Academic

Ballmer's Future at Microsoft

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

My sense is that it is too early to know how this weekend's events will affect Steve Ballmer's future at Microsoft -- mainly because we don't know whether Microsoft is really done with Yahoo -- but this item from TechCrunch is interesting:

One reading of Ballmer?s obsession with the [Yahoo] deal is that he felt his job was on the line if he didn?t get it done. According to one secondhand account that leaked to us yesterday before the deal was called off, over the past week Ballmer increasingly has been ?yelling and screaming at employees for almost no reason? and is being ?more of a tyrant than usual.? One executive on the Microsoft deal team supposedly made a comment about ?not having to worry about Ballmer anymore? if the Yahoo deal fell through. What the exec didn?t know, though, was that Ballmer was in earshot, and he screamed back that the deal would go through and that he wouldn?t let the board ?crucify? him.

Full post as published by Conglomerate on May 05, 2008 (boomark / email).