Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer is popular for his strange habits and un-professional practices. He has often landed into publicity troubles.
His stange acts of shouting and dancing in developer conferences is weird.
Do you know of any CEO who loses his coolness on sight of a great gadget called iPhone. Here is the man –Steve Ballmer!
Yesterday, at Microsoft’s private company meeting at Seattle’s Safeco Field, Ballmer snatched an iPhone from one of his peers (believe it or not, most Microsoft employees (in U.S.) have an iPhone) and didn’t give it back till he was done trying to be a Clown.
The employee actually got noticed after he was trying to click Steve’s photo with an iPhone.
As per the TechFlash:
“As the story goes, it happened when Ballmer was making his big entrance—slapping hands, running around, and generally whooping things up, as is his tradition at these events. That was when he spotted someone at field level, allegedly a member of the Windows group, using an iPhone to take his picture. Ballmer grabbed the Apple device from the employee and made some funny remarks as everyone booed. Then he put it on the ground and pretended to stomp on it, before walking away. The scene was visible on the big screen, so even people in the upper deck could see what was happening. Later, during his presentation on stage, Ballmer referred to the episode again, teasing the person and making it clear that he hadn’t forgotten what [had] happened.”
Compare the attitude to world’s best Entrepreneur: Steve Jobs. Uhh, that’s like comparing Supersonic fighter jet with a 1942 classics. A simple search on youtube, yields awful results.
He was not done, later in his presentation he again referred to the episode. Poor poor employee.
Various tweets from MS employees present in the meeting confirm this. Engadget even have the pic (form the same iPhone) when Ballmer was teasing the employee.
What I don’t understand is how people can call this “in good humour”. This is CHEAP.
Similar posts: AppleInsider, ArsTech
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A few observations.
1. It’s difficult to put Ballmer’s comments about the layoffs in context when he and other members of executive staff are taking tens of millions in bonuses. Sorry, I don’t believe that this is appropriate or justified, given our financial performance over the past year.
2. Was I the only person who was kind of shocked by Seth Myer’s riffing? SitOnMyFacebook? Making fun of old people? Don’t we all have to take annual training to prevent precisely the kind of behavior exhibited onstage by Seth?
3. Stephen Elop’s presentation was HORRIBLE. Dynamics is cool, but the director drilled down way, way, way, way too far. He should have picked a couple common scenarios and left it at that. But, no, he wanted to torture us. Then, Elop piled on by talking about Garage and some kind of random nonsense about collaboration. Seriously, why? What was the point? Why not demo the latest version of Office?
4. Did everyone notice the exodus of people when Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie went onstage? It was striking. I don’t believe that everyone spontaneously needed to take a bathroom break at that moment. The tag team of Ozzie and Mundie nearly put me to sleep. I wish that I had strapped my head to the back of my chair; otherwise, I might have risked whiplash or damage from a sleepy forehead strike.
5. Kevin Turner said that Microsoft was “the most innovative company in the industry”. I beg to differ. Apple is without question the most innovative, they’re doing all the right things (other than having a lower-priced competitor to netbooks), they have developer mindshare, they single-handedly killed our smartphone market share lead, and they’ve unified their entire product line with a common development platform. Meanwhile, we’ve got unbelievable overlap, infighting between divisions, inability to recognize failure, we reward incompetence/mediocrity, we get very low ROI on our R&D spending, etc. That’s not innovation.
6. Bing, Windows Live, Natal, and Windows 7 are notable exceptions. They rock.
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The iPhone incident really says a lot about Mr Ballmer. A true CEO would have wondered why his employee feels compelled to use a competitor’s product. He would have asked for the employee’s email and solicited his feedback on how to make our products better.
Instead, he chose to belittle the offending employee.
Mr. Ballmer doesn’t want intelligent employees capable of critical thinking. What he really wants are henchmen who exhibit blind loyalty.
Somebody should tell Mr. Ballmer that he’s the CEO of a major corporation, not the leader of SPECTRE.
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Did anyone stick around to see the scorecard ballmer showed at the end with the colored arrows?
how did internet explorer earn a sideways arrow? I think someone forgot to rotate it 90 more degrees…
does Sinofsky only focus on Windows and Windows Live? was the internet explorer team too busy optimizing for the zune hd browser?
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(believe it or not, most Microsoft employees (in U.S.) have an iPhone) *** This is not true. From what I saw in Microsoft, this is not true, only about 10% of Microsoftees that i know have iPhones.
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