Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft Corp bid goodbye at his last annual company meeting of the organization, amongst thousands of employees who came in from Microsoft’s east side campus of Lake Washington and around 25,000 of them connected through Live Webcast.
Ballmer farewell was in style, with the same track which was played at the company’s first employee meeting, back in the year 1983, Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin” and this was followed by a standing ovation from everyone present there with “Time of my life” playing in the background. A very moved Ballmer repeated his quote from meeting 30 years back, “We have unbelievable potential in front of us, we have an unbelievable destiny”. He further quoted, “”Only our company and a handful of others are poised to write the future. We’re going to think big, we’re going to bet big”.
Ballmer relooked at his life’s journey, sharing how in 1980, he dropped out of Stanford’s Business School and told his parents that he wanted to join Microsoft, when his father questioned him what a PC was. He also talked about his plans of transforming the company by focusing on developing innovative products and offering varied solutions which would make Microsoft “fundamentally more powerful”. While touching the subject of rivals, Ballmer said that Apple is all about coming up with devices which are “fashionable”, Amazon knows only to sell “cheap” and refereed Google as “knowing more”, but Microsoft is a company which is all about “doing more”. We couldn’t agree more with your there, Steve!
While addressing the employees, he almost choked on his words “I believe in you, I believe in the mission. We’ve been a great company for years. We will be a great company for many more years”.
See, what Sean Nolan of “Family Health Guy has to say about Steve Ballmer here.