Most people in the market think that Microsoft has given up on the smartphone business, but the new Microsoft seems to still have a part of Ballmer.
Editor’s note: This article is from Tencent Technology, compiled Ming Xuan.
After interviewing Ballmer, Microsoft released the company’s first smartphone in three years last week, shocking the entire technology industry.
According to foreign media reports, Microsoft’s former CEO Steve Ballmer (Steve Ballmer) admitted in an interview that the loss of the smart phone strategy in the past, and the high price of Nokia mobile phone business in 2013, let him and Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates, who voted against the deal, was out of sync.
Balmer said with a smile: “The situation at the time was a bit complicated. I certainly had some contradictions with him. Maybe he also had conflicts with me.” He also said that the last time they met was a year ago. The funeral of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. “We met at the age of 18 and 19, and it is no different from young people who secrete too much testosterone. So there is no traditional professional relationship between me and Gates. There may be more storms than you have seen in other situations. .”
After many years, Microsoft’s failure in the smartphone space still irks Ballmer. He believes his strategy is correct, only at the wrong time. “I don’t agree with Microsoft’s view that it should not chase the smartphone business. I don’t think we should make the mistakes we made, but I still believe we have a chance.”
The rise of Google’s free Android system to mobile phone makers has broken the possibility that Microsoft can sell smartphone versions of Windows to manufacturers as it does on PCs. Ballmer said that the only solution is to let Microsoft make its own mobile phone, which is too late. “We have to make a decision to make the hardware really successful. Our business model is wrong. We could have been earlier, but we are late.”
After interviewing Ballmer, Microsoft released the company’s first smartphone in three years last week, shocking the entire technology industry. Most people in the market think that Microsoft has given up on the smartphone business, but the new Microsoft seems to still have a part of Ballmer.
Ballmer has been with Microsoft for 34 years and left Microsoft in 2014, where he served as CEO for 14 years. But just as he is still using the Bing search engine, Microsoft has never really left him.
His office is only a short drive from Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle, which is decorated with Microsoft tablets and large-screen computers running Windows. According to the latest statistics, Ballmer is currently Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder, which also makes his personal net worth reach about 50 billion US dollars, ranked 17th in the Bloomberg global billionaire list.
After five years from Microsoft, the 63-year-old Ballmer did not lose any energy. When he leans to show his point of view, his answer is often closer and closer to shouting.
Bolmer can never retire quietly, but he admits that when he leaves Microsoft, he is not sure what to do. In 1980, Ballmer joined the company as the 30th employee of Microsoft, and Microsoft reached a milestone deal with IBM. Before that, he barely worked anywhere else.
Unlike his predecessor, Gates, who gradually withdrew from Microsoft, Ballmer was a full-time CEO until the last day. “I have always assured myself that when you have a job, you have to do something. So, until the day I finished, I didn’t have the effort or energy to think about what would happen next.”
The most obvious path that Gates chose was charity, and Ballmer said his wife, Connie, also encouraged him to join in charity. But he refused: “I thought at the time that most of the things that needed to be done, the government did it… I said, ‘Oh, we should pay taxes.’”
Even after deducting the tax, Ballmer still has a lot of extra money, he first went to find a team. In 2014, he spent $2 billion to acquire the franchise of the Los Angeles Clippers. Although Ballmer believes in government spending, most of his wealth will eventually flow to charity, especially to improve the social mobility of children, and the rest will be inherited by his three sons.
What is his legacy at Microsoft? In the Balmer era of 14 years, the company’s revenue has tripled and its profits have doubled. Although he has achieved some results, especially the Xbox game console and its now huge cloud computing department, during his tenure, Microsoft’s share price was basically flat, and he was busy with monopoly investigations in Europe and the United States.
Under the leadership of his successor, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s share price has tripled. He focused the company on cloud computing and positioned Microsoft as a partner rather than a competitor by allowing programs like Word and Excel to run on Apple and Android phones.