Microsoft's Former CEO Says Disagreement With Gates on Smartphones Drove Them Apart

Nov. 4 -- Former Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer joins host Emily Chang on "Bloomberg Studio 1.0" to discuss his relationship with Bill Gates.

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[iyerviking]

Steve Ballmer a.k.a the world’s luckiest roommate.

[wildreams]

Ballmer: "I think I did some of my best work after Bill left, actually."
Emily: "Really?? Like what?"

Savage.

[shinikyokai]

Ballmer poisoned Microsoft's corporate culture with the stacked ranking system, which resulted in every employee sabatoging each other so that they wouldn't end up on the bottom rank that gets fired. This led to tremendous problems with all of their software and hardware offerings while Balmer was CEO which only started to recover after his exit.

[ihcnehc]

Ex-Microsoft here. Zero innovation came from Microsoft during the entire time Steve Ballmer was the CEO. All heads of major product groups are MBA number crunching types loaded up with tech lingos but zero intuition and insights.

[IKhanNot]

If I invested in everything Ballmer said would have failed I would have been a millionaire by now.

[IceColdProfessional]

I'm glad he's a team owner now. He seems more like a basketball coach than a CEO of a tech company.

[beatonthedonis]

Can't understand how Microsoft couldn't deliver a phone OS that could sync seamlessly with Windows PCs and sew up the business market at least. They even lost to Blackberry.

[ThinkPositiveDude]

After Bill left, this clown nearly tanked the company until he was forced out by other major shareholders. The main thing that kept them afloat during that time was the OS monopoly that Bill created.

[dec]

" *DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVOLOPERS!* "

-This guy.

[stephenpaul]

Guys, we wouldn't have Bing if this guy wasn't in charge. Show some respect.

[mshutube]

Ballmer is the prime example of why no engineering company should ever put a sales guy as a CEO. Microsoft was at its worse when Ballmer was in charge.

[kevindsmith]

She looks like she is trying not to laugh in his face when he talks about his successes. 🤣

[fabriziomarchetti]

this man will be remembered for the iphone comment. that's it, he will go down in history as the guy who laughed at the most successful product of all times.

[driverx]

Steve, you forgot the Zune...after Bing lol.

[bolingowarrior]

He was a salesman and could sell tons of what Microsoft traditionally made (hence profits going up up up). However, technology companies really need visionaries at the helm given how fast the sector changes, which is why the stock price stagnated.

[MickyAvStickyHands]

Let's be real. Steve would be selling Buicks (albeit a lot of them) had he never met Bill.

[jurgisvalancauskas]

Well he was not a horrible CEO, just a very average one. Really horrible CEOs destroy their own companies (like Marissa Meyer destroyed Yahoo), Ballmer didn't destroy Microsoft. He left MS in a pretty reasonable shape. He just lacked general intuition where the whole tech industry is going to that's why most of his decisions were either hit or miss.

[internetraveller]

This is the kind of guy that you don't know how the hell he is not only your boss but also has a high position inside the company and then from time to time, very often actually, thanks to his "ideas" things go wrong and nobody points it's finger to him. I really don't get it how incompetent people get this far.

[ritch]

Is this guy the one who messed up the whole Microsoft ?

[chlone]

He was the most creative CEO that I'd ever seen in terms of releasing one's anger