Published in APC, March 1996

As befits a billionaire executive vice president of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer is not readily available to humble members of the press. While he squeezed several television interviews into his recent two-day visit to Australia -- part of a high-speed regional review of Microsoft's Asia-Pacific operations -- representatives of the printed word had to make do with a group interview. 24 people, one man, 60 minutes before his flight to New Zealand. Time is key to Ballmer; while local MD Chris Kelliher introduces him, he intently reads a newspaper. He pauses mid press-conference to make a note to send someone an e-mail. We'll keep, but he won't.

Time translates well into money. After Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Ballmer, currently executive vice-president of sales and support, is Microsoft's largest shareholder and its second most senior executive. As well as being responsible for nearly 50% of Microsoft's 20,000-odd workforce he faces the challenge of selling Microsoft's Internet strategy. It's a difficult task which clearly doesn't phase him at all.

Even with a limited exposure to Ballmer, the driving force beneath the corporate sheen soon becomes obvious. It isn't a glorious vision of the future computing can bring us; it's a still more glorious vision of the money that can be made.

His initial presentation of Microsoft's Internet catch-up strategy is straight-down-the-line, press-release perfect, tight on detail and lacking in passion. Every attempt by a journalist to pick out some general vision without the word "Microsoft" in it ends in some equally bland statement. We want a guru; he wants a promotional exercise.

Move the subject to the share market, competition between businesses or earnings projections, though, and Ballmer almost explodes with enthusiasm. "If there's a paradigm shift, we're dead . . . If people want to make HTML the 3270 data stream of the nineties, we're dead, and long live Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison. We're ready to die on that petard." Clearly, Ballmer sees no death impending. "Every minute of every day, we'll ask every Microsoft employee to ask themselves, 'Have I done anything to increase our share of the Internet browser market?' That's the business we're in; driving up our share is incredibly, incredibly important to us." You get the feeling that software merely happens to be the chosen combat zone; it's the battle and the spoils that produce the reward.

Bill Gates describes him as "a man of endless energy, effortlessly social". A good measure of his corporate independence, his supreme self-confidence, is that he is the first Microsoft presenter I have ever seen who has managed to get from start to finish without mentioning Gates once.

Unlike Gates, his personal life is unobtrusive. He wears a wedding ring, but is the only member of Microsoft's five-member Office of the President not to allude to his marital status in his official press biography. He drinks Diet Pepsi, jogs and plays basketball, and is on the executive boards of both his alma maters. This is a man who truly believes that employee stock options would be a major factor in job choice and satisfaction, a man who hasn't been unemployed since he graduated Harvard, first to work at Proctor and Gamble before joining the nascent (and then unincorporated) Microsoft in 1980.

Ballmer is fond of the observation "Microsoft can hold its breath longer than anybody else" when questioned about price wars. That theory doesn't get far when competing with Netscape, but Ballmer is unperturbed. "We certainly view Netscape as a company that we are in serious competition with. I don't think it has to lead to our destruction. It could if we ignore it. We may be ignoring everything else . . . but we're not ignoring Netscape, no way."

Competition is grand in the Ballmer scheme, provided Microsoft wins. He speaks with glee of NT and NetWare "running neck and neck". "I think we have the opportunity to catch Novell sometime within the next six to twelve months," he says, enthusiasm swamping an embedded tiredness. You almost start feeling sorry for Robert Frankenberg.

Even on the touchy subject of the Microsoft Network, Ballmer is unfazed and forward-looking. "If we could rewrite history, we'd probably do things a tad different, but not much. While [MSN was] one time anticipated as what I might call AOL++ or CompuServe++, it's clear in the current environment -- the popularity of the Internet -- trying to build a proprietary interface with a proprietary customer base, with proprietary content and proprietary development tools, is truly a go-nowhere proposition." The new alternative, as Ballmer tells it, is a one-off fee for the MSN as an Internet gateway and guiding hand.

This is a profound admission of failure, yet Ballmer concedes little, unwilling to admit any problems and sure that he knows where the end of the rainbow lies. "In the new model, we may make a lot less total revenue per customer, but we actually get to keep the revenue instead of paying it over [to telcos]. Is it better to make $10 and get to keep it all, or to make $100 and pay $90 out the back end? I'm not sure it matters really." As long as the money is there, somehow, I'm sure Steve will be happy.