Ten years of Steve Ballmer

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Exactly 10 years ago this week, Bill Gates stepped down as chief executive of Microsoft, installing Steve Ballmer in his place.

That decade hasn’t been kind to Microsoft. In the past 10 years, Microsoft’s stock has dived 53 per cent – a slide that would have seen many other chief execs knocked from the position pretty quickly.

All the damage can’t be blamed on Ballmer, as until two years ago Gates was still acting chairman, and clearly offering a lot of leadership to the firm he founded.

And it’s impossible to ignore the affects of the dot com bubble bursting and the recession of the past year on the computing industry’s biggest firm, nor the impact of the rise of Google and the reinvention of Apple.

Still, even with those factors, his reign can hardly be called a success – some have even called for Microsoft to ditch him.

To celebrate Ballmer’s tenth anniversary at the helm, we look back at some of the best – and worst – moments of the decade.

The dancing and the chanting

There’s nowhere else to start, really. Sure, acting like a lunatic on stage hardly explains a 53 per cent stock prices spiral (one assumes, though maybe it does) but it’s hard to escape that one of the most enduring images of Ballmer is the big bald sweaty man hoarsely chanting “developers, developers, developers.”

Or there’s the time, to mark Microsoft’s 25th anniversary, that he danced like a monkey across a stage for 45 full seconds (and looking like he pulls something halfway through it). Nearly a minute, as a monkey – this from the head honcho at one of the biggest, best known firms in the world.

If nothing else, Ballmer has proved one heck of a lot more entertaining than Gates, and even if he’s not announcing anything as shiny as Apple’s Steve Jobs tends to at his shows, at least you can hope for an amusing performance.

His attitude – for lack of a better description – seems to be filtering down to the rest of the company, or at least the marketing department. Microsoft ran a series of increasingly bizarre adverts this year, showing a sense of humour and a bit of personality – not unlike Ballmer himself.

Failed launches

While dancing across stage like a monkey is one way to get attention, launching good products is probably the preferred method.

In the past 10 years, Microsoft has launched a lot of products, some good, some not so good.

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