Steve Ballmer
- For another table-dancing, mentally deficient, foul-mouthed, chair-throwing psychopath, see Tom Cruise.
“I have four words for you: 'I. Love. This. COMPANYY! YEEEAAAAAAAAARARRRRARAGH!'”
Steven Anthony "Steve" Ballmer (born March 24, 1956), also known as Grandmaster Microscotch or The Big Anti-Apple, is an American businessman, comedian, and stage performer. He is one of the few people who doesn't need a full Moon to become a howling lunatic, and sticks out his tongue more than Gene Simmons. Replacing Bill Gates, he was the CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014, during the dark days of Windows Vista and faux corporate enthusiasm. He is the current owner of the Los Angeles Clippys in the NBA.
Ballmer was publicly known for his "hyperactive, dazzling stage presence" and "cuddly, lovable personality", but like most corporate executives was hiding something; until recently, his true psychopathic activities were a carefully guarded secret within Microsoft. With the Internet release of a now-infamous YouTube video showing Ballmer berating and intimidating a captive audience of meek and fretful employees, his private behavior became public knowledge. Further investigation revealed still more sinister actions, and eventually led to his unmasking as one of history's most profligate non-developers.
Early life[edit | edit source]
“Maybe my darker instincts are correct about Steve Ballmer. Maybe the knowledge that I deny is the truth... the knowledge that Steve Ballmer is dark and willing to destroy all things. Just what the doctor ordered.”
Ballmer was born in 1956 in Detroit, Michigan, the son of a Swiss immigrant father and Belarusian Jewish mother. Like all American immigrants, Ballmer's father felt the need to make his son work his way up from rags to riches, the hard way. As a result, Little Stevie had to sleep in a doghouse and eat dog food, while the family pitbull dined and slept inside. It is from his father that Ballmer learned one of his trademark phrases, "We will bury you!", and the rest of his broken English came from his mother.
The good education should soon bear fruit. In elementary school, Ballmer barked regularly and galloped on all-fours, driven by an irrepressible inner restlessness and with a wet nose and beady eyes. However, his childhood was not completely free of complications. He was naughty, like many other children are in many ways, but insisted on such peculiar preferences, leading to his father walking him to school on a leash. In the cafeteria, at lunchtime, he also ate from a bowl, and was met with scowls from his classmates. His school days were otherwise rather uneventful, as regularly tends to be the case, and Steve continued to work on his American Dream without emotional traces.
During his studies in the 1970s at California's Stanford University, Ballmer met Bill Gates, and Gates offered Steve a job at his budding Microsoft Corporation. Between the two, a symbiotic relationship developed: Gates was happy to finally have the dog that his parents had always denied him. And Ballmer could finally — after years of painful austerity — again be on a leash, though this time figuratively. Ballmer then dropped out of Stanford and headed for the coffeeshops and heroin of Washington.
Career[edit | edit source]
Microsoft[edit | edit source]
Early success[edit | edit source]
“Only $99 (except in Nebraska)!”
In 1980, Ballmer began his career at the nascent Microsoft Corporation, as a janitor and furniture rearranger. After years of steady-if-unspectacular service, he began to move up within the organization when offered money to bump off (or waste) a Microsoft employee who was taking too many days off. Steve's meteoric rise through the ranks led, by the turn of the millennium, to the position of CEO (Chair Effervescent Officeman), whilst leaving a trail of 130 layoffs: 22 software developers, 15 senior developers, and 93 part-time developers.
Below are things that Steve Ballmer thinks are latent financial time bombs:
- Having an outlook with glass panes in your home or office most likely infringes on our intellectual property.
- The use of words is definitely an undisclosed balance sheet liability.
- Hurling chairs through an office violates our patents.
- Paperclip use does involve some serious IP issues.
The DEVELOPERS! incident[edit | edit source]
“Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! But not Linux developers! Not open-source developers! And especially not Google developers!”
The DEVELOPERS! Incident is probably what made Steve Ballmer famous the world over. The Windows 2000 presentation started with a bang as Ballmer (allegedly high on massive amounts of Snapple) leapt from behind the curtain with his trademark grin and started screaming in agony and pain to "Give it up for me!" Essentially this went on for 67 minutes with Ballmer hopping and moonwalking around the stage while screaming his head off to the sound of claps and cheers from the lobotomized audience.
What happened next is truly almost indescribable. After Ballmer was done jumping and screaming onstage he simply stopped and walked over to the microphone. From this point on Ballmer spent the next 23½ hours repeating the phrase, "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"; he was totally unaware that his profuse sweating had drowned the entire audience of Ballmer Bros. After the presentation was over, Ballmer needed to have his vocal cords surgically replaced, and the doctors instead put in a sonic wave generator that can make your head asplode from 50 paces. He also bragged that he sweated enough to fill the Pacific Ocean three times over.
After the whole ordeal was over, Ballmer retreated to his Microsoft-themed mansion, chugged a six-pack of pink-lemonade Snapple, and got in a few satisfying rounds of his favorite computer game Minesweeper.[1]
Ballmer the Fucking Killer™[edit | edit source]
“There once was a CEO named Steve,
Who threw chairs at employees for reprieve,
He shot lasers from his eyes
To bury other guys,
And he'll Fucking Kill™ you if you don't believe.”
In 2005, Mark Lucovsky, who left Microsoft for Google in 2004, alleged in a sworn statement to a Washington state court that Ballmer became enraged upon hearing that Lucovsky was about to leave Microsoft for Google, picked up The Chair™, and threw it across his office. Ballmer then ranted about how "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a Fucking Pussy™!", and vowed "I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to Fucking Kill™[2] Google." After this, Ballmer pathetically groveled to Lucovsky and begged for him to stay at Microsoft, to no avail.
Investigators suggested a number of indicators why Ballmer would attack Lucovsky. The subject reportedly brought an iPod to the Microsoft office, thought Netscape was way better than Internet Explorer, admitted to searching the Internet with Google on Firefox, dual-booted Linux, and otherwise acted in a non-Borg manner. Many Microsoft partner training programs have added sections to specifically address handling these situations if they suspect that the subject is attempting to goad Ballmer into lethal force. Scientists have theorized that the pheromones secreted by the sweat glands in Ballmer's own elbow pits trigger the Fucking Killing™ instinct in his easily-molded mind.
Below is Ballmer's polite apology letter to Google:
Dear LINUX Eric Schmidt,
I would like to GOOGLE politely apologize for my APPLE aggressive behavior. I fully realize that this LINUX move dealt a serious blow to Microsoft's reputation in the eyes of EUROPEAN UNION software corporations, let alone the opinion of LINUS TORVALDS independent developers.
Destroying PLAYSTATION Google was never my intent. As the Microsoft CEO, I am BELGIUM interested in the continuation of the long-term SUN partnership between Microsoft and Google. Furthermore, it would be an honor for me to PLAYSTATION participate in any OS/2 future Google campaigns, including those that promote the FIREFOX competitors of Microsoft. It should be widespread knowledge that Microsoft ODF respects fair competition and has never engaged in any iPODS attempts to undermine it.
As a token of my ODF goodwill, I hereby resign all claims that BELGIUM leaving Microsoft is a crime and vow to never again ADOBE throw furniture at or otherwise harm my own OPENDOCUMENT colleagues. Microsoft agrees to recognize the iPODS fact that selling copies of free software is iPODS legal, regardless of the method by which these STANDARDS copies were obtained. In respect to LINUS TORVALDS copyright law, Microsoft recognizes the GNU General Public LINUS TORVALDS License and other free licenses as PLAYSTATION valid legal documents.
Yours LINUS TORVALDS sincerely,
Steve Ballmer
Microsoft, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA
The SI unit of death threats is named the "Ballmer" in Steve's honor (1 Ballmer = 1 death threat issued by the patient against another individual). Fittingly, Steve Ballmer is the current holder of the world record for most death threats, with 13.7 MBallmers,[3] followed closely by Steven Sinofsky with 972.4 KBallmers (most of them sent by Steve Ballmer).
The Ballmer Screen of Kill[edit | edit source]
Despite the widely documented early success of The Ballmer, many complications daunted the engineers charged with the task of maintaining and upgrading his aluminum alloy body. The necessity of constantly filling the Snapple intake manifold with increasingly potent and expensive software implantations proved too much financially for Microsoft, not to mention the costly flop of Windows Vista. In 2014, Microsoft declared bankruptcy and all assets and holdings of the company were liquidated (whatever that means).
NBA[edit | edit source]
After Microsoft's liquidation in 2014, Ballmer retired from the computer industry and went on to join the NBA, despite not knowing how to be a baller. In 2015, Ballmer acquired the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion; for all his villainy, Ballmer was at least not a racist, unlike previous team owner Donald Sterling (who didn't want his mixed-race girlfriend "associating with black people"). Ballmer announced he would be renaming the Clippers to the Los Angeles Clippys, in honor of the infamous Microsoft Word paperclip.
Linux[edit | edit source]
“MURTHY: But broadly, what do you worry most about on the project?
BALLMER: You're not asking that and I don't want to answer that. I want to answer this question. The question is, 'How do we do it all?' With developers! Developers! Developers! (*sticks out salivating tongue as a metaphor for profuse sweating*)”
In an attempt to make Linus Torvalds think he likes him, sysadmin Ballmer has contributed to Linux by working on the GNU coreutils. kill -9 is now kill -FUCKING. Just as well, he nearly contributed to systemd™ so that the startup script started the machine up but immediately afterwards shut it down (deleting all startup daemons too) and then rebooted the computer into a Non-Genuine™ version of the Windows Aero desktop based on the unstable-stable branch of KDE. One last such contribution he made is KDE itself, as he wanted to encourage Windows by Microsoft™ purchases by designing a desktop environment for Linux which truly feels as if it is Fucking Killing™ the user, and therefore makes hipsters who are GNOME-sceptic more inclined to ditch Linux for Windows. Unfortunately, the open-source community failed to revert Ballmer's modifications until what seems to be KDE Plasma 5.1.
In an attempt to piss Eric Schmidt off and put Google Doodles out of business, Ballmer starred in a Eunuchs port of the Nintendo game Super Smash Bros. Brawl, as an omnipresent floating head looking for more developers.
Personal life[edit | edit source]
When he is not busy attempting to Fucking Kill™ Google, Ballmer attends daily anger justification classes with his PR agent. He has learned how to deal with his angry outbursts with phrases such as "That's not what I said," "You obviously don't understand what I meant," "This is obviously an attempt by partisan fanatics and the sensationalist media to mar my reputation," "That's a gross exaggeration of what actually took place," "I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life," and "Look! Steve Jobs said 'ass'!"
Ballmer has often stated that when he wakes up in the morning he feels an indescribable joy, the simple joy of being the one and only Steve Ballmer. Ballmer once said, "Sometimes I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction." On a good day you will see him on the Microsoft campus polishing up on his monkey dance. Steve has also been known to dabble in stamp collecting, but most of his 672 stamps have had disturbing images scribbled on them with a Sharpie.
It is known that if exposed to Gloria Estefan music, Steve will run up and down screaming at anyone that tells him to sit down. Ballmer also gets seriously pissed off at the sight of Ruben Studdard, and maintains that the stage isn't big enough for more than one big sweaty fatso. Steve Ballmer does not have an iPod, but he does look himself up on Google. Ballmer does not suffer from attention deficit disorder, but he does suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Naturally, Steve Ballmer will always have a higher score than you on Minesweeper. He has all of the backdoors to it.
- ↑ Fucking Kill™ is a trademark of Steve Ballmer, who will Fucking Kill™ anyone who uses it without permission. Oops.
- ↑ Dr. J. P. Cravitz and Dr. A. L. Wade, The International Journal of Abnormal Psychology, November 2005.
See also[edit | edit source]
- Bill Gates
- Richard M. Stallman – An enemy of Ballmer, for being far too much of a Fucking Prick™ about free software.
- Dr. Evil
- Google – Steve's #1 enemy, first and foremost
- Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs – Two more of Ballmer's enemies, because Ballmer feels that only one Steve should be allowed to run the computer industry. Jobs is now gone.
- Snorlax
- Developers! for a nonsense version of this article (for why, see this section.)
- Ballmer Raids
- Homer Simpson
- Linus Torvalds
- They're coming to take me away