14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has recently announced that Steve Ballmer would retire from his position as a company CEO within the next 12 months, as soon as the board finds a successor.
While this is terrible news for his fans, most people were delighted to find out that Microsoft would soon get a new leader, especially because Ballmer was considered one of the main reasons for the terrible performance of Windows 8 and the Surface tablet.
Word is that ValueAct Capital, the investing firm that recently purchased a $2 billion (€1.5 billion) stake in Microsoft, was behind Ballmer’s retirement, but the CEO quickly denied all rumors, obviously without providing any other specifics.
Here’s where our readers come into play. Wolfram, an avid Softpedia reader, explained in a comment the real reason why Steve Ballmer has decided to retire.
Read his entire comment below and post your thoughts on this using the box after the jump. Again, kudos to our readers for posting such great comments.
[USERCOMMENT=Wolfram]"'Qui s'excuse, s'accuse' ('He who excuses himself, accuses himself.') [French proverb]
Ballmer Denies Having Been Pushed Out of Microsoft...
In fact, he was pushed out! But not because of his poor performance, as Microsoft CEO; or because of the low rate of adoption of Windows 8.
Here is the REAL reason of its 'resignation':
Mr. Steven Ballmer was caught using a laptop running Linux. It happened in his office, in Redmond. The guy who noticed "the forbidden OS" was Mr. Gates himself.
Mr. Gates, as a Scorpio native, is a very, very suspicious man. He made a secret investigation. And here is what he found out:
1. During the last six years, Mr. Ballmer bought no less than thirteen (13) laptops - all, with various Linux "distros" pre-installed on them. The laptops were abandoned in various places inside MS Headquarters, including in the cleaning lady's lumber room.
2. Mr. Ballmer has ordered a couple of t-shirts - printed with 'offensive' inscriptions like: 'Windows sucks'; 'I hate Windows!'; 'Baseballmer - the Windows breaker'; 'Hasta la vista, Windows Vista'.
3. Mr. Ballmer's nice (and smart!) kids are ALL using only Apple products - starting with iPods and ending with MacBooks. The lovely Mrs. Ballmer personally showed Mr. Gates were her "obsessed" husband is hiding his various Notebooks, Laptops, PCs, Tablets, and Phones, in her home; starting with the basement and ending with the garage.
For example, in his basement, Mister Ballmer keeps a SUN workstation. In his garage he has a Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstation. And in his working room he uses a Sperry UNIVAC mainframe - which runs Cobol. Only for computing his wages, of course.
ALL those above enumerated devices were running Linux, BSDs, Solaris, Chromium OS, and OS/2. Not even one had Windows installed on it!!
Mrs. Ballmer told Mr. Gates that she is decided to take all those "monstrous machines" and throw them on fire! She can no longer bear them.
4. Mr. Ballmer has funded, from its own income, the development of a 'parallel version' of 'Neo-Windows' - a 'revolutionary' OS, running on a 'very powerful' Personal Computer. Here is the prototype's configuration:
- OSs: Windows 1.o & Neo-Windows 10 - Dual Boot-able. (Note: Neo-Windows 10 has almost one billion Lines of Code!). - CPUs: 11 intel XXXeONS - each one with 33 cores (with hyper-threaded Hyper-Threadings); running at 69.99 GHz. - GPUs: NVIDIA Cuadratic Quadro 1VX0 - 8-SLI card -, with 128 GB of GDDR 19 VRAM (for Office applications); and 15 Tesla M9000 cards, with one million cores and 1TB of dedicated video RAM (for Seismic processing, Weather modeling, and Financial computing). - RAM: 1.000 TB - DDR 15. - HDDs: 666, 1 Petabyte drives, each running at 100.000 rpm, in a RAID-ed RAID-16 array. - PSU: 500 Kilo-Watts model - water cooled. - + a 'innovative' Math Co-Processor: this is activated through a 'potter's wheel': the faster you turn it, the faster becomes the Math Co-Processor!!
If you are asking me about the monitor, well, he uses an older, monochrome model, 12-inch diagonal, green-phosphor CRT display, with CGA resolution (40×25 characters).
His system is cooled by a huge fan (I mean really huge!) which has 20 meters in diameter. The hot air is pumped through a plastic tube, up to the roof of his bureau - a place where Microsoft is warming up seagulls, and homeless people, for free...
From what I know, these are the main reasons for Ballmer's dismissal."[/USERCOMMENT]