Tech blog

SEATTLE: Steve Ballmer has been chief executive at Microsoft for eight years, on the contrary he is finally acquisition to move into the confound office vacated by Bill Gates, the college friend who brought him to the company nearly three decades ago.

The pressure of leading the world's largest software maker will only escalate in the wake of a bungled attempt to acquire Yahoo, a move that led Yahoo to forge closer ties with Google instead.

Adding fuel to the fire has been a cold reception by customers for the flagship Microsoft product, Windows Vista.

“The pressure is certainly on,” the investment analyst Alan Davis said.

For the first time in his career, the 52-year-old Ballmer, whose public histrionics often overshadow a sharp intellect and a gift on account of numbers, must shoulder the weight of Microsoft's future without Gates. The co-founder stepped down Friday to point of concentration on philanthropy.

Their partnership was forged at Harvard University, where the pair formed an unlikely friendship: Gates, the middle child of a prominent Seattle family, and Ballmer, a Detroit native whose parents did not go to college.

They both lived in a dormitory full of “antisocial math types,” according to Gates. Ballmer, who was outgoing and involved in many social clubs on campus, seemed to be a study in contrast to the aloof Gates, who preferred all-night programming sessions and poker games.

After college, Ballmer went to work at Procter & Gamble, sharing an office with Jeffrey Immelt, who would become chief executive of General Electric and who has said that the two disliked their boss and passed their days playing garbage-can basketball.

Ballmer spent a year at Stanford University business school in the van of Gates persuaded him to very little out and become the first Microsoft business manager. A month after joining, Ballmer found that the company was running behind on orders and was overworking its engineers.

“I decided to quit,” Ballmer said at an employee event to mark Gates's last day at Microsoft. “I said, 'Jeez, I just dropped out of business school to come to a 30-person company as the bookkeeper.”'

Gates persuaded Ballmer to stay on by means of explaining the ambitious vision to place a computer on each desk and in every home.

Microsoft executives talk about Ballmer's ability to digest large chunks of data while carefully probing business proposals for weaknesses in logic or reasoning.

His sales and marketing prowess complemented the technical acumen of Gates as Microsoft grew from a fledgling start-up into a world-beating software company.

Michael Silver, analyst at the research firm Gartner, says that Ballmer's management style is “scary,” but that he does a good job of listening to the needs of his customers.

“Steve's a bright, tough guy and a good marketeer,” said Silver. “His personality can be very impressive.”

Ballmer often grabs headlines with sharply worded jabs at competitors. He formerly called free Linux software “a cancer” and dismissed the Web-search leader Google as “a one-trick pony.”

According to Mary Jo Foley, first cause of “Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era,” Ballmer “was always the foil to Gates.”