you went to Harvard, and then when you're in Harvard, uh, you have a classmate that's down the hall named Bill Gates. It was interesting because the guy who introduced us says, You guys are both kind of weird energetic guys. You should meet, uh, so we did. And the time we met was just about the time he was starting Microsoft, plus or minus a month, I want to say. And that clearly was more than, This is just going to be another random guy. I mean, a guy starting his own company. It was his second company. He had done one in High School, uh, he was clearly a special guy. And I got to know him pretty well. You graduated Magna Cum Laude, and then you decided to go to Proctor and Gamble. I did Proctor and Gamble. Now, very often, Proctor and Gamble gets a lot of very talented people in their young training programs. Did anybody famous work alongside you? Well, funny you should mention that. A number of people did, uh, when I was there. Scott Cook, who started

in it was there Jeff IML who ran GE. He and I worked together on Duncan Hine's brownie blueberry muffin and moist and easy snack cake mix. We were the dynamic drivers of brownie mix sales. Go to Stanford and you're going to get your MBA and then you decide to leave and drop out of Stanford to go to this tiny startup in Seattle area called Microsoft. What did your father say about that? Oh he he he was apoplectic in a way. I mean he didn't try to stop me but I remember when I called home and my dad said what what the heck is software. Um he'd actually been involved installing Wang systems old word processors but what software and then my mom said why would a person ever need a computer. Now today you'd say that's crazy but it wasn't crazy in 1980. But they said okay okay we hear you we hear you uh if it doesn't work out you go back to business school right. I said right and then never came back so you

The summer ends, and you stay there, and you're the 30th employee of Microsoft, and ultimately you become, I guess, next to Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the biggest shareholder. What were the jobs you had as you worked your way up? Well, I started out as assistant to the president. I was Bill's assistant, basically Chief cook and bottle washer. So, I set up the accounting, which there was some, but we needed to professionalize. I was the HR department. I hired everybody. When IBM came the first time about their personal computer, I became the kind of salesman for IBM. Why? I knew how to wear a tie. I was about the only guy around the place, and Bill said, Well, you have a tie and a suit. Why did you come to the meeting? So, when did you realize this isn't a little startup that's going to be a nice little company in one part of the software world? It's going to be a dominant company in the world. By the late '80s, I would say for sure, I knew the company's going to be something I

remember when Andy Grove, who ran Intel, said someday there'll be a hundred million computers a year sold. Bill and I looked at each other and said he's nuts. There's never going to be 100 million. And these days there's 300 million plus computers sold a year. And your father and mother, what did they say at this point? Yeah, and they got comfortable when we went public. They knew I wasn't going to be broke. Bill actually offered me a decent starting salary. It was either 40 or 50 grand. I can't remember which. Looked good in that day and age. So they knew that was a good choice. Now my dad still had a little skepticism. There were all these people and there was nothing physical you could get your... What do all these people do? There's no product. What did they all do? So that was a confusing point. I mean, he's a smart guy, but he'd always ask me that every time we went through the campus. So

In the year 2000, you became the CEO. Bill decided to sort of retire, became the chief software architect, but no longer CEO. So you now can run the place. Were you surprised that Bill decided to retire? I was surprised. I was surprised. Bill had asked me to be president in 1998, and I'd said fine, and that was another number two position, and I was fine with that. And then Bill came to me and said, Hey, will you be CEO? And I asked him, Do you really want me to be CEO, or do you really kind of want me to be a figurehead? Just tell me. He says, No, I really want you to be CEO. And I would say, Was I CEO? Well, because Bill stayed working every day till about 2008, and I would say, I didn't feel like a total CEO probably until Bill wasn't working there every day in 2008, because there was a lot of shared responsibility. Talk about some of the things that happened while you were

CEO, you moved into video gaming, I guess Xbox. Yeah, we were saying what's the path for software, if you will, into the living room, and the only path that was really clear at the time was the video gaming systems. There was no way to be in the video game business and not build the hardware. We had been in the hardware business in a small way. We'd had our Mouse product, a few other products along the way, and frankly, I think we probably in many ways should have done more Hardware sooner. Well, you made another investment at the time that was actually criticized. It was an investment in a company called Facebook. I think you invested about $300 million or so. And why did you do that, and did you regret not trying to buy the whole company? I did try to buy the whole thing. Zuckerberg came up to Seattle. We met down there. I put a concrete Financial offer on the table, but it's a little Ross Perot tried to buy Microsoft from Bill Gates in like '79, and Bill said no. Founders really have a

lot of love and passion around their stuff, and even though Facebook was tiny, I think it was 2009, and I offered, I know, 20-plus billion dollars, something like that, and Mark had absolutely no interest. Wow, okay. So, a couple of other businesses, they think the smartphone business that Apple is now more or less perfected, at least in the United States. You were skeptical that that would be a great business. Do you think Microsoft could have gotten into that business earlier? Yes, we could have and should have. We should have done, in my opinion, we should have gotten in the hardware business, and that's my... I blew that one. One of the other things that happened during this period of time when you were the CEO was Cloud Computing. Your own neighbor, Amazon, built this big business under your own nose. Were you surprised that they had become so big in Cloud? They've had more success than I anticipated. I didn't sell them short, but they have had more success. Here's why I'm not saying I was completely

dubious. It is very hard sometimes for big companies to do something very different. I call it doing a second trick. At the time, I would call Amazon a one-trick pony. It was doing this retail stuff. It was doing an awesome job. But to do a second trick, you don't get a lot of companies who do that. That doesn't mean Microsoft's out of the game. You know, we started this thing called Azure and Office 365, and my successor, Satya, has taken the thing to very much new heights. And right before you left, you tried to buy, and you did ultimately after you left, I think they completed the Nokia acquisition. And that was an effort to get into the smartphones. That didn't work out. Why do you think it didn't work out? Uh, I think out. I think there were probably two reasons. Number one, uh, maybe it was late. And number two, after I left, while the company went ahead and bought it, um, I don't think there was the same level of enthusiasm at the board level and management level for scaling up and

investing there okay so you ultimately decided to leave and your successor uh is SAA Nadella. Were you surprised when he was selected? No, no. He was the recommendation that I made. Uh, he was the recommendation that Bill Gates made. I thought he was a candidate to replace me, which is why we moved him into his last job, which was running one of the big divisions. And I was glad he got the job because he's done a great job. Now, when you were uh there, you dramatically increased sales uh and earnings were dramatically higher. The stock price didn't go up. Uh, why do you think there wasn't a correlation between the stock price and earnings and revenue? I think probably two factors. Number one, I took over uh at least at the worst time if you want your stock price to go up. I came right at the heart of the dot-com bubble. Uh, everything was Skyhigh. Uh, the bubble breaks and oh by the way, judge orders the breakup of Microsoft. That happens I know within several months of me taking

over and Things fall down, and then you have to build back up. That's number one. By the end of my tenure, I had a certain kind of reputation with Wall Street, and not that favorable. Not about my performance, but certainly people. Hey, the guy's a grinder. He's going to keep doing this thing. But are all these new things going to actually break through profit-wise? And number two, I think mostly people on Wall Street would have said I over-invested individual shareholder of Microsoft. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. So how come you didn't sell more shares? Because Bill Gates and Paul Allen have sold a large part of their shares. Well, when I was CEO, I just didn't think it was right. Somehow, it didn't feel right to me. But I still, you know, I'm a loyal, loyal dude. I still drive Fords. My dad worked at Ford, and I still own Microsoft [Music] stock. Come on, get up, get developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. Uh, you are well known for uh very visible and vocal

expressions of your thoughts. Is that a style you consciously adopted, or it just happened that way? I was a very, very shy kid, very shy kid. I was a shy kid when I got to Harvard, and then I built my confidence as I built it because I was doing things and being successful. I was shy when I got to business school, when I got to Proctor and Gamble. First day I started, guy who W up my roommate, he said it was like this: Hi, my name's Steve Balmer, my palms sweaty because I'm so nervous, um, so shy kid. And then I got better and better, and I developed some confidence in public speaking, and it turns out I have something of a knack. And part of that is getting in front of your troops and pumping them up and telling a story. And um, I will do basketball. It's a weird environment because, of course, I don't have a lot of credibility. I'm an owner, for God's sakes. I'm not an expert, but you know, at the

end of the day, at least I can get into the game and be verbal and vocal. Okay, so if you look back at your extraordinary career at Microsoft and now what you're doing, any regrets, or you're happy with everything the way it worked out? I'm pretty happy with the way things worked out. I mean, I can go back, and there's decisions I'd make differently if I was at Microsoft, but you know, if I look at the span of work, we went from a company that had two and a half million in sales and 30 people to a company that had 100,000 people and 80 billion, roughly, of sales and lots of profit. I can feel good about that, even though there were mistakes. I started out the process with a lot of friends. I still have mostly the same friends as I did, which I feel very good about that. I'm in a very good place in my life now, probably, you know, in a way, the best ever, ever, although I wouldn't trade out anything I did in the past at

least at this age. I like being a little less busy. That's good for me. Um, I'm pretty pleased. So, as a leader, what would you say is the most important characteristic to be a good leader? Uh, commitment. You really have to have your head in the game and be committed to be a good leader. There's two parts of leadership. One is leading people, and that's about commitment and people understanding you have commitment. The other part of leadership, which doesn't get talked about much, is you have to be a leader of ideas. The worst thing you can do, both for your people in general, is to say, Let's go, and you point that way, and the truth is you should have gone that way. So, leaders have to be leaders of ideas. The ideas compel the people, but then the ideas have to be right, and you have to stay committed. If 20 years from today or 25 years from today, you're looking back on your life, what would you want people to say was your legacy, what you contributed to our country? Well, you asked a very specific question.

what would I what did I contribute to our country number one hey we democratized computing and putting that kind of power and capability for people to to thrive to investigate to be smarter to to create more. I feel immense pride about that. I put that number one. I think that was not only something that affected this country but the world. I whatever we do fil pH anthropically. I hope makes a big big difference. It's hard to make a bigger difference than being involved in the popularization of computing and the five NBA championships you will have won. That will be important as well right yeah but that's kind of a zero some game when we win them. Somebody else doesn't win them so it's a little harder to say it's a broad contribution but in La that would be a big contribution.

스티브 발머 : MS주식을 왜 팔아???

스티브 발머 : MS주식을 왜 팔아???