Steve Ballmer Pictures And Video: A Visual Guide To The Microsoft CEO

Why don't people recognize a really rich, important, wacky guy in charge of a huge, modern corporation, and who can be counted on to take a great, weird photograph?

Only one of Microsoft's early honchos had any business experience at all, and while Bill Gates and Paul Allen made the most the fastest, the third guy, Gates' old roommate, made himself useful enough that he stuck around and ultimately became Microsoft's CEO.

Who is this guy? Most readers of the Huffington Post's business vertical already know, surely, that it's Steve Ballmer.

Let's step back into the past, all the way to the debut of Windows 1.0. This was a major step for Microsoft, obviously, but it signaled to consumers that personal computing would get easier, and it signaled to the business world that Microsoft would continue to outmaneuver IBM, which was trying to stem Microsoft's growth with its OS/2, designed to compete with MS-DOS.

Well, still the token businessman, Ballmer was tapped to pitch Windows to consumers and, years later, we thank Microsoft from the bottom of our hearts for this little time capsule:

But for whatever reason, in the transition of power from Gates to Ballmer, a lot of people missed learning the new guy's name and face. It's a tragedy, really, and one close to my heart; as business editor, I am tasked with pairing photos with stories every day, and it saddens me to know that if I put up one of the many gloriously expressive Ballmer photographs from the AP archive, some readers won't know who it is.

So I'm making the effort here and now to present you with the visual guide to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

• • • • • • • • • • • • Ballmer was Gates' roommate at Harvard.

Before we close up, maybe you haven't had enough Ballmer videos. Let's enjoy a few more together, shall we?

Developers, developers

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Comments

[KCFreedom]

Not my original idea, but Ballmer sure looks like the monster from "Young Frankenstein".
Guess he got a better brain.

R.I.P. Peter Boyle