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Ballmer.jpg
Steve Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980, and became Microsoft's 30th employee. He was the first business manager Bill Gates hired. Ballmer became CEO of Microsoft in January of 2000. (AP file photo)

Microsoft's biggest problem is Steve Ballmer, says former exec

February 10, 2013 @ 6:10 pm (Updated: 9:57 am - 2/11/13 )

There are the things we know about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer from YouTube clips of company meetings and product roll-outs.

"He is a very high-strung individual," says a former company executive, pointing to a raucous company meeting with Ballmer in charge, running around the stage, screaming, "I have four words for you. I love this company."

There are the things people who work at Microsoft know.

"He walks the hallways sometimes bouncing a basketball in front of him," a former co-worker says.

Then there are the things employee number 400 at Microsoft knows about the CEO.

"I always got along fine with Steve, but he is not a visionary and he's not the right person to run the company," says Joachim Kempin, a former company senior VP.

Kempin admits his new book Resolve and Fortitude: Microsoft's Secret Power Broker Breaks His Silence is an attempt to "stir things up."

"I still feel a huge bond with Microsoft. I use their products every day. But, it frustrates me that the company basically has lost so many battles - Google search, Microsoft Bing. The iPod and Zune (Microsoft's discontinued digital media player.) Look at the iPhone, Apple's tablet and you go down the list, the Android operating system, Facebook," says Kempin.

"All of that happened over the last 10, 11, 12 years and you have to question whether there is the right team in Microsoft to conquer the new world."

Kempin ran Microsoft's operation in Germany before coming to the U.S. in 1983 and becoming a powerful figure within the company who oversaw all of Microsoft's product sales to PC manufacturers.

"It was an amazing ride," he says. "When I started that group we did around $170 million a year. Fifteen years later we did $9 billion a year. The team really excelled, and there were years when that group pulled in more than half the profits of Microsoft."

In his 20 years with the company, Kempin saw a change in leadership styles.

The early years reminded him of the kind management "you would find in the German military, basically 'take that hill, and I don't need to tell you how to do it, you figure it out.' Later people would say, take that hill and I will tell you how to do it, which gives less freedom in your action and you feel less empowered."

Wearing a suit and tennis shoes as he described his life now as being an enjoyable one living in West Seattle, but still thinking of Microsoft and wishing the company would "get on track."

Some would argue, Microsoft doesn't need advice from someone who left the company a decade ago. They're doing fine.

For Microsoft's most recent quarter, the company reported revenues on Jan. 24, 2013 totaling $21.5 billion. It posted earnings per share of 76 cents for the December quarter, beating Wall Street's expectations by 1 cent. That quarter included the launch of key Microsoft products Windows 8 and the Surface tablet.

"When you just look at revenue and profit Ballmer is doing a good job," says Kempin. "By every other measure he is taking the company in the wrong direction."

There is plenty of talent within Microsoft, Kempin says, but Ballmer has a way of "purposefully ousting any executives with potential to wrest him from the CEO seat, "which he has occupied since 2000.

Many of Microsoft's top tier managers have left the company during Ballmer's time as CEO.

Richard Belluzzo, credited with launching the Xbox game console, rose to chief operating officer at Microsoft but left after only 14 months in that job. More recently Windows unit Chief Steven Sinofsky left the company last year. Office chief Stephen Elop went to Nokia. Ray Ozzie, the software guru Gates designated as Microsoft's big-picture thinker, left to start his own project.

Microsoft representatives declined comment about Ballmer, and Kempin's book.

Kempin adds he "always got along great with Steve" and he's "surprised" Ballmer hasn't contacted him since the book came out.

Beyond changing the CEO, Kempin would like to see someone else as a visionary for the company and he suggests turning employees free to be more creative.

"The company spends around $10 billion in research and development every year, but the ideas don't make it to the market," says Kempin. "There's plenty of good stuff in that company, give the people some seed money and let them go."

By LINDA THOMAS

More from Linda Thomas

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Comments (17)


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  • Burn_Notice wrote...
    Wait..... Steve Ballmer runs Microsoft?
    February 11, 2013 11:07 am
    Sheesh and all this time I thought Peter Boyle was running the MSOFT Mothership during seasonal breaks of "Everyone Loves Redmond"...err Raymond. Oops.
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  • allentime2k wrote...
    "Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA"
    February 11, 2013 12:44 pm
    "when the sales guys run the company, the product guys don't matter much....and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft." -Steve Jobs. Microsoft has never been about innovation or vision. Even Billg was a great businessman - not a product man or a true visionary. Microsoft's model has always been licensing, copying and aquiring the innovations of others - although their PR team desperately tries to position and brand the company as innovative and visionary-reality proves otherwise.
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  • Burn_Notice wrote...
    Very True!
    February 11, 2013 2:09 pm
    Every great Microsoft software or technology was the creation of some other company. Microsoft best asset was their foresight to buy out the competition. They bought it for pennies on the dollar after devaluing competitive products by giving away and albeit inferior product for free or very little cost and thus killing off their competitors. MS-DOS, EXCEL, WORD, POWERPOINT, ACCESS, even large technologies of the beloved Windows were created outside of Microsoft and then BOUGHT by Microsoft for a song. PowerPoint killed all other presentation software and Outlook did the same to all Personal Information Manager software when Microsoft gave away the product for free in their Office Product line. It is hard to compete against FREE.

    I agree with the above post. Microsoft is far from an innovator more like a consolidator.

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  • mpgunner wrote...
    So, Ballmer gives confidence like????
    February 11, 2013 10:59 pm
    Jobs? Is Ballmer an innovator? In 2013, what is MS going to do? Google is looking pretty amazing and creative.
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  • timori1 wrote...
    computer cronyism
    February 11, 2013 11:59 pm
    The problem with Balmer (and many other companies) is that the heads are corrupted by serving different and more influential masters than customers, creators, and innovators (namely stock holders, entertainment industry, and now even government). As a consequence, users are aggressively pushed into a marketing scam of constantly updating to poorer and often more crippled products, and for which older and more stable systems but no longer supported. This should all be illegal under basic fairness principles. Some examples of how ridiculously and contemptuously anti-consumer these companies are are the use of tilt bits which severely cripples the OS but makes the RIAA happy by protecting content, ridiculously poor search functions so consumers cannot even find files on their own system, and scare tactics/security updates that allow M$ and others to monitor our computers without our consent under the Patriot Act. Now we are even being told PC's are obsolete, and that we need to trust our entire system and contents into the hands of the cloud. Its all a bid for control however, which if the public is naiive enough to relinquish, will be a disaster for a civilization which heavily depends upon computer power to function. The heads of these companies realize how cheap computing is, so if they have ultimate control, they can make (or rather steal) and lot of money by overcharging, leasing rather than selling, etc, just like ATT did before cell phones and the internet. Firing Balmer would be useless because the entire culture is corrupted, and he would probably be replaced by someone worse. We need rather legistlation which encourages innovation and prevents changes like M$ have already introduced into their corrupted products. Their crippling of systems has done and will continue to do real damage to productivity. Balmer and others like him are more interested in corporate welfare than innovation. If they get their way, they will be selling us the sky, selling our private information to third parties and the government, and crippling and obfuscating non-transparent systems beyond hope of anything innovative to be created from them. We are in desperate need of antitrust legistlation rather to prevent the damage that has been wreaked on our computers so far. Lets hope it happens before we are further thrust into a new dark ages of computer cronyism and public exploitation.
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  • Snout wrote...
    Maybe some sugar
    February 12, 2013 1:24 am
    for those sour grapes?
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