Steve Ballmer’s long goodbye: 8 classic moments

Longtime Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley has snagged the last interview with Steve Ballmer before he hits the high, wide, and lonely road to retirement (or whatever) once his days in the big chair are over.

It’s a nice piece — fair, thoughtful, and not at all snarky.

Enough of that. I think Ballmer deserves a final tribute more fitting to the way the man has lived and ruled Microsoft for the last 13 years: loud, obnoxious, and no holds barred.

Picking Steve Ballmer’s greatest moments isn’t easy, because there are so many to choose from. Here are a few of my faves, many of them preserved on video.

Ballmer channels Ron Popeil

If you want to see the essential Ballmer in action, you need to go way back to the early days, when he made the following late-night commercial for Windows 1.0 that was played at a company sales meeting back in the mid 1980s before it found its way to the InterWebs.

Windows 1.0: It slices, it dices, it crashes at least three times an hour. Since then, the only thing that has really changed about Ballmer is that he has less hair.

Ballmer compares Linux to cancer

In an interview with the Chicago Sun Times in May 2001, Ballmer noted the apparent similarities between open source software and life threatening disease. To wit:

Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That’s the way that the license works.

By 2007, though, Ballmer was saying, “I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows.” Apparently cancer isn’t such a bad thing after all.

Ballmer rearranges his office furniture

In November 2004, former Microsoft engineer Mark Lucovsky entered Ballmer’s inner sanctum to give him the bad news: He was leaving to join Google. In a court deposition over Google’s hiring of another former Microsoftie, Lucovsky recounted the event:

At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: “Just tell me it’s not Google.” I told him it was Google.

At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “F****** Eric Schmidt is a f****** pu**y. I’m going to f****** bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f****** kill Google.”

Thereafter, Mr. Ballmer resumed trying to persuade me to stay…. Among other things, Mr. Ballmer told me that “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.”

Granted, the soon-to-be-former CEO has denied violating the civil rights of any inanimate objects. But he’s unlikely to win any Man of the Year awards from the National Association of Furniture Manufacturers.

Ballmer disses the iPhone

Shortly after the iPhone was introduced in 2007, an interviewer asked Ballmer for his take. He laughs and blurts out the following:

$500? Fully subsidized, with a plan? I said that is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine.

There’s some saying about people who laugh last. I can’t remember it exactly. I guess I’ll have to ask Siri.

Ballmer compares Microsoft search to a clumsy toddler

At an earlier Web 2.0 chat in 2007, Ballmer is asked how he, as the parent of Microsoft search, would counsel his less-than-athletic young progeny. His response :

I would say, “Hey, you know, you’re just three years old, and we’ve got you in there playing basketball with the 12 year olds. And you know what? You’re growing up quick, you’re getting better every day, you’ve got all the potential in the world, and it may take you until you’re six or you’re seven or you’re eight or you’re nine or you’re ten, but you’re gonna dunk, you’re gonna dunk on the other guy, some day Johnny.”

Well, Johnny is almost 10, and he still can’t touch the bottom of the net, let alone the rim. But at least he’s tossing up fewer airballs.

Ballmer channels Charlie Sheen

After months of keeping a comparatively low profile, Ballmer emerged to sit down with John Batelle at the Web 2.0 conference in October 2011, where he declared Microsoft was “winning, winning, winning, winning, winning” in the world of cloud apps.

In the same interview he declared that one had to be “a computer scientist” in order to use an Android phone. Last time I checked, Android phones outsold Windows phones by a margin of 22 to 1 in the third quarter. Must be more computer scientists out there than we thought.

Ballmer plays Vista for us

No single product in the Ballmer era has had a more profound, or more negative, impact on his legacy than Windows Vista. So it’s instructive to examine how Ballmer’s take on it has evolved over the years.

September 2005: “Vista has never been delayed.” (By “never,” he meant only by about two years — of course, then it was called Longhorn.)

January 2007: “[Vista] is not only the biggest launch in software history, it’s also the broadest release we’ve ever done…. We’re incredibly excited about the products, we’re incredibly excited about what it means to our customers, to the PC industry, and we really hit the ground running.”

May 2008: “Vista is not a failure and it’s not a mistake.”

May 2010: Vista “was just not executed well.”

September 2013: “The thing I regret most is the, what shall I call it, the loopedy-loo that we did that was sort of Longhorn to Vista.”

Uh, yeah. So do the millions who made the mistake of upgrading from Windows XP to Vista. Though, to be fair, Loopedy-loo would have been a better name for it.

When monkeys dance

There is, of course, no more epochal Ballmer moment than the famous clip from 2000, which later became known as the Steve Ballmer Monkey Dance.

Of course “Developers! Developers! Developers!” also comes close.

Despite the fact that this video — and all its various remixes — have long since passed into Internet Meme Hall of Fame, watching it never gets old for me. How often do you get the chance to watch the CEO of a company act like a total raving lunatic in public?

In all sincerity, I will miss the big galoot.