Background

Ethnicity: Steven Ballmer father was a Swiss immigrant, and his mother was Belarusian Jewish.

Steven Ballmer was born on March 24, 1956, in Detroit, Michigan, the United States, to Beatrice Dworkin and Frederic Henry Ballmer. Ballmer and his sister, Shelly, grew up in a wealthy suburb of Detroit, where their father, a Swiss immigrant, had a midlevel management job at Ford Motor Company.

Education

At Detroit Country Day School, which he attended on a scholarship, Ballmer was perceived as an overachiever. A highly intelligent and enthusiastic student with a talent for math, he earned a 4.0-grade point average, played on the football and track teams, managed the basketball team, and participated in various school clubs. Ballmer graduated with a perfect score of 800 on the mathematical section of the SAT. Ballmer also lived in Brussels from 1964 to 1967, where he attended the International School of Brussels.

He repeated this experience at Harvard University, where he studied applied mathematics, managed the football team, and worked on the Harvard Crimson newspaper and the university literary magazine. While studying there he became friends with Bill Gates, a fellow student, who dropped out in their junior year to start a software company. Although Gates dropped out after his first year at Harvard, Ballmer completed school with a degree in applied math and economics.

After working for two years at consumer products company Procter & Gamble as a product manager, he attended the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. After completing his first year at the business school, Ballmer approached Gates hoping for a summer job at his company. Gates instead asked Ballmer to take a full-time job managing the company's operations. In 1980, Ballmer left the Stanford Graduate School of Business and joined Microsoft.

Career

After completing his education Ballmer joined Procter & Gamble as an assistant product manager, a post he held for two years. Then he joined the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1979. Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 as employee No. 30 after dropping out of Stanford's Master of Business Administration program.

Ballmer's earliest role was as a head recruiter for the fast-growing firm. Despite not being a programmer himself, Ballmer possessed the knack to identify potential talent. Not long after Ballmer was hired, Microsoft signed a contract to create an operating system for IBM's new line of what eventually would be called personal computers. Under a tight deadline, Microsoft licensed a program called QDOS from a small Seattle company, rewrote it, and renamed it MS-DOS.

Gates hired him at a starting salary of $50,000. Ballmer's immediate advice to Gates was to hire 50 to 60 more people (the company at that time had a base of 30 employees.) Gates reacted strongly, claiming that Ballmer was going to "bankrupt the company." In their first years together, Gates and Ballmer often clashed on strategy. They learned to work together and modified their strategy so that they planned for the long term, without losing control. Ballmer undertook such tasks as heading the systems software division, driving the company's marketing efforts, and providing a crucial link with key company customers.

The roles of the major players were set: the co-founders of the company, Gates and his partner Paul Allen, busied themselves with the technical aspects of the company while Ballmer was assigned the responsibility of handling the business. Ballmer reorganized Microsoft’s partnership into a corporate structure in 1981 after the company was incorporated. Accordingly, Gates came to hold 53 percent of the equity, Allen 35 percent, and Ballmer 8 percent. He also developed a stock option plan for the employees.

During the 1980s Ballmer headed the development of operating systems, the core of the company's business. He was quick to realize that the graphical user interface (GUI) introduced by Apple's Macintosh in 1984 was a major step toward making personal computers easier to use and more popular. In addition, it was a potential threat to Microsoft's goal of making MS-DOS the industry standard. To stave off the competition and ensure that developers would continue creating applications for the MS-DOS platform, Microsoft announced Windows, a GUI for MS-DOS, in late 1983.

Windows was heavily promoted during the two years between its announcement and the product's actual release in October 1985, gaining a reputation as vaporware (an industry term for products announced far in advance of any release, which may or may not actually take place). The Windows interface used the visual metaphor of a desktop and file folders, which was originally created at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970s and first brought to market by Apple. Although some aspects of the desktop interface were licensed to Microsoft for use in Windows 1.0, Apple sued Microsoft in 1988, claiming that the "look and feel" of Windows 2.0 infringed its copyright. Apple lost this suit in 1992.

The year 1986 marked an important point in Ballmer’s career. Microsoft became a publically held company and Ballmer became a multimillionaire. The success of the company was primarily driven by the success of the Microsoft Office suite of applications, comprising word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software. Over the next several years he held many important positions in the company and in February 1992, he was made the Executive Vice President, Sales, and Support. In this position, he led the development of the .NET Framework.

In 1998 Ballmer became president of Microsoft, and two years later he became the company’s CEO after Gates stepped down from that position to become chairman. Under Ballmer’s leadership, Microsoft diversified its focus through new products such as the electronic game console system Xbox, first released in 2001, and the Zune family of portable media players introduced in 2006. The Xbox struggled to make consistent profits, however, and the Zune players failed to challenge the market dominance of Apple’s iPod. Ballmer faced another challenge in 2007 when Microsoft’s operating system Vista was greeted with mixed reviews.

Microsoft registered a phenomenal increase in profits during Ballmer’s tenure as CEO. The corporation’s annual revenue surged from $25 billion to $70 billion, while its net income increased 215 percent to $23 billion. In 2009 the company expanded into the search engine market, releasing Bing. Later that year Microsoft brokered a deal with Internet portal site Yahoo! in which Yahoo! would use Bing for its Web site and handle premium advertisements for Microsoft’s Web site.

In 2011 Ballmer helped arrange the $8.5 billion acquisition of the Internet communication company Skype. It was the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history and placed the company in competition with Apple’s video chat service FaceTime and Google’s Internet communication service Voice.

Ballmer announced his retirement in 2013 and stepped down from the position of CEO of Microsoft in February 2014. He stepped down from the company Board of Directors in August 2014. He was succeeded by Satya Nadella in February 2014. Later that year Ballmer purchased the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA.

Achievements

• 

  During Ballmer's tenure, Microsoft grew to almost $80 billion in revenue and was the third most profitable company in the United States. Ballmer oversaw Microsoft at a difficult time, after the first dot-com crash and through efforts to catch Google in search and Apple in mobile phones.
  
  Steve Ballmer was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in Paris by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. As of July 2020, Ballmer has an estimated personal net worth of $71.5 billion, according to Forbes.

Religion

Steve describes himself as an ethnic Jew, not religious, yet he decided later in life to learn more about Judaism as a religion. He studied for a year and a half and had a bar mitzvah in 2015 at Temple B’nai Torah in Bellevue.

Politics

Ballmer has donated to Republican campaigns 10 times and Democratic campaigns five times. On June 4, 2016, Ballmer co-founded the USA Facts Institute with Ballmer Group’s Chief Operating Officer Brandt Vaughan. USAFacts is a non-profit organization and website that offers a non-partisan portrait of the United States population, government finances, and policy impact on society.

Views

Steve Ballmer is the Co-Founder of Ballmer Group, which supports efforts to improve economic mobility for children and families in the United States who are disproportionately likely to remain in poverty. Ballmer Group uses philanthropy and civic activism to help ensure that a person thrives through a healthy birth and stable family, a safe childhood and adolescence, a good education, and a career that can support a family.

In 1994, Ballmer and Bill Gates jointly donated $10 million to Harvard University's computer science department. In 2014, Ballmer again donated money to Harvard University's computer science department to enable it to hire new faculty.

In 2014, Ballmer donated $50 million to the University of Oregon for the purpose of scholarships, public health research and advocacy, and external branding/communications. Ballmer has ramped up his philanthropy since 2014, putting over $2 billion into a donor-advised fund, with a focus on lifting Americans out of poverty.

Quotations: "We want to give people the ability to do what they want, where they want, and when they want on any device connected to the Internet."

"We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we're in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There's no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either."

"Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that."

Personality

Before every big meeting of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer prepared his voice on the song "I say a little prayer for you" of Dionne Warwick. Precaution he must take since his operation of vocal cords, after a conference where he had too shrieked. Both a realist and an optimist with a sense of humor, he balances many different, sometimes conflicting ideas.

Interests

• Writers

  Built to Last by Jim Collins

• Sport & Clubs

  basketball

Connections

Since 1990, Ballmer is married to Connie Snyder. Snyder and her husband are also parents to three sons, Sam, Peter, and Aaron Ballmer.

Father:

Frederic Henry Ballmer

Mother:

Beatrice Dworkin

Spouse:

Connie Snyder

Connie her husband while both were working at Microsoft. She has been involved in charities for a long time.

Sister:

Shelly Ballmer

Friend:

Bill Gates

Gates and Ballmer became friends while attending Harvard in the 70s, studying and watching movies together. Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 as its 30th employee, five years after Gates founded the company with Paul Allen.

References

• Steve Ballmer on Twitter