Download Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft djvu

Interesting read it if you want earlyish old history. still it is important as part of an epoch

I am enjoying it very much. It is very entertaining and I am reading it now and can't put it down. It is well written and it gives a lot of insight to Steve Balmer. If you are an investor or like good biographies you will enjoy this book.

"Ballmer is vast. Ballmer contains multitudes." This observation in the introduction to Bad Boy Ballmer leads respected investigative journalist Fredric Alan Maxwell to conclude his unauthorized biography/expose of Microsoft head honcho Steven Anthony Ballmer, and truth be told, Microsoft itself, with "Steve Ballmer can remind you of many people." This seems to be his prevailing message along with "Microsoft is bad!"

Granted, Microsoft's misdeeds have been made public and their ruthless corporate strategies painstakingly if not gleefully reported by the media. A lot like Martha. But few companies have created such wealth or had more lasting influence on our lives, and thus Ballmer, who is Microsoft, deserves attention.

While "Monkey Boy" Ballmer, as portrayed by Maxwell, is passionless (he's committed to cancer research and was devastated over the deaths of his beloved parents, Fred and Bea), he self-contradicts, like Walt Whitman, and is a chameleon. Perhaps this is why Maxwell concludes by saying, anticlimactically, "Steve Ballmer can remind you of many people."

In this intricate as the integrated circuit biography, there are nuggets of gold underneath, such as the ironic twist that Fred Ballmer helped prosecute the Nuremburg trials under Microsoft antitrust case judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. Michigan and Seattle history, as well as Jewish identity (Ballmer is Jewish) and its contribution to Ballmer's psychology give the book that touch of individuality that a portrait of one of the highest-paid American employees, and one of its most controversial companies, deserves.

When the name Microsoft is brought up, Bill Gates comes to mind, but few realize how important Steve Ballmer is to Microsoft's success. Ballmer is the current CEO, and he makes things happen at Microsoft. He has passion and truly loves his work. The author writes that the Ballmer's truly extraordinary accomplishment is putting up with Bill Gates because Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen could not. Gates and Ballmer took the company from 30 to 50,000 employees. They make a perfect combination because Gates is the tech guy and Ballmer is the business guy. This book is a great story of a man that has always been in the shadow of Bill Gates.

Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market

Quick read, fun start, disappointing finish. Like most biographies, the editing seems to have fallen off the cliff by about the midpoint. Disappointed that the author kept intersecting himself into the narrative. Got the impression that the author wanted to write an expose on the faults of ballmer, but came away from the experience feeling charmed by the humanity of ballmer. It was an uneven effort, part hagiographic, part negative.

The book does a disservice to those who want to understand Ballmer or Microsoft. To start off, the cover photo of the book I bought appears to have been reversed: Ballmer's wedding ring is on his right hand in the picture, and the inimitable Ballmer sizing-up countenance has the smiling side of his face and the rational side of his face reversed. (Note that the photo I'm describing here differs from the photo shown in the Amazon promo). I mention this, because Maxwell seems to have reversed the reality of Microsoft and Ballmer in a lot of ways throughout the book.
To start off, Maxwell pushes a Nazi leit motif throughout the book. This makes as much sense as comparing opera to dog food. Playing hardball with competitors differs in kind from killing people. Maxwell's comparison is insulting, silly, and more to the point, tone deaf.
Maxwell gets a lot of the historical Microsoft background right from a variety of sources, although misspelling Bellevue repeatedly gnaws.
What's most lacking are any interviews with principals. Where are Maritz, Letwin, Cutler, Silverberg, Murray, Snyder, Glaser, Maples, Yee, Brodie, Simonyi, Klunder (to name a dozen of about a couple of hundred) when you need them? Instead, we get a lot of rehashed stuff from media sources that is either histrionic, hysterical, or hissy. What is presented is largely P.R.-and-news-account factual, but glosses over the reality of the guy, and gets details wrong about various incidents and doesn't corroborate some facts. For example, the balls-in-the-office incident occurred, but it was bouncy balls and not nerf balls. Still, I've got to admit that in many ways the book is well researched, particularly the Detroit years.
Ballmer is a brilliant businessman and a brilliant leader, but he pushes people and his company sometimes to the extreme, like a race car driver who can push his car too hard, or an over-zealous parent who may expect and demand too much from a child. Nevertheless, Ballmer's ability to discipline the company, its people, his direct reports, the business model, Bill, customers, and himself is a huge lesson for anyone who chooses to observe. I was looking for the details of this discipline, and the logic and rationale of the Ballmer mind in Maxwell's account, but never found them.
Ballmer once famously said "Don't use reason, when force will do," which I'm sure Maxwell would've turned into a Nazi screed. The message here isn't that we we should literally kill the opposition, but that when making certain decisions--for example personnel decisions or strategic decisions--if you have the power, exercise it. Don't waste your time futzing around trying to convince people you're right if you're going to make a decision anyway.
Ballmer also once said "I'm not financially driven," which seems at first glance to be one of those "If they say it isn't the money, it's the money," sort of statements. But the point here was that he cares first about the long-term life of the company and not about short-term financial results. This has been a truism that started with Gates from day one.
There's also the implication throughout that Microsoft does lousy software and has gained its position unethically. This is one of those amorphous condemnations--if you've grown up trying to make decent software for millions and millions of people--that tends to grate. Microsoft has spent enormous resources in testing, developing quality-control programs, and developing customer service and feedback sysems, all of them fully backed by Steve Ballmer. Ballmer understood that these "touchy-feely" characteristics could be quanitified and fully incorporated into the business model. Windows and Office have succeeded because of many of these quality initiatives and not in spite of them.
Doing quality software is hard. Microsoft's sales have been hard earned, with many competitors whose companies and products have lost battles and wars to what ultimately became the Microsoft monopoly. Placing bounds on that monopoly is appropriate. Punishing people for their success is sour grapes. Maxwell fails to distinguish between the two.
My main point here would be that Maxwell doesn't bring out that Ballmer's emotions are extreme and extraordinarily useful to the company. They mirror and embody the importance and impact of the actions of an enormous software company. Similarly, his mathematical and business brilliance occurs in real time. He prefers informed action to analysis.
He's a salesman who knows his customers, who knows his numbers, who knows his strategy, who knows his goals, and who knows his principles. His methods are at times raw, brutal, unfiltered, extreme. Some people are scared of him and operate in fear of him. But that's not his intent. His intent is to convey the seriousness, the impact, the passion, and emotion that's inherent in the life of the business.
Occassionally, legal disputes arise from the behaviors of the company. Gates onces said, not quite in these words, "I get sued every day, so I don't sit around all day worrying about getting sued." Microsoft has hundreds of lawyers who vet the thousands of contracts and deals they do every year. Obeying and living within the law is not a trivial thing for a large international company with thousands of employees. Maxwell may argue that Microsoft operates as if its above the law, but the rich history of thousands of mutually beneficial contracts with customers, employees and vendors is significant evidence that there's another side to the Microsoft legal story.
There would be a lot to learn from a study of Steve Ballmer and how he thinks, and why he does what he does, and what his guiding principles are. A lot of people inside and outside could benefit from such a book. Unfortunately, this book ain't it.

The author tries desperately and repeatedly to connect Ballmer with the nazis. The author's obvious dislike of and bias against Steve, and his assumptions that every negative rumor about Ballmer is true, speaks very poorly of his scholarship and any historical value this book might have had.