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Time For Ballmer To Go?
- TechCrunch, Monday, May 5, 2008 11:02 AM
Microsoft's dramatic decision this weekend to withdraw its offer for Yahoo and not pursue a hostile bid raises a whole host of questions. What happens to Yahoo now? What happens to Microsoft? Or is this just a tactic to drive down the price of Yahoo's shares so that Microsoft can go hostile with a lower offer? And Much has already been said about how Microsoft walking away from the Yahoo merger is a bad thing for Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and his board, but TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld thinks that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer doesn't come out of this looking so hot, either. "If the deal really is dead, does Steve Ballmerneed to start looking for a new job," he asks?
Perhaps. After all, he says that Ballmer was always the driving force behind this deal, while many Microsoft employees were opposed to the idea from the start. Perhaps Ballmer thought he needed to redeem himself in the eyes of Microsoft's board after the Windows Vista disaster. Perhaps Ballmer thought his job was on the line if he didn't get the deal done. He's certainly been testy recently. According to one source, Ballmer has been "yelling and screaming at employees for almost no reason" and is being "more of a tyrant than usual." Another made a comment about "not having to worry about Ballmer anymore" if the Yahoo deal fell through, which Ballmer heard and then screamed back that it would happen and he wouldn't let the board "crucify" him.
