Useless News Of The Day: Ballmer And Gates Fought Eight Years Ago (MSFT)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 5, 4:30AM EDT

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The top story at WSJ.com today is that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, heads of Microsoft (MSFT), had a series of fights over control of the company. That was eight years ago. It may be a nice human interest story. But, Ballmer is CEO and Gates is "retiring" to give his money away to worthy causes.

The financial paper writes that "Things became so bitter that, on one occasion, Mr. Gates stormed out of a meeting in a huff after a shouting match in which Mr. Ballmer jumped to the defense of several colleagues." That must have been an Aha! moment. The two men have know each other since 1973 when they were both at Harvard. It is hard to imagine that, over the decades, they agreed on everything.

The story goes on to say that the duo struggled over who would run the world’s largest software company and that the argument went on for almost a year.

Over the period since the big blow-ups, shares of MSFT have gone from $53 to $27. There was a special dividend in there, so that comparison is not entirely fair. Nonetheless, the stock has not done terribly well. But, Gates and Ballmer are still friends.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.