Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former chief executive Steve Ballmer were like brothers. Or maybe they were more like the parents of a major technology giant, where both were in charge, but, ultimately, one got more say. And like all brotherhoods or relationships, with the good comes the bad.
Ballmer, who was C.E.O. of the company for 14 years before retiring and buying the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion, opened up about some of the thornier details of their relationship in a new interview with Bloomberg, published Friday.
“We started off as friends, but then really got quite enmeshed around Microsoft,” said Ballmer, who was Gates’s chosen successor. The tension first started building when Ballmer took over as C.E.O. “We had a very miserable year. Bill didn’t know how to work for anybody, and I didn’t know how to manage Bill. I’m not sure I ever learned the latter.”
Ballmer said it continued to devolve as the two disagreed about the direction of the company, with Ballmer looking to focus on hardware, and Gates and the Microsoft board pumping the brakes. “There was a fundamental disagreement about how important it was to be in the hardware business,” Ballmer said. “I would have moved into the hardware business faster and recognized that what we had in the PC, where there was a separation of chips, systems, and software, wasn’t largely gonna reproduce itself in the mobile world.”
All of that has put his relationship with Gates on ice, particularly since he and Gates are both no longer with Microsoft. “We’ve kind of drifted apart,” he said. “He’s got his life and I’ve got mine.”
He had kind words for Satya Nadella, his successor, who stepped in to save the company by expanding Microsoft’s cloud computing and enterprise software business. Since he took over in 2014, Nadella bought LinkedIn for $26 billion; oversaw the successful relaunch of the Surface tablet, racking up $4 billion in sales for the most recent year; and more than doubled revenue from Azure. Over the last three years, the company’s stock price has soared more than 56 percent. Unlike Ballmer, he has also managed to get along with Gates, who decided to return to Microsoft after Nadella’s appointment.
“Now, my successor is taking things there to infinity and beyond,” Ballmer said. “I see the stock price flyin’ sky high. And all you can say is the market certainly agrees with the direction Satya’s taken the company. And I’m super excited about that.”
Not every friendship is meant to last forever. People grow apart. They change, and work complicates things. So, too, does doing interviews in which you share personal details about your relationships and talk about how you drifted apart.
Part of the reason Nadella has been successful is that, having spent 22 years at Microsoft before being named C.E.O., he was able to navigate the famously rocky relationship between Ballmer and Gates, and with each of them individually, much like any clever child of divorce does.
“The thing you’ve got to remember is I grew up in a Microsoft where Bill and Steve were there,” Nadella told Vanity Fair contributing editor Bethany McLean in 2014. “If there’s anything that I know it’s how to get stuff done with Bill around.”
