Steve Ballmer Keeps Up The Relentless Attack

Steve Ballmer doesn’t take no for an answer. He lost $7 billion on the Xbox video-game console before turning a profit. He poured an estimated $7.5 billion over 2 1/2 years into an Internet business that still trails Google in ad sales by a 7-to-1 margin. And he isn’t going to let a February 2007 rebuff by Yahoo! board keep him from buying the company to catch up.

Ballmer, who a year ago hadn’t laid out more than $1.5 billion on an acquisition, upped the ante. Not only did he propose what would be the largest technology takeover, seven times bigger than Microsoft’s record, he also made the first unsolicited bid in company history. Ballmer gave Yahoo’s board less than a day’s notice before going public with his $44.6 billion offer.

“He’s absolutely relentless,” said John Connors, a Washington venture capitalist who was Ballmer’s chief financial officer for five years. “He’s particularly relentless when it comes to getting Microsoft into a better position, and in competing with Google, it’s going to take a bold move.”

Ballmer, 51, credits Microsoft’s successes to persistence and a willingness to make long-term bets, a strategy that sometimes infuriates investors. On a conference call with employees after announcing the offer February 1, Ballmer pledged the same dedication that Microsoft used in developing its Windows and Office programs. “We keep at things,” he said, according to a transcript. “We don’t start and stop.” He declined to comment for this story.

Ballmer doesn’t delay when he decides on a purchase. Tellme Networks CEO Mike McCue held meetings with Ballmer for two days before the Super Bowl professional football championship last year and figured his group would hear back after the game. That Sunday morning, Ballmer, a math major at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called them back in for what he called ’Math Camp,’ helping him plug numbers into a spreadsheet to decide whether the combination would work.

At one point Ballmer grew so excited he started gesturing wildly while holding an open can of soda, spraying McCue and his executives. The enthusiasm won over McCue, a former rival of Ballmer’s at Netscape Communications who spent years convinced Microsoft was the ‘evil empire.’ Yahoo employees may have a similar conversion after ‘some initial trepidation,’ he said.

Ballmer is also taking on Microsoft investors who complain that the Yahoo price will be too high and say it will be hard to integrate companies that have a duplicate set of almost every product in their internet divisions. Microsoft shares had their biggest drop since April 2006, a 66% decline, on February 1 after the bid announcement. Microsoft fell 40 cents to $28.12 at 4 pm New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Source - The Economic Times