RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

Freak Show

Freak Show

The New York Times Magazine has a profile of, judging from the photo, a slimmed down Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. Says reporter Steve Bodow:

Ballmer loves this scheduling system. The assemblage of tiny grids is both a necessary practicality of the way he must now go about his job -- with the far-flung Microsoft products and markets, there is simply no way he can be the old-fashioned be-everywhere boss he would otherwise like to be -- and a symbol of the new personality he would like to present, for himself and, in a sense, for the entire company: older, wiser, calmer. Also: transparent. Gone are the days when Microsoft didn't mind being seen as a secretive evil empire.

I think the reporter, who is a staff writer for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," is very naive. Ballmer and Bill G., for that matter, have been very "open" about a lot of things, including their personal schedules (it lets them demonstrate their software -- where else can you find out that the VP of Marketing will get only 12 hours with the CEO each year than in Microsoft Excel?). The writer also talks about how Microsoft fought "the biggest antitrust case in a century," apparently forgetting that Ma Bell was broken up and IBM came within a hair's breadth of the same fate.

The whole article comes off as fluff for anyone who actually spends time around Microsoft. It's still Darwinian, it's still intense, and bold.