Say what you will about Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, but the truth is that the CEO managed to provide historical performances on stage along his 28 years with Microsoft. The continuous object of ridicule and mockery, some of those performances are undoubtedly part of popular culture, and at Microsoft Tech Ed 2008, Chairman Bill Gates and Microsoft's leader of the robotics group, Tandy Trower, offered yet another Ballmer-moment introducing the Ballmer-bot.

As you can see in the video fragment embedded at the bottom of this article, the Ballmer-bot manages a pretty accurate representation of the actual CEO. Ballmer's iconic chant: "developers, developers, developers!" was replicated to perfection by the U-Bot, a project of Patrick Deegan from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"Since Steve couldn't make it with us today, we thought we'd provide a good substitute," Trower states in the video just as U-Bot and Deegan come out on stage. The U-bot, dubbed for the purposes of the presentation the Ballmer-bot, and equipped with a screen featuring a picture of the CEO, went on to offer a replica of Ballmer's historical burst of developer love. Sure, the U-bot makes a rather slim down and less agile copy of the real, flesh and bone Steve Ballmer, but it more than makes up for these aspects with battery life and hard disk space and... excitement, of course.

"Good; we've got the Ballmer-bot pretty excited here. It's an amazing looking robot. It's just balancing itself, and fantastic," Gates could not help but comment. Deegan simply took it a little further and made a reference related to a recent incident at a Hungarian University where Steve Ballmer was egged by an angry participant.

"Yeah, what you see here is the latest in robotics technology. The Ballmer-bot features a dynamically stable mobile base, a rotating torso, and two dexterous arms. This makes it so that it's even able to throw eggs," Deegan stated.

The Ballmer-bot is powered entirely by the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, a thing that Gates and Ballmer have to be proud of. However, at Tech Ed 2008, no protesters from the audience felt compelled to thrust eggs at the Ballmer-bot in order to test whether it reacts the same as the real Ballmer.

"The robot also includes a 2 gigahertz dual-core Intel processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, a six-gig hard drive, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and an LCD touch screen. Altogether this gives Ballmer-bot almost unlimited capabilities," Deegan said.