Steve Ballmer, every mention
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every year anyone David Rosenthal 94Ben Gilbert 88Michael Lewis 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Steve Ballmer comes up
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 50:40 David Rosenthal I think it was our Microsoft series when we talked to Steve, to Bomber.
- ▶ 50:44 Michael Lewis Steve, here we go, Steve.
- ▶ 50:47 David Rosenthal Past acquired guest, Steve Bomber.
- ▶ 51:32 David Rosenthal And we were like, well, let's see if we can talk to Steve,
- ▶ 51:35 David Rosenthal and so then we talked to Steve, and we got his, you know, perspective on things, and it completely changed.
- ▶ 51:51 Ben Gilbert Steve didn't get back to us for a day, and then we heard back, and he said, I don't listen to podcasts.
- ▶ 2:45:06 Ben Gilbert You'll notice that this was not just David and I setting up a few cameras like we've done with Steve Ballmer or Morris Chang.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:44:43 Ben Gilbert They were willing to match the offer for DoubleClick, and the message included an email from Steve Ballmer saying that he opened the door for a much higher offer.
- ▶ 1:44:51 Ben Gilbert Ballmer wrote that if the offer match was not acceptable, DoubleClick should simply mark up the paper to meet its needs and then sign it, and Microsoft would review and rapidly countersign to close the deal with minimal negotiation…
- ▶ 1:45:03 Ben Gilbert Without saying so, Ballmer was communicating, here's a blank check, tell me what closes the deal.
- ▶ 2:52:33 David Rosenthal Yes, the motor, I mean, when we interviewed Steve Ballmer a couple months ago, he brought it up.
- ▶ 3:08:08 David Rosenthal It's the same thing as the Microsoft Surface strategy, why Bomber was so adamant, we gotta make a Surface, we gotta show the OEMs.
- ▶ 4:10:14 Ben Gilbert Most of you have probably listened, but if you have not, go check out our first episode on the origin of Google and the creation of the search engine and the search business, and of course, our Microsoft series part one, part two, and an…
The Jamie Dimon Interview: How JP Morgan Became an $800 Billion Bank · Acquired
- ▶ 1:04:52 Ben Gilbert If you like this episode, go check out other recent episodes, like the start of our Google series, which is off to a screamin' start, our Rolex episode, which is another one of our biggest ever, and then our interviews, Steve Ballmer, Mark…
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:11:24 David Rosenthal Well, after our Steve Ballmer interview, never gonna not count dividends again.
- ▶ 3:32:01 Ben Gilbert I have a three-way tie of three excellent TV shows that I watched in the last, I guess, two months, because we didn't do, uh, Carveouts with Steve Ballmer.
Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:20:23 Ben Gilbert Remember the Clippers when Steve Ballmer bought it was only two billion.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 2:12:30 David Rosenthal And he was the outside candidate to replace Bomber as
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:04:14 Ben Gilbert And so this would have been right after Bill stopped being CEO, handed the CEO reins to Steve.
- ▶ 5:52:50 David Rosenthal And Bill came out of it and said, Steve, you're the CEO now.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:14:42 Ben Gilbert Steve Ballmer had to work at one company, and Bill Gates had to work at the other.
- ▶ 1:15:10 David Rosenthal I mean, can you imagine if there was, like, the Gates Company and the Bomber Company?
- ▶ 1:26:19 David Rosenthal So in July, 98, right as this big, huge DOJ antitrust suit is heating up, Steve Ballmer gets promoted to president of the company.
- ▶ 1:26:28 David Rosenthal Bill is still CEO, but Steve is now promoted to president and is the clear number two.
- ▶ 1:26:41 David Rosenthal And then, Ben, as you're referring to, on January 13th, 2000, Bill Gates announces that he is handing the CEO role of Microsoft over to Steve, and that he is moving to a newly created position as chief software architect, and he will…
- ▶ 1:28:12 David Rosenthal And so, the transition to Steve Ballmer happens.
- ▶ 1:28:16 David Rosenthal This is the context under which Steve Ballmer became the CEO of Microsoft.
- ▶ 1:28:36 David Rosenthal Is how much Steve was the emotional rock for the company when this was happening.
- ▶ 1:28:42 David Rosenthal All the stuff everybody thinks about Steve, you know, the running around on stage, the yelling, the screaming.
- ▶ 1:29:02 David Rosenthal And Steve was there trying to keep everybody moving forward.
- ▶ 1:29:22 David Rosenthal Knowing that context, for me at least, it completely changed
- ▶ 1:29:31 David Rosenthal So when Steve takes over, his agenda is three things, and I think in basically priority order.
- ▶ 1:30:04 David Rosenthal Two, one of the very first things Steve does when he becomes CEO is he promotes Brad Smith to general counsel, who Brad Smith is still, of course, leading all this at Microsoft to this day.
- ▶ 1:30:17 David Rosenthal And Steve tells Brad,
- ▶ 1:31:10 Ben Gilbert It's kind of amazing that Steve was part of the old guard and the new guard to do this, because how can you say, I'm gonna put
- ▶ 1:32:11 David Rosenthal So then that leaves job number three on Steve's agenda of be successful.
- ▶ 1:32:48 David Rosenthal Yes, and absolutely, Bill was still there, and Steve had Bill, and they were running the company together.
- ▶ 1:33:12 David Rosenthal And that is a muscle that, as we talked about last episode, Steve had been building for a while, but boy, does he really come into his own here.
- ▶ 1:36:58 Ben Gilbert It really exposes that Steve was the one who had the passion for the enterprise.
- ▶ 1:39:42 David Rosenthal And it was perfectly suited to Steve's strengths.
- ▶ 1:40:04 David Rosenthal All, every single one of those names I just mentioned become multi-billion dollar revenue enterprise IT server products that are built and sold during the Steve Ballmer era of Microsoft.
- ▶ 1:45:31 Ben Gilbert On the why it's good for Microsoft, Steve also pioneered this bundling idea, which is once you sign the enterprise agreement, you get access to all of this.
- ▶ 1:54:59 Ben Gilbert So, I mean, it was really the first seven years of Steve's tenure as CEO.
- ▶ 2:03:22 Ben Gilbert Steve Ballmer is.
- ▶ 2:11:38 David Rosenthal I'll bring it up again later, but we got to talk to Steve again, to Bomber, as we were preparing for this episode, and he had this amazing quote to us about some of his acquisitions that didn't go well.
- ▶ 2:24:17 Ben Gilbert So they come out, first of all, it's Bill Gates again in 2006, six years after Steve Ballmer has become CEO.
- ▶ 2:29:30 Ben Gilbert I don't think Bill had a passion for empowering the enterprise and, you know, making sure that businesses succeeded the way that Steve was, but nobody should ever sell Bill Gates short and say he was just the technical genius, and that…
- ▶ 2:34:32 Ben Gilbert So I think a lot of the consumer stuff can be answered by Steve Ballmer wasn't really a consumer-oriented technologist.
- ▶ 2:34:59 David Rosenthal In that conversation that we had with Steve, where he, you know, made the comment about my acquisitions, my mistakes, we just lost money on the bad ones, the genesis of that conversation was about Vista.
- ▶ 2:35:10 David Rosenthal You know, he was reflecting, he said, that probably was the worst moment, actually.
- ▶ 2:45:36 Ben Gilbert And Steve Ballmer goes to Boeing Field, and they have a meeting at the airport.
- ▶ 2:45:51 Ben Gilbert From what I can tell, Bill and Steve kind of looked the Yahoo guys in the eye and decided, these guys are kind of jerking us around.
- ▶ 3:09:40 Ben Gilbert Steve Ballmer has a quote after the announcement.
- ▶ 3:09:51 David Rosenthal Phones at this point in time, flagship phones were costing like a hundred dollars with carrier subsidies, and Steve's like, 500 dollars?
- ▶ 3:10:05 Ben Gilbert One, Steve is being the company salesperson.
- ▶ 3:20:11 Ben Gilbert And this is a thing that I think Steve Ballmer also doesn't get credit for.
- ▶ 3:20:41 Ben Gilbert Steve Ballmer realized pretty early, I think because of the Google Android thing, mobile was gonna shake out differently.
- ▶ 3:21:51 Ben Gilbert But, to Steve's credit, he acted.
- ▶ 3:25:23 David Rosenthal It validates the product vision, and it terrifies Bomber and Microsoft leadership, because they just watched what happened, what Apple did to the phone market.
- ▶ 3:35:10 Ben Gilbert As the general public is concerned, Steve Ballmer was obsessed with Windows.
- ▶ 3:35:15 Ben Gilbert He built the enterprise business.
- ▶ 3:35:17 Ben Gilbert He left.
- ▶ 3:35:37 David Rosenthal He and Steve know that there needs to be a successor in this role.
- ▶ 3:35:42 David Rosenthal Even Steve will be the first person to tell you he is not a technologist.
- ▶ 3:35:46 David Rosenthal He can't do both roles.
- ▶ 3:35:48 David Rosenthal He needs a bill.
- ▶ 3:35:49 David Rosenthal He needs a chief software architect.
- ▶ 3:37:40 Ben Gilbert And essentially what's going on is Bill and Steve kind of look at Ray
- ▶ 3:39:21 David Rosenthal And so in January, 2006, Ray with Steve Bomber's full blessing goes and starts recruiting for a secret project within Microsoft incubated outside any of the existing divisions.
- ▶ 3:39:41 David Rosenthal That was like the key linchpin of Microsoft's Steve Bomber era enterprise strategy.
- ▶ 3:43:11 David Rosenthal And Steve Bomber supported this whole thing, pushed it all through, despite heavy pressure and incentives from inside the company, from Windows, from partners, from the whole go-to-market motion that he built, you know, Microsoft's…
- ▶ 3:43:29 David Rosenthal Steve
- ▶ 3:46:31 David Rosenthal So, in 2010, Ray Ozzie actually leaves the company, but as he's doing, he and Steve roll Red Dog, by this point in time renamed Azure, back into the server and tools business, and the two of them go to the University of Washington, and…
- ▶ 3:47:05 David Rosenthal And after that, Steve replaces the division head of the whole Server & Tools division, who was Bob Muglia at the time.
- ▶ 3:47:31 David Rosenthal But the reason that Steve made the change was he said, we need a new leader who's going to come in and change this organization and make it a cloud first organization.
- ▶ 3:47:47 David Rosenthal And the person that Steve taps to do that from Bing is none other than Satya Nadella.
- ▶ 3:50:30 David Rosenthal We have one more chapter in Nokia in the end of Steve's tenure to talk about here, but it turned out, actually, that the cloud market was so big
- ▶ 3:52:33 Ben Gilbert With Steve's buy-in and the air cover from Steve to make it happen organizationally.
- ▶ 3:54:06 Ben Gilbert There was seven years before Steve Ballmer handed the reins to Satya where Azure development was happening under him.
- ▶ 3:54:21 David Rosenthal And Steve is the one who handpicked Satya to lead it and get all the credit and the narrative and the win and then become the CEO.
- ▶ 3:56:04 David Rosenthal I kind of think all of the credit for the vision for it and the championing it for the initial seven years within Microsoft goes to Steve and to Ray.
- ▶ 4:00:09 David Rosenthal To wrap up our history of this period of Microsoft and mobile and everything and Steve's tenure and talk about Nokia as we end things here.
- ▶ 4:02:54 David Rosenthal And as Steve put it to us, it was only money.
- ▶ 4:04:20 David Rosenthal And I think it's probably in Steve's mind here of like, I'm not getting any credit for this, all this cash I'm generating.
- ▶ 4:05:20 David Rosenthal The board basically says to Steve, like, clearly there's not support for this.
- ▶ 4:05:30 Ben Gilbert Steve mulls it over, plays with it, is for it, proposes it to the board, and exactly, the board comes back and says, hey, there's not support for this.
- ▶ 4:05:51 David Rosenthal And on August 2320 13, Microsoft and Steve Bomber announced that he is retiring within the next 12 months and that the board and the company have started the search for a successor as CEO.
- ▶ 4:06:21 David Rosenthal How it went down, we don't know exactly, but the fact pattern is, Steve announced that he was leaving.
- ▶ 4:06:48 David Rosenthal Steve Ballmer steps down.
- ▶ 4:07:02 David Rosenthal Bill, Steve, the original folks, we're retiring.
- ▶ 4:07:40 Ben Gilbert Bill, Steve, old wars, antitrust, bad releases of Windows.
- ▶ 4:07:48 Ben Gilbert And it was Bill and Steve leaving in one fell swoop to clear the path.
- ▶ 4:09:19 Ben Gilbert Okay, I have got some start and finish stats on Steve's tenure as CEO.
- ▶ 4:09:26 Ben Gilbert This episode, we started a little bit before Steve took over because we wanted to put the internet chapter in and the antitrust chapter in, but I think everyone kind of feels it by this point.
- ▶ 4:09:35 Ben Gilbert The question really is, like, what happened when Steve was running the company?
- ▶ 4:09:42 Ben Gilbert And this is the time frame from 2000 when he was announced as CEO.
- ▶ 4:10:03 Ben Gilbert Important to pay attention to is the price to earnings ratio when Steve was announced as CEO was a 75 X.
- ▶ 4:10:34 David Rosenthal So Steve comes in at an all-time high multiple, and right before the DOJ verdict and the breakup of the company.
- ▶ 4:10:49 Ben Gilbert Essentially, if you're doing an analysis of what happened in Steve's tenure, and you're trying to grade that, you are implicitly saying, did Steve make a good investment
- ▶ 4:11:00 Ben Gilbert To be honest, I think Steve took one for the team in taking over as CEO in that moment.
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