Backstage With Steve Ballmer

This article first appeared in the Aug. 6, 2012 issue of Forbes magazine.

In early July I interviewed ­Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ­onstage at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference. The venue was Toronto’s Air Canada Centre—home of the Toronto Maple Leafs NHL team and the Raptors NBA team.
Watching Ballmer prepare backstage for the interview was a revelation. He paced the corridors, practicing his lines in a booming stage voice. That big voice is his signature characteristic. Think ESPN basketball announcer Dick Vitale or a public-address announcer at a pro wrestling match: LOUD!
Ballmer’s big voice came in handy 90 minutes later when his lavalier mike failed at the end of his presentation. He boomed on, sans mike, and 16,000 people had no trouble hearing him.
After the interview onstage he and I retreated to the greenroom to continue with a quieter conversation.
This is a big year for you. It’s up there. Microsoft’s founding [in 1975] was the day somebody said software was going to be a real business. The launch of the IBM PC in 1981 was when the notion of the microprocessor as the engine of computing got legitimized. Then the 1995 launch of Windows 95 was big for everybody—big for Microsoft, big for the industry. With Windows 8 we think we’re ushering in a new round, one of mobility, natural user interface and the cloud.
A recent Vanity Fair article said that Microsoft’s last ten years have been a “lost decade.” Ultimately progress is measured through the eyes of our users. We have 1.3 billion people using PCs today. There was a time in the 1990s when we were sure there’d never be 100 million PCs sold a year. This year alone there will be 375 million sold. So, is it a lost decade?
Your stock price is half what it was in 2000. The stock market has always had its own meter. Sometimes it’s ahead of itself, sometimes behind. All Micro­soft can do is focus on creating exciting products. If we deliver them and make more money, that will translate into rewards for our shareholders.
Has Microsoft’s historic success made it vulnerable to disruption? So far we’ve done a pretty good job of avoiding that. We make bold bets on the future, more than most big companies.
It’s frequently said that Microsoft often stumbles on the first two versions of a product, then nails it on the third. I’m not sure if that was a compliment or not, but we are persistent and patient. We made a big bet on Xbox, and I’m glad we did. We made a big bet on Bing, and I’m glad we did. Bing hasn’t delivered full financial return, but man, we have a product that delivers more relevant results than Google and is more differentiated for social networks and for our Facebook partnership than anything else out there. I love what we’re doing with Windows 8, which is a bold bet. We’re reimagining our number one product. That’s cool. But it’s not for the fainthearted. It takes a certain boldness and a certain persistence.
Building your own tablet computer—Surface—seems like a departure. With Surface we wanted to make sure that no stone is left unturned, in terms of really showing Windows 8 in its most innovative form. With Windows 8 you can get a tablet and a PC in a single package, and I think Surface probably proves that as well as anything. Our goal is not to compete with hardware partners. The bulk of our Windows volume is going to come from our hardware partners.
In the 1980s and 1990s you and Bill Gates formed one of the most productive partnerships American industry has seen. Do you miss Gates? Well, yes, I miss him! Bill comes in a day or two a month, just to brainstorm with groups, talk about their plans and ideas for ­Office and so on. He’s on e-mail pretty ­regularly regarding Microsoft matters. And he’s on the board. We don’t have a dependency, though. The leadership team runs the business every day.
Apple and Microsoft have had a great rivalry ever since both were founded in the mid-1970s. Microsoft had the better of it in the 1990s, but now Apple’s on a roll. Apple does amazing work, and Microsoft is doing amazing work. It’s always great when you get a lot of people pushing themselves to do better, be better, invent better and to better serve, better lead customers in new directions.
My 16-year-old son is an Xbox fanatic. He wants to know what you have in the pipeline. Well, of course, I can’t tell you about stuff we haven’t announced, but he’s going to love Halo 4.