Bad Boy Ballmer
The Man Who Rules Microsoft
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The unauthorized biography of an immigrant's son whobecame a multibillionaire working for Bill Gates, and probably the highest-paid employee in American history.
In January 2000, Bill Gates gave his vast responsibilities and title of Microsoft CEO to his best friend Steve Ballmer, a man relatively unknown to the public. Based on in-depth study and interviews with classmates and Microsoft insiders, Fredric Alan Maxwell vividly brings to life one of the technology industry's most colorful and controversial figures: Steven Anthony Ballmer. From Ballmer's relatively humble suburban Detroit beginnings (where he and his archrival Scott McNealy went to competing high schools) and his 1974 meeting with Gates in a Harvard dorm, Maxwell richly details how the competition addicts Ballmer and Gates have worked together for the past twenty years to form Microsoft's ego and id. The up-by-the-bootstraps saga reveals both the good boy Ballmer -- the dedicated son, great friend, and supportive schoolmate -- and the bad boy Ballmer -- the ruthless businessman who earned the nickname "The Em-balmer."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen may be the most well-known rulers of the huge computer empire, but this latest offering attempts to show that the company's current CEO, the colorful and bombastic Steve Ballmer, an early Microsoft employee and friend of Gates's from their days at Harvard, is in fact the company's muscle. Unfortunately, this "biography" is little more than a re-hashing of Microsoft's already well-documented ruthless business practices, staggering financial success and endless legal travails. Seattle-based writer and researcher Maxwell, once profiled in the New Yorker for his research skills, does succeed in assembling an array of secondary sources into a concise edition of the Microsoft saga. But as a biography of Ballmer, the book falls woefully short. Readers learn that Ballmer was born in an affluent Detroit suburb, is of Jewish heritage, was a classic overachiever who worked his way into Harvard, dropped out of Stanford Business School and was briefly employed as a brand manager for Procter & Gamble. But beyond a few examples of Ballmer's frighteningly enthusiastic style he once ripped his vocal chords while giving a particularly forceful speech there's very little about Ballmer's true impact on Microsoft, or of Microsoft's impact on Ballmer. In his introduction, Maxwell gushes that Ballmer's is the "incredible story of tremendous ambition, genius, and charisma, of intense drive and merit, of insatiable greed and blatant arrogance." But there is in fact so little Ballmer and so much Microsoft in this book, it is a stretch to call this effort a biography.
