Ballmer exploded. He threw a chair against the wall. “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy!” Ballmer yelled, according to the court document. “I’m going to fucking bury that guy! I have done it before and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.”
It was November 11, 2004, according to a sworn statement submitted by a former Microsoft engineer and quoted by Kurt Eichenwald in Vanity Fair‘s comprehensive report on how Microsoft lost its mojo and the role Steve Ballmer had to play in this.
If you think about it, the true irony of this episode is not only that Microsoft has since become irrelevant, while Apple, Facebook and Google got the lead roles, but that nowadays Google is doing a very good job at killing itself by becoming the new Microsoft on the block: either designing “software by committee”, to use the phrase of another former Microsoft employee, or plainly stealing it after the more innovative new players bring it to the market.
