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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!

Jun 05, 08 - 12:25 pm Comment from: wannabe

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.

Jun 05, 08 - 12:28 pm Comment from: Wealthy Industrialite

Note to self: Keep Apple stock for at least next 9-10 years.

Jun 05, 08 - 12:29 pm Comment from: loopy_nj

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)

Jun 05, 08 - 12:31 pm Comment from: Ampar

"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.

Jun 05, 08 - 12:34 pm Comment from: Jubei

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.

Jun 05, 08 - 12:40 pm Comment from: Ampar

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.

Jun 05, 08 - 12:43 pm Comment from: Jubei

@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!

Jun 05, 08 - 12:47 pm Comment from: ChrissyOne

Another decade of Ballmer?!?!

(pinch me!!!)

Jun 05, 08 - 12:48 pm Comment from: Ampar

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.

Jun 05, 08 - 12:51 pm Comment from: Demon

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.

Jun 05, 08 - 01:09 pm Comment from: Brau

Hmm. I thought Balmer's wife was Jane Goodall.

Perhaps Steve Ballmer secretly has tens of thousands of Microsoft put options. That would explain a lot.

Yay! 10 more years of Vista-like Windows. This is the best news for Mac and linux fans.

To Ballmer: Wish you the best. May MS board of directors never fire you.

Jun 05, 08 - 01:38 pm Comment from: Macromancer

in 9-10 years Apple's market cap will have exceeded MS's.

Jun 05, 08 - 01:42 pm Comment from: ken1w

> 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...

If he's there for another 10 years, Microsoft will not be the "world's largest software maker."

PJ's top ten hints that your filty rich dad has no intrest in spending time with you:

#3 He will quit his job to be able to spend more time at home as soon as you head out the door to college.

Jun 05, 08 - 01:45 pm Comment from: Metryq

"... led the team responsible for designing, developing, and testing Vista."

No wonder Vista came up Short.

So, about the time Windows 7 comes out.

Here's hoping that his kid gets left back a few times. Long live Monkey Boy!

Jun 05, 08 - 02:11 pm Comment from: Macintosh

"until my last kid goes away to college"

Ha ha... That's awesome. So he's saying: "I'll stay home once my kids are gone, until then... I'm staying at work, or going on business trips".

The really frightening thing about this article is that somehow he was actually permitted to breed.

If he retires now he would have to spend more time with his kids. I guess he doesn't want that.

BALLMER BREAKFAST TABLE - DAY

DAD: Who said, sit down!

FAMILY: Uh..?

DAD: Give it up for me!!!! Aaaaaagh!

YOUNGEST: Jeez, when's this guy leaving?

2nd YOUNGEST: Mom, you had sex with this guy? I have to kill myself.

DAD: More bacon! I! Love! This! Company! Yaaaaa..Aaaaaagh!

OLDEST: Dad. Didn't you mean family?

DAD: I know what I meant, smartmouth!

Jun 05, 08 - 02:38 pm Comment from: Predrag

Macromancer said:

"...in 9-10 years Apple's market cap will have exceeded MS's."

It will happen much sooner than that. Currently, Microsoft's market cap is barely 1.6 x larger than Apple. We can all agree that there is pretty much nowhere for Microsoft to grow, other than following the entire stock market / tech sector, etc.

Meanwhile, Apple's profits in the last quarter were around $1B (about $5 per share). Profits from single iPhone sold come to about $200. If Apple were to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008 (at this point, rather conservative estimate), that would add $2B to the bottom line, other things being equal. With P/E staying in the neighbourhood of 30 (current forward P/E is 29), this would require Apple to ramp it up to about 20 million iPhones per year in order to attain share price of about $290 necessary to eclipse MS market cap. This all assuming all other sales (Macs, iPods, etc) remain flat.

We don't know how the stock market is going to behave once there is a change in the White House (whichever it may be, although it looks like the US is readying itself for their first black president) but if external factors remain calm, Apple should eclipse Microsoft in about a year or two; perhaps Christmas 09.

I'm sure they'll still have Balmer around to mark that occasion.

Jun 05, 08 - 02:41 pm Comment from: Maginary

If I were placed at the head of Microsoft today (which I would accept because I could use a few billion dollars in the ol' coffers) I would immediately alert hardware manufacturers that we were on a path to end OS development and that they should begin creating their own OS's, just like Apple. I would also abruptly end any and all hardware development, as that is not what MicroSOFT's core competency is or should be in. That's not to say we wouldn't continue an R&D;shop that we could then generate prototypes for other hardware companies to utilize, kind of like the Kindle. Man, how did that get past the marketing department? I would focus on developing applications spanning all platforms; a market that would grow up from regaining their independence from Winsucks. For example, I would immediately devote teams to developing Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc. Office varieties. I would focus on games actually utilizing OpenGL and other open source frameworks. Business utilities, personal management tools, etc. all with the goal of turning M$ from a greedy, belligerent, evil company, to one that plays nicely with others but is still profitable and actually fosters an environment of growing knowledge and innovation, not suppressing it. Why have they been so inane to NOT develop applications for other platforms in the past? Don't give me the horseshit Mac Office response. It's crap and I don't use it. Apple has had to fill in the gaps that MS has created, and while they've done an excellent job, I'm sure they'd rather have someone else affording development costs on large projects.

Users and hardware vendors need to free themselves from the tyranny of a vertical Microsoft and embrace a market where competition breeds innovation.
------------------------------------------End of transmission

Jun 05, 08 - 03:25 pm Comment from: Gandalf

Mother Nature doesn't get it right every time.

It is wicked of me but I hope she gets it wrong again.

don't forget to turn out the lights when you leave steve...

@Drunk Cheney. I think Billion should stay. I bet he has his money is in one of the banks that run XP/Vista the system will crash and he will loose all his money. He will need to build it back up wont he?

Jun 05, 08 - 04:20 pm Comment from: TexasAg03

Ballmer is a fargin greedy bastage!

Jun 05, 08 - 04:36 pm Comment from: Kit-N

That man has THREE kids?!?!

Geez, what kind of woman would want to…

Oh, wait. Maybe it's the tongue action.

Jun 05, 08 - 04:37 pm Comment from: Kit-N

No, no, I can't. I have to go back to "What kind of woman would want to…

Jun 05, 08 - 04:45 pm Comment from: Metryq

@ Streeble,
"don't forget to turn out the lights when you leave steve..."

I think the lights are already out at Microsoft. They're all bumbling around in the dark. The usual expression is "the light's on, but nobody's home." This is just the opposite. To quote astronaut Taylor, "It's a madhouse!"

Jun 05, 08 - 04:54 pm Comment from: Petey

Good riddance.

Turn the light off when you leave you sad fsck.

"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"

Retirement? You guys don't get it. It was his kids that insisted on this... not Balmer.

Of course Ballmer will be out. MS won't survive 9-10 years under his "leadership".


This is esp. so as Gates fully retires and gives Ballmer COMPLETE control of MS (OMG, to think Ballmer has been restrained so far...). Check out today's Wall Street Journal cover story of these guys, 6/5/08.

MW: must