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After school he began studying mathematics at Harvard University. Ballmer met Bill Gates while he was a student. Even after Gates dropped out of college, the two remained friends. Ballmer completed his studies in 1978 with a doctorate and then worked as a product manager at Procter & Gamble. In 1980 he dropped out of a short-term academic training course at Stanford Business School in Palo Alto, California. In the meantime, Bill Gates and Paul Allen had invited him to work in their software company "Microsoft", which they had founded six years earlier.

After Allen's health-related departure, Ballmer was appointed to the role of Vice President for Sales. There, Ballmer developed into a sales expert who, with great commercial intuition, led the company to success alongside Gates. The breakthrough came with the sale of the MS-DOS operating system to IBM, which brought rapid demand to Microsoft as the PC became more widespread, as the company continued to have the marketing rights for DOS. As Bill Gates' closest colleague, Ballmer accompanied the rise of Microsoft in the following years, whose number of employees grew from 130 (1981) to 1,200 (1986).

The company's successes can be dated to the introduction of Windows, which ended the collaboration with IBM in 1990, to its subsequent improved versions and to the DOS-independent Windows NT. In 1992, Ballmer joined Microsoft's executive committee. He was also a member of the President's Office. Under Ballmer's leadership, Microsoft began to push more strongly into the Internet market in the mid-1990s, where it was initially barely represented. When Bill Gates came under increasing public criticism and the focus of legal investigations because of his company's monopoly position, he withdrew from leading positions.

In 1998, Ballmer was promoted to president of Microsoft and in 2000 to chief executive officer. Since then, as senior corporate manager, Ballmer has devoted himself to technological development in the software sector. The first results in this regard were the new operating systems Windows 2000 and Windows XP, the planned Internet project Microsoft.Net and the office software Office XP from 2001. In 2000, Microsoft had 34,000 employees. In the years that followed, the company's success was repeatedly thwarted by legal challenges, through which US and EU antitrust courts turned against the company's dominant monopoly position.

The criticism is primarily directed at Microsoft's newer software developments, which were mostly designed in such a way that the operating systems are no longer compatible with applications from other manufacturers. In the spring of 2002, the leadership role of CEO Ballmer was further strengthened following the departure of President Rick Belluzzo. In June 2005, Microsoft launched a new offensive: With new software, the company has since been offering e-mail queries via mobile phones. In 2007 he became an honorary citizen of the municipality of Lausen BL in Switzerland.

This was because his father had residency in Lausen.

Steve Ballmer lives with his wife and two children in Redmond (Seattle), the headquarters of Microsoft.

He was the first man in history to become a billionaire from Microsoft
Stock Options. He is the 2nd longest employee at Microsoft and the only
person ahead of him is Bill Gates. He was the 24th employee to join
Microsoft.

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Steve Ballmer

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