| Written by Emily Tan |
| Monday, 07 June 2010 00:00 |
It's been a decade since Steve Ballmer took over as CEO of Microsoft Corp from its poster boy, Bill Gates, but it's only recently that Ballmer seems to be stepping out from Gates' shadow. At the International Consumer Electronics Show 2009, Ballmer gave his first keynote address, a speech traditionally given by Gates since 1994.
"Bill [Gates] said, 'Steve! I don't want to be full time on Microsoft anymore. I want to be full-time on my foundation. He didn't say, 'Take CES'. He said 'Take full-time'. But it meant that if we were going to speak at CES that I was going to do it. And I enjoyed it," Ballmer said in an interview in Putrajaya on May 25. He was in Malaysia to launch Microsoft's cloud computing solutions — a suite of business productivity software and a developer platform that are available online.
Gates left his role as full-time chairman of Microsoft in 2008 and retains his position as non-executive chairman of the software giant. He now works full time with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which funds various charitable organisations and scientific research programmes worldwide.
Ballmer: Hopefully, I've improved a little bit, but I don't think I've changed my personally that much. Photo by Haris Hassan
Reports about the CES keynote address described Ballmer's presentation as "flawless", "charismatic" and "smooth", a far cry from his performance at an internal Microsoft event in 2000. Immortalised in a YouTube clip, his performance earned him the unfortunate nickname of "Monkey Boy" among the tech circles.
"I do know a lot of my online reputation is based on a few things I have done in life that have gotten a lot of repetition. But I think most of us have many more sides to our personalities than you'd get with a 60-second YouTube clip," laughs Ballmer.
At six feet tall, Ballmer is a big man with a big personality and, if reports are to be believed, a big temper. In 2004, former Microsoft software developer, Mark Lucovsky, in a sworn affidavit to a US court, described how Ballmer threw a chair across the room when he learnt Lucovsky was leaving to join Google.
"Hopefully, I've improved a little bit, but I don't think I've changed my personality that much. Do I get enthusiastic? Yes, I get enthusiastic, that is part of my personality. But at the same time I think I can listen, I think people can relate to me pretty well, have a thoughtful discussion with me," says Ballmer, adding that almost anyone would be misrepresented if viewed purely through online snippets.
Microsoft too has been evolving, and far more rapidly than most realise, pointed out Ballmer in a presentation on May 25 prior to the interview. "When I first left Stanford Business School to join Bill [in 1980] with the ambition of putting a computer on every desktop, my father asked me, 'What is a software programme?'. And my mother said, 'Why would anyone need a computer?'. Then 10 years later, dad asked, 'What is a network? The Internet, who funds it?'. Today, it's about cloud computing."
Ballmer describes Microsoft's new broader vision as "enabling people in businesses to realise their full potential". "Now, that's not as specific, but we're also doing more things. We have four or five different businesses, each different areas of innovation, and visions but none cover the full spectrum of what we do," he explains.
For Ballmer, after 30 years at Microsoft, the concept of innovation too has evolved to cover a broad spectrum. "I have come to appreciate what I might call the 'yin and yang' of innovation. Innovation is good ideas applied to existing concepts as well as completely new concepts. Innovation is not just about a single brilliant idea, it's about a lot of good execution. There's large and small-scale innovation, short-term and long-term innovation, continuous and discontinuous... innovation has a range to it.
The world doesn't thrive because there's just one thing that represents innovation, it's the breadth and diversity that really drives the planet forward."
Despite his philosophical attitude towards innovation, Ballmer is keenly aware that Microsoft must stay on its toes to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive environment. "There are places where I wish we had moved faster," he says. "I always want us to move faster!"
This article appeared in Management@work, the monthly management pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 809, Jun 7-13, 2010.
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