend them against Microsoft's own engineers. A company man protects the company. Sometimes the thing he is protecting it from is its own future.
Ballmer, to his credit, eventually said as much about mobile. In September 2013 he said he regretted not focusing on Windows Mobile in the early 2000s, which had left Microsoft a distant third in the smartphone market. Windows CE, Microsoft's operating system for handhelds, had shipped in November 1996. The company was early. It just didn't commit.
He had, after all, told the world in 2005 that you had to keep pursuing new technologies even when initial attempts fail, and cited the original Windows as proof. Windows had been allowed to fail for five years because it threatened nothing. The phone threatened everything.
Hardware, Heresy, and the Empty Bench
The last act of Ballmer's tenure was a turn toward hardware, and it is easy to read now as either vision or desperation.
Microsoft's first hardware product had been the Z-80 SoftCard in 1980, the year Ballmer arrived: a circuit board that let the Apple II run the CP/M operating system. It sold 5,000 units at $349 apiece in its first three months and was the company's largest source of revenue that year. Mice and keyboards followed, then the Xbox. But Microsoft had never built its own computer. Its entire business rested on licensing Windows to the manufacturers who did, companies like Dell and HP, who were not pleased to compete with their supplier.
In June 2012, at an event in Hollywood, a few miles from where a young Ballmer had once failed as a screenwriter, he unveiled the Microsoft Surface, the first computer in the company's history whose hardware Microsoft made itself. It launched alongside Windows 8 on October 26, 2012. Windows 8 replaced the Start menu with a screen of touch-friendly tiles; customers hated losing the Start menu. On July 19, 2013, after quarterly results revealed weak sales of both Windows 8 and the Surface, Microsoft's stock suffered its biggest one-day percentage drop since 2000, erasing more than $32 billion in market value. The company had already posted its first quarterly loss ever in July 2012, $492 million, after writing down aQuantive, an online advertising company it had bought for $6.2 billion in 2007.
There were other misfires. In April 2010 Microsoft launched the Kin, a phone line that grew out of its 2008 acquisition of Danger, the maker of the Sidekick; it was discontinued within two months for poor sales. In May 2011 Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion, the largest acquisition in its history to that point. In June 2012 it paid $1.2 billion for Yammer.
And on September 3, 2013, twelve days after announcing his retirement, Ballmer agreed to buy Nokia's mobile phone business. The deal closed on April 25, 2014, for $7.2 billion, after he had left. He called it the toughest decision of his tenure. It was also the decision Gates didn't support, the one Ballmer would later name as a reason their friendship failed. In the summer of 2015 Microsoft wrote down $7.6 billion related to the phone business and cut 7,800 jobs from it. Almost exactly a year earlier, in July 2014, the company had announced 18,000 layoffs, about 14 percent of its workforce, the largest in its history. Windows Phone was eventually abandoned; in January 2019 Microsoft advised its remaining users to switch to iPhone or Android.
Ballmer's diagnosis afterward was not that he had gone too far into hardware but that he hadn't gone far enough. In 2017 he said Microsoft should have turned itself into a world-class hardware company. It's the answer of a loyalist who, even in retirement, wouldn't concede that the war was unwinnable, only that it had been under-resourced.
In 2008, Ballmer had said he intended to stay as chief executive for another decade. On August 23, 2013, Microsoft announced he would retire within twelve months, and a special committee that included Gates would pick his successor. The stock rose on the news.
The search revealed the bench. When observers listed the executives who might once have succeeded him, they found that every one had already left: Jim Allchin, who ran Windows; Brad Silverberg, who shipped Windows 95; Paul Maritz; Nathan Myhrvold, the polymath chief technology officer; Greg Maffei, the former CFO; Pete Higgins; Jeff Raikes; J Allard, the father of the Xbox; Robbie Bach; Bill Veghte; Ray Ozzie; Bob Muglia; Steven Sinofsky, the Windows chief who had departed months after the Windows 8 launch. Kevin Turner, the operator from Sam's Club, was regarded by some as the de facto number two, and as lacking the technological vision for the top job.
The man who loved the company had, somewhere along the way, lost the people who might have run it after him. The culture of combative debate that once forged ideas had become, for many, a reason to leave; the term "Velvet Sweatshop," coined about Microsoft in a 1989 Seattle Times article, had long since been adopted by its own employees.
On February 4, 2014, the board named Satya Nadella chief executive. Nadella had grown up in Hyderabad, the son of an Indian civil servant, come to the United States for graduate school, and joined Microsoft in 1992. He was a quiet engineer who had most recently run Cloud and Enterprise, the very division Ballmer had built to hedge against Windows. Nadella's Microsoft turned toward the cloud. It bought Mojang, the maker of Minecraft, LinkedIn, and GitHub, joined the Linux Foundation, and became, in April 2019, the third American public company valued at over $1 trillion. In January 2024 it became the most valuable public company in the world.
Ballmer hosted his last company meeting in September 2013. He danced. The send-off was tearful. He stepped off Microsoft's board on August 19, 2014. A week before that, he had become the owner of the worst franchise in professional basketball.
Buying the Worst Franchise in Sports
His first attempts at ownership were a series of losses that looked almost like penance.
On March 6, 2008, Seattle mayor Greg Nickels announced that a local group involving Ballmer had made a "game-changing" commitment of $150 million in cash toward a proposed $300 million renovation of KeyArena, and stood ready to buy the SuperSonics from their Oklahoma-based owners to keep the team in Seattle. It failed. The Sonics moved to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder. In June 2012 Ballmer invested in a proposal by Chris Hansen, a Seattle-born hedge fund manager who had grown up a Sonics fan, to build a new arena in the city's SoDo neighborhood. On January 9, 2013, Ballmer and Hansen led a group that agreed to buy the Sacramento Kings from the Maloof family for an estimated $650 million and move them to Seattle. That failed too. The Kings stayed in Sacramento.
Then, in the spring of 2014, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling, was recorded making racist remarks, and the NBA moved to force him out. The Clippers had been for decades the league's punchline, the other team in Los Angeles, a franchise that had wandered from Buffalo to San Diego and whose owner was now a national disgrace. Ballmer bid $2 billion, the highest offer. At the time it was the second-highest price ever paid for a North American sports franchise, behind the $2.15 billion paid for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012. After a California court confirmed that Sterling's wife, Shelly, had the authority to sell, the sale was announced on August 12, 2014.
He arrived as he always had: loudly. Videos of a screaming Ballmer at Clippers events joined the Microsoft canon. He promised, in effect, to love this company too. Within weeks he announced the team would stop using Apple products.
What followed is the part of the story his critics never had to reckon with. Ballmer spent. He acquired star players. In March 2020 he agreed to buy The Forum in Inglewood, the arena whose owners had opposed his plans for a new building nearby, for about $400 million, clearing the way to build the Intuit Dome, a privately financed arena for the Clippers. In December 2020, a survey by The Athletic of league insiders voted him the best owner in basketball. The company man had found, at last, an institution where his instinct to pour resources and enthusiasm into the thing he loved was exactly what everyone wanted from him.
But the Clippers also revealed a pattern. In August 2015 the NBA fined the team $250,000 for circumventing the salary cap by offering an unauthorized business opportunity while recruiting the free agent center DeAndre Jordan. The fine was small. The habit it pointed to would not stay small.
The Ledger Turned Outward
In 2015, Steve and Connie Ballmer co-founded the Ballmer Group. Connie Snyder had married him in 1990; she was a University of Oregon alumna, had served on its board of trustees, and had been working in philanthropy before her husband retired. They had three sons, Sam, Aaron, and Peter.
The Ballmer Group is not a foundation. It is a limited liability company based in Bellevue, Washington, serving as a family office with, by one 2023 estimate, $85 billion under management, and its stated purpose is economic mobility for children, especially those in poor families. It operates in three places: Washington state, where Microsoft made him rich; Los Angeles County, where he bought a basketball team; and the Detroit metropolitan area, where his father drew a Ford paycheck. It expanded into Los Angeles in 2016 and into Detroit in 2017.
Its methods are recognizably his. Grants typically last at least three years and are unrestricted, a gesture of trust unusual in large-scale philanthropy. But before the money goes out, the group performs extensive data-driven due diligence and tracks recipients' commitment and capacity to deliver. In 2018 it announced a $59 million, five-year investment in Social Solutions, a software company that tracks data for nonprofits and social service agencies. In February 2023 it committed up to $165 million to Communities in Schools; in April 2023, $43 million to Washington state for early childhood education and $38 million to the University of Washington for early-childhood educator scholarships; in May 2023, $42.5 million over five years to more than 100 Black-led nonprofits. In 2022 the Ballmers gave $425 million to the University of Oregon to create the Ballmer Institute for Children's Behavioral Health, and later that year $149 million for climate efforts. By August 2024 their giving totaled more than $3.75 billion.
In 2017 he launched USAFacts, a nonprofit meant to let citizens understand government revenue, spending, and outcomes, reportedly funding researchers with $10 million to fill its database with official figures. It is the purest expression of the Ballmer temperament: a man who built his career demanding business justifications for every product now demanding them of the federal government. He went on The Daily Show to explain it.
The Ballmer Group is also, as Education Week reported, less transparent than its peers. Its officials declined to commit to disclosing all its grants, investments, lobbying, or support for elected officials and campaigns. And the ledger has other entries. In 2021 ProPublica reported that Ballmer had used his ownership of sports teams to push his federal income tax rate as low as 12 percent, compared with roughly 35 percent for the athletes on his roster; the Clippers, profitable before he bought them, reported $700 million in losses for tax purposes in the years after. In 2023 ProPublica reported that he had used wash sales, packaged by Goldman Sachs as "Tax Advantaged Loss Harvesting," to save more than half a billion dollars in taxes over five years. In December 2014 the IRS had gone to court to compel Ballmer and other former Microsoft executives to testify in an audit of how the company priced transfers among its subsidiaries; in 2023 Microsoft disclosed that the IRS claimed it owed $28.9 billion in back taxes. The man who built USAFacts to show Americans how their government spends money was, by these accounts, exceptionally skilled at reducing how much of his own it received.
Then, in September 2025, the journalist Pablo Torre reported that the Clippers had used Aspiration, a "green" fintech company, to pay their star Kawhi Leonard an extra $28 million through an endorsement deal, a way around the NBA salary cap. The Boston Sports Journal later reported Leonard had also received $20 million in Aspiration stock. Ballmer and the team said they were victims of a fraud by Aspiration's co-founder, Joe Sanberg, a progressive entrepreneur and activist. It then emerged that Ballmer and Clippers co-owner Dennis Wong had kept investing in Aspiration and in Sanberg's charity after Aspiration's financial troubles and fraud had become public. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate. The league found the Clippers and Ballmer guilty of cap circumvention, issued the largest punishment in its history, and banned Ballmer for a year. In January 2026, his lawyers filed to have him dismissed from the fraud suit over Leonard's pay. Wikipedia now lists him as the Clippers' principal owner, with a parenthesis: suspended.
It is hard to know how to hold all of this at once, and I won't pretend the record resolves it. The man who settled with the government because he couldn't bear the suggestion that his company wasn't a good, proper, moral place was now, by the judgment of his own league, a rule-breaker. The loyalty was the same. The object had changed. At Microsoft he had loved an institution bigger than himself; at the Clippers, the institution was, more or less, himself. A loyal soldier who becomes the king loses the thing that checked him.
What remains is the shape of a life spent belonging. A Swiss engineer's son raised inside the Ford Motor Company, moved to Brussels and back at the company's discretion. A football manager at Harvard, never a player. The thirtieth employee and first business manager of someone else's startup. A best man. A chief executive who settled the government's case because he wanted the company to be seen as moral, who fought Linux and Google and Apple as though they were personal betrayals, who flew from a Swiss ski slope to beg a Bavarian mayor for a contract. A man who shouted until his vocal cords gave out, who wept and danced at his own farewell, who never stopped holding most of his shares.
In 2008, at the peak of his power, the Guardian reported that the chief executive of Microsoft, worth billions, still drove Ford cars, because his father used to work for the company.
Part IIThe Playbook
Ballmer is an unusual subject for a playbook because his record is so divided. He was one of the most effective operators of his era and one of its most famous strategic failures, often in the same decision. The principles below are drawn from both halves: what he did that compounded, what he did that cost Microsoft a decade of relevance, and what the gap between them teaches anyone running a large organization.
The principles
- 1.Negotiate to be paid for what you produce, and convert before it breaks.
- 2.Choose the manager's seat on purpose.
- 3.End the wars that tax your culture more than your balance sheet.
- 4.Make products justify themselves, then protect the ones that can't yet.
- 5.Recruit operators from outside your industry's mythology.
- 6.Build the boring business while everyone watches the shiny one.
- 7.Spend energy like capital, because it depreciates.
- 8.Analyze the business model, not the price tag.
- 9.Never call a competitor a disease.
- 10.Treat the succession bench as the CEO's real product.
- 11.Use the founder; don't need the founder.
- 12.Buy what others flee, then remember the rules still apply.
Principle 1
Negotiate to be paid for what you produce, and convert before it breaks
Ballmer's original deal, $50,000 plus ten percent of the profit he generated and no equity, was a bet on output rather than valuation. In an early-stage company that couldn't price its stock, it aligned his pay precisely with the thing Gates most needed from a business manager: profit. The structure worked so well it became unsustainable, and the conversion to eight percent equity at incorporation in 1981 is the more instructive move. Marquardt's fix turned a variable cash claim that threatened the company's economics into ownership that tied Ballmer's fortune to the company's long-term value.
Two lessons sit inside the episode. First, a profit share is the right instrument when value is uncertain and your contribution is measurable; it lets you capture upside without arguing about a number nobody can calculate. Second, every variable compensation scheme has a breaking point, and the person who proposes the conversion before resentment sets in gets to shape the terms. Gates personally funding most of the stake shows how much goodwill a fair conversion can generate.
Ballmer applied the same understanding later from the other side of the table. In 2003, with the stock flat, he replaced Microsoft's stock-option program. Options that had made 12,000 millionaires in a rising market were producing restlessness and the FYIFV mentality in a flat one. Compensation is behavior design, and he knew it from experience.
Tactic: When joining an early company whose equity can't be valued, ask for a share of the profit you can measurably drive, and write in the trigger for converting it to ownership before it becomes a fight.
Principle 2
Choose the manager's seat on purpose
At Harvard, Ballmer managed the football team rather than playing on it. At Microsoft he was hired as the first business manager, not as a co-founder or technologist. For two decades he moved through operations, operating systems, and sales, accumulating a working knowledge of every lever in the business that no visionary founder possessed.
That position has an underrated advantage: it puts you at the junction of everyone else's work. The manager sees the schedule, the budget, the morale, the customer, and the gap between what was promised and what shipped. Ballmer's eight percent, and his eventual ascent to chief executive, came from making himself indispensable to the people with the more glamorous jobs.
The seat has a cost too, and his tenure exposed it. A career spent optimizing other people's performances doesn't necessarily train the instinct to bet on an unproven category. The Wall Street Journal's verdict that Microsoft was early to smartphones, touchscreens, and smartwatches but killed them to protect Windows and Office is, in part, a description of what happens when the manager's instinct for discipline outranks the builder's instinct for risk.
Tactic: If you take the operator's role, deliberately pair yourself with someone whose job is to argue for the bets your spreadsheets would kill, and give that person real authority.
Principle 3
End the wars that tax your culture more than your balance sheet
Ballmer settled the federal antitrust case that Gates reportedly wanted to keep fighting. His reasoning wasn't primarily legal. Being the object of a government complaint "just has all downside," he said, because people assume there's a real problem and it becomes hard to say "we're a good, proper, moral place."
This is the insight: some fights cost more in identity than in money. A company perpetually defending itself against its own government recruits worse, sells harder, and absorbs a story about itself that its employees eventually believe. Settling didn't end Microsoft's legal exposure. European fines followed in 2004 and 2008. But it took the breakup threat off the table and let leadership attention return to products.
The principle has a mirror image in his later career. The Clippers' 2015 fine for the DeAndre Jordan approach and the 2025 Aspiration scandal show what happens when an organization doesn't absorb the lesson of a small regulatory warning. The cheapest settlement is with your own conduct, early.
Tactic: For every long-running legal or regulatory fight, estimate its cost to recruiting, morale, and customer trust, not just the potential judgment, and settle when the non-financial cost is larger.
Principle 4
Make products justify themselves, then protect the ones that can't yet
Upon becoming chief executive, Ballmer required detailed business justifications for new products, ending the habit of greenlighting hundreds of projects because they sounded interesting. In a company Microsoft's size, that discipline was overdue, and it contributed to margins that were double those of Google and IBM.
It also killed the future. The Journal's summary is exact: Microsoft "repeatedly killed promising projects if they threatened its cash cows." Windows CE shipped in 1996; Ballmer later admitted he regretted not focusing on mobile in the early 2000s. His own 2005 lesson, that the original Windows proved you must keep pursuing technologies whose first attempts fail, was true, but Windows had been allowed to fail because it cannibalized nothing.
B
Built vs. Missed
The same discipline that built Ballmer's durable businesses filtered out the disruptive ones.
| Initiative | Relationship to Windows/Office | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise servers (SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange) | Complementary | Scale ~$20B business |
| Azure (launched October 27, 2008) | Neutral, later complementary | Scale Foundation of Nadella era |
| Xbox and Kinect | Separate market | Try $8.9B division |
| Windows Mobile / Windows Phone | Threat to PC-centric model | Risk 2.7% U.S. share by 2016 |
| Kin phones | Consumer, unproven | Risk Discontinued within two months |
| Nokia devices ($7.2B) | Late defense of mobile | Risk $7.6B writedown, 7,800 jobs cut |
The table shows the pattern: Ballmer's discipline excelled at businesses that complemented the core and failed at businesses that threatened it. The fix isn't to abandon discipline but to run a separate standard for projects whose purpose is to make the core obsolete.
Tactic: Create a protected budget, with its own leadership and metrics, for projects that could cannibalize your largest product line, and forbid the core business from evaluating them.
Principle 5
Recruit operators from outside your industry's mythology
In 2005 Ballmer hired Kevin Turner, chief executive of Walmart's Sam's Club, as Microsoft's chief operating officer, specifically to bring process and discipline to sales, marketing, and services. It was a deliberately unglamorous hire for a software company, and it reflected Ballmer's conviction that Microsoft had to behave like a mature enterprise. His Accenture board seat from 2001 to 2006 put him in the same orbit.
Outside operators bring practices insiders have stopped seeing: supply discipline, sales cadence, cost control. Retail's thin margins teach a rigor that software's fat margins don't. Turner's tenure lasted until 2016, well into the Nadella era, which suggests the operational value was real.
The limit was equally visible. When the succession search came, Turner was considered the de facto number two and described as lacking technological vision. An outside operator can strengthen the machine, but if the operator becomes the only credible successor, the company has confused running the business with knowing where it should go.
Tactic: Hire operators from adjacent, more disciplined industries to fix execution, but never let the operations chief be the only internal candidate for the top job.
Principle 6
Build the boring business while everyone watches the shiny one
The public story of the Ballmer years was phones, tablets, and search. The financial story was enterprise. Exchange, Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, System Center, and Dynamics CRM each began as an underdog and became a category leader. By April 2013 Microsoft's business division and its server and tools division were each larger than Windows, which is why the company could post 19 percent profit growth while its consumer products struggled.
Azure, launched in October 2008, belongs in the same category: unglamorous infrastructure that became the foundation of Microsoft's later return to the top of the market. Satya Nadella came from the Cloud and Enterprise division Ballmer had built.
The lesson is about attention. Ballmer's public reputation suffered because the market judged him on consumer battles, while his durable contribution was in businesses that rarely made headlines. Leaders who understand this can allocate capital to the boring compounder without being distracted by the narrative, though they should also expect that the market may never give them credit for it.
Tactic: Track your least-discussed business units by growth and retention rather than by press coverage, and fund the ones quietly compounding before you fund the ones generating headlines.
Principle 7
Spend energy like capital, because it depreciates
Ballmer's energy was a management instrument. The chanting, the leaps, "I love this company!" were meant to motivate employees and partners, and they did, for years. A 1986 parody video selling Windows 1.0 like a Crazy Eddie commercial helped rally a company behind a product most of the industry considered a joke.
But energy has a cost, and the cost was literal: he shouted so much he needed vocal cord surgery. Organizationally, intensity that rallies one generation can drive away the next. The list of departed potential successors, Allchin, Silverberg, Maritz, Myhrvold, Maffei, Higgins, Raikes, Allard, Bach, Veghte, Ozzie, Muglia, Sinofsky, is partly a record of a culture whose combative debates wore people down. Microsoft's own employees adopted the phrase "Velvet Sweatshop."
Exuberance is also a public asset that can turn into a liability. The same viral clips that showed passion became, during a flat stock decade, shorthand for a leader who seemed louder than he was strategic.
Tactic: Reserve high-intensity motivation for genuine inflection points, and measure its effect by senior retention rather than by the room's applause.
Principle 8
Analyze the business model, not the price tag
Ballmer's 2007 dismissal of the iPhone, "no chance," was based on price. His 2016 explanation confirmed it: $600 to $700 was too much, and he didn't anticipate that Apple would get carriers to fold the cost into monthly bills, "a business model innovation." His 2009 jab at paying "$500 more to get a logo on it" made the same mistake from another angle, treating brand and integrated design as a markup rather than as the product.
The error is instructive because Ballmer was an expert in business models. His own fortune came from restructuring a compensation contract, and Microsoft's dominance came from the IBM deal that let it license DOS to every clone maker. Yet when analyzing a competitor, he defaulted to a product manager's checklist: price, features, keyboard.
The general rule: a disruptive product often looks overpriced or underfeatured when judged by the incumbent's purchase model, because its real innovation is in how it is sold, financed, or distributed.
Tactic: When a competitor's product looks too expensive to succeed, map exactly who pays, when, and through what channel before concluding the market will reject it.
Principle 9
Never call a competitor a disease
Ballmer called Linux a "tough competitor" with "characteristics of communism," then a "cancer … in the intellectual property sense," then an infringer of Microsoft's intellectual property. He flew from a Swiss ski holiday in April 2003 to plead with Munich's mayor, offering a 35 percent discount, and lost anyway.
Rhetoric like this does two kinds of damage. Externally, it hardens communities against you; Linux developers had every reason to see Microsoft as an enemy for a decade. Internally, it makes later cooperation look like surrender. When Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation in November 2016, coverage invariably mentioned that Ballmer had called it cancer fifteen years earlier. Ballmer himself reversed in March 2016, saying the comments were right at the time but times had changed.
The same applies to Apple and Google. Calling the 1997 Apple investment "the craziest thing we ever did," banning Apple products from the Clippers, and allegedly vowing to "kill Google" all signaled a personal hostility that made strategic flexibility harder. Contempt also blinds: it's difficult to learn from a competitor you've publicly declared illegitimate.
Tactic: Describe competitors in public only in terms you could comfortably repeat on the day you announce a partnership with them.
Principle 10
Treat the succession bench as the CEO's real product
When Ballmer announced his retirement in August 2013, every executive who had once been considered a plausible successor had already left. The board ended up promoting Nadella, who succeeded brilliantly, but the absence of a visible bench was itself a verdict on the culture Ballmer had led for thirteen years.
M
The Ballmer Arc at Microsoft
Key moments in a thirty-four-year tenure.
1980
Joins June 11 as employee No. 30 at $50,000 plus 10% of profits.
1981
Microsoft incorporates; Ballmer's profit share becomes an 8% stake.
1992
Named executive vice president for sales and support.
1998
Promoted to president, de facto number two.
2000
Named CEO on January 13; Gates becomes chief software architect.
2005
Recruits Kevin Turner from Sam's Club as COO.
2008
Gates leaves day-to-day work; Azure launches October 27.
2012
Unveils Surface, Microsoft's first self-made computer.
2013
Announces retirement August 23; agrees to buy Nokia's phone unit.
2014
Satya Nadella named CEO February 4; Ballmer leaves the board August 19.
Ballmer said in 2005 that his first priority was getting the people he delegated to in order. That's the right priority, but delegation and succession aren't the same thing. A leader can have a highly effective team of direct reports and still fail to develop anyone capable of replacing him, especially when strong executives keep leaving after losing internal battles.
Tactic: Keep a written list of three internal executives who could replace you within a year, review it with the board annually, and treat any departure from that list as a strategic event that demands explanation.
Principle 11
Use the founder; don't need the founder
Ballmer's formulation of his relationship with Gates, "Use him, yes, need him, no," is one of the clearest statements ever made about succeeding a founder. The 2000 arrangement, in which Ballmer ran operations while Gates kept "technological vision" as chief software architect, left the new chief executive responsible for results without control over direction. Real reorganization, including replacing division heads to break up fiefdoms, only came after Gates left day-to-day management in 2008.
The lesson cuts against sentiment. A founder's ongoing presence as a parallel authority creates ambiguity that slows decisions and invites appeals around the chief executive. The successor needs access to the founder's knowledge without dependence on the founder's approval.
It also shows the personal price. Gates opposed Ballmer's hardware and smartphone push, and the two men drifted apart. Independence from a founder can be the right governance choice and still cost a friendship. Leaders should make that choice with their eyes open.
Tactic: If you succeed a founder, negotiate a clear end date for any shared authority before you accept the job, and define in writing which decisions require no consultation.
Principle 12
Buy what others flee, then remember the rules still apply
The Clippers were a disgraced franchise when Ballmer paid $2 billion in 2014, after failing three times to buy his way into Seattle basketball. He then did what a committed owner should: acquired stars, bought The Forum for about $400 million to clear the path for the Intuit Dome, and by 2020 was voted the best owner in basketball. Buying a distressed asset and investing heavily in it is a sound strategy when you have the capital and patience others lack.
His philanthropy shows a related discipline. The Ballmer Group gives unrestricted, multi-year grants but only after rigorous data-driven diligence, a combination of trust and verification most donors split apart.
The cautionary half is just as clear. The 2015 DeAndre Jordan fine and the 2025 Aspiration finding, the largest punishment in NBA history and a one-year ban, show an owner whose willingness to do whatever it took for his team crossed into cap circumvention. ProPublica's reporting on his tax strategies raised a related question about operating at the legal edge. An owner who buys a franchise to restore its reputation can't afford to become the reputational problem.
Tactic: When you buy a distressed asset, write a compliance standard stricter than the one the previous owner broke, and have someone independent of the business audit every compensation structure that touches it.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Steve Ballmer, on Linux, July 2000It has characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it.
— Steve Ballmer, on Apple's pricing, March 2009Paying 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.
— Steve Ballmer, revisiting his iPhone prediction, 2016People like to point to this quote where I said iPhones will never sell, because the price at $600 or $700 was too high. And there was a business model innovation by Apple to get it essentially built into the monthly cellphone bill.
— Steve Ballmer, Web 2.0 Summit, October 2011You 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.
— Steve Ballmer, on Microsoft's 1997 investment in Apple, 2015The craziest thing we ever did.
Maxims
- Get paid for output. When equity can't be valued, a share of measurable profit is the cleanest bet on yourself.
- Convert before it breaks. Every variable deal has a breaking point; propose the restructuring before resentment does.
- Hold the clipboard on purpose. The manager's seat sees the whole field, but someone else must be allowed to call the long shots.
- Settle for identity. End fights that cost your culture more than they could ever cost your balance sheet.
- Discipline needs a sanctuary. Make products justify themselves, except the ones designed to replace your cash cow.
- Fund the boring compounder. Enterprise and infrastructure rarely make headlines and often make the decade.
- Volume depreciates. Energy rallies a company once; used constantly, it wears out voices and drives off successors.
- Read the contract, not the sticker. Disruptors often win on how they're paid for, not what they cost.
- Don't name a disease. The competitor you call a cancer may be the partner you need in fifteen years.
- Loyalty needs a check. Love the institution, but make sure something bigger than your love can still tell you no.
