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.
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1. Posted by Jake on May 5, 2008 @ 19:58 | Permalink
Gordon has a point. I'm married to a former dot-com executive and we endured the 2001 collapse of that industry in its relative infancy. Nixing the Yahoo deal was the right call for Microsoft (at this time and price). If Ballmer was so fixated on a Yahoo deal with such elusive metrics, perhaps his time has come and gone. This seems like a classic CEO delusion of grandeur about what M&A can accomplish, as a weak substitute for a bona fide business plan.
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