“Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has started the clock ticking on his retirement from his position as head of the world’s largest software maker,” Paul McDougall reports for InformationWeek.
“Speaking at an event Tuesday in Washington, D.C., Ballmer said he would preside over Microsoft ‘for another nine or 10 years … until my last kid goes away to college,'” McDougall reports.
MacDailyNews Take: To each his own, but If we were already multi-billionaires, we’d have retired long ago in order to spend as much time as possible with our kids before they went away to college, not waiting for our many mansions, vacation homes, and seaside villas to clear out before abandoning the ship we’d run aground. We know college is expensive, but, come on; How much does Ballmer think college costs? Earth to Ballmer: You could buy each of your kids their very own school, you big dummy. We hope Ballmers’ kids never see that quote. They’ve got enough problems: those fargin’ Zunes that dear old dad has foisted upon them, those shitaceous Dells running that Vista mess to which he’s consigned them, the Red Rings of Death, always having to find places to hide their iPods, iPhones, and MacBooks, etc…
McDougall continues, “Ballmer, 52, is married with three children. If he follows through on his plan, Ballmer would retire at about the age of 62 — a not uncommon timeframe for top software executives who’ve made billions of dollars over the life of their careers.”
“Some pundits have called on Ballmer to immediately resign as Microsoft’s CEO in the wake of the poor reception received by the company’s Windows Vista operating system and its bungled negotiations to buy out Internet rival Yahoo,” McDougall reports.
“There is no clear succession plan in place at Microsoft,” McDougall reports. “In January, Microsoft confirmed that Rob Short, corporate VP for Windows Core Technology, had quit. Short, a 19-year Microsoft veteran, led the team responsible for designing, developing, and testing Vista.
“In addition, Microsoft Business Division president Jeff Raikes has said he would retire in September,” McDougall reports. “Microsoft’s mergers and acquisitions chief Bruce Jaffe stepped down at the end of February.”
MacDailyNews Take: Like rats from a sinking ship.
Full article here.
No, don’t leave. It won’t be fun without you.
Leave him there. It’s only going to help the Apple cause…..
Here’s hoping to a NEW baby in the Ballmer household. May he stay at Microsoft forever!
The notion that Ballmer will last more than three more years at Microsoft is plain silly. If there is no Yahoo! acquisition, he’ll be out before 2010 as Microsoft loses the dominance that they need to be profitable with their current strategy. If the Yahoo! bid succeeds, it will take investors a little longer to figure out that it was an expensive failure.
Note to self: Keep Apple stock for at least next 9-10 years.
9 or 10 years. Ballmer can’t figure out how many years until his “last kid” enters college, what a genius. maybe he should have used Excel.
“Speaking at an event Tuesday in Washington, D.C., Ballmer said he would preside over Microsoft ‘for another nine or 10 years … until my last kid goes away to college,'” McDougall reports.
Nine or 10 years!?!?! I think he’s being hopeful M$ will be around for that long – I expect he’d run it into the ground long before then…
…and gone on to open a chain of furniture store selling three-legged chairs (four legged chairs, if you want to pay a yearly upgrade)
Well 2014 and Microsoft is still bigger than ever.
“those shitaceous Dells”
I though that was a short era wedged between Jurassic and Cretaceous.
I’m certain Ballmer can complete his scuttling of Micro$loth in that time frame. Probably the project will be completeded sooner. I assume SJ gave his consent for his sleeper to end his mission in that time frame.
Not to be picky but Balmer has said this several times before. This is not “new” or news really. He has said for a while now that he will stay until his kids graduate.
Also, it’s a bit thin to connect this to any rational guesses as to when MS will become “Balmer-free” because when *he* wants to go is not so important as when the board wants him to go, when the stockholders want him to go or when the market failures say he should go.
I agree with most everyone here so far that he will likely be going *long* before ten years are up.
Nooooooooooooooooooooo. I don’t want him to leave. He needs to stay for another 20 years….. Heck Botox him and he can extend it another 20. MS needs him.
“Speaking at an event Tuesday in Washington, D.C., Ballmer said he would preside over Microsoft ‘for another nine or 10 years’ …”
He may not get the choice.
Microsoft isn’t Zimbabwe, is it? If he screws up badly enough, the shareholders will get rid of him.
In nine or ten years, Ballmer will be size of Mount St. Helens with scales, tentacles and the ability to breathe fire while summoning an army of demons. He’ll be the first national monument to be declared a weapon of mass destruction.
Is that a warning? or what?
Surly he could retire today and STILL put his kid(s) through college. Doesn’t he have at least a Billion dollars in one of his bank accounts.
What a moron.
@Ampar
I want to see Godzilla vs Ballmer. Who will be King Of Monster Island.
You know, this kind of comment makes sense for a middle class guy making $50K to $150K a year. You need to keep working to pay for college. But I imagine that SB earns enough to prepay for his kids college. So is he saying that he doesn’t want to be home with his kids?
What a great dad, eh?
If Balmer’s kids are as stupid as he is, he’ll be working at MS for 15 more years. That would be great for Apple!
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Another decade of Ballmer?!?!
(pinch me!!!)
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To Jubei:
Godzilla’s going to need pull Mothra and Rodan out of retirement first.
Not to mention that some female actually had sex with this guy. That is an image that churns my stomach. What some women won’t do for money. It’s just sad.
“Doesn’t he have at least a Billion dollars in one of his bank accounts.”
It’s not about the money. I think there’s probably some kind of felt parallel between Microsoft and his children for him. He feels the kids are his responsibility till they’re “off hand”. Likewise, he presumably feels Microsoft is his responsibility — or at least that’s the message he wants people to take away. Since the first responsibility runs out in ten years, he feels he might as well shuck off the second then, too, and begin taking life easy … lying in his cage all day munching bananas, or whatever.
Yahoo was the wrong target Carl, ask yourself, if you owned a company would you want Monkey Boy Ballmer to buy it and run it into the ground?
If Ballmer’s plan is to run MS into the ground, he’s made a great start at accomplishing that goal. Personally, I’d have canned his ass for that disaster called Vista.
How about that 2nd disaster called the Zune ? Another reason that his ass should have hit the doorknob on the way out of MS.
Given 9 more years at the helm, he’ll be present for auctioning off of
the office furniture when MS liquidates. I’d advise him to sell his ms stock and buy AAPL.
Hmm, he has children. Not good, not good at all.
“… if you owned a company would you want Monkey Boy Ballmer to buy it and run it into the ground?”
He’s certainly got problems, even if they aren’t all of his making.
This just went up on Slashdot:
“Acer is betting big on Linux, looking to push Tux on many of their upcoming laptops and netbooks. … Acer sees two killer apps with Linux on computers: operation and cost. Its flavour of Linux will boot in 15 seconds compared to minutes for Windows, and the open source operating system can extend battery life from five to seven hours.”
Those are pretty big advantages. As someone posts in the thread, Gimp is still a pretty poor replacement for Photoshop. But then people on this board already know the answer to that one …
This is Ballmer’s problem, isn’t it? On the high end why would anyone buy Windoze when they could get a Mac? At the low end it’s likely that increasingly the OEMs will be thumbing their noses at him and selling Linux.
MS’s other cash-cow is Office, but there are complaints about the Microsoft OOXML-format shenanigans being lodged with ISO even as we speak and OOXML may yet be derailed — or at any rate delayed.
Of course, Ballmer would like search, but he can’t compete with Google. Jeez, he’s so desperate they’re talking of paying people to use MSN search.
Can’t you smell the whiff of decay already? Who knows where MS will be in ten years time? And it’s got to be anyone’s guess whether Ballmer will still be there then.