Steve Ballmer Marketing Savvy Of Microsoft’s ‘Other Billionaire’ Complements Firm’s Technical Side

Steve Ballmer is cooking up a new idea and needs a whiteboard to think it out.

It is a way to measure the market for computer servers, the machines that manipulate data around networks of smaller computers. As Microsoft Corp.’s top marketer, Ballmer is trying to understand the market to sell more of the company’s software into it.

After 15 minutes of scribbling boxes and pyramids with different magic markers and talking all the while, Ballmer spots a connection between two parts of the market that he hadn’t noticed before.

Pleased by the discovery, he declares: “My brain works better when my mouth is going.”

Big and bombastic, Ballmer is second only to Bill Gates in influence at Microsoft. Their drive is the same, but their personalities are different.

Gates is shy, Ballmer, outgoing. Gates is a programmer who understands marketing, Ballmer a marketer who understands programming. Gates is most persuasive in small groups, Ballmer in a crowd of a 10,000.

“I make things black and white. I say ‘This is what we’ve got to do’ and that works in a big crowd,” said Ballmer, whom Gates relies on to fire up new recruits and sales representatives. “I tend to make things simple, simple, simple. I can’t get across shades of gray.”

They have been close since they were in the same residence hall at Harvard in 1973. Ballmer beat Gates on a national math test in those days.

But Gates’ programming skills, and prodding from his friend Paul Allen, prompted him to leave college. The two then started Microsoft.

Ballmer, who is 40, joined Microsoft in 1980. After graduating from Harvard, he worked at Procter & Gamble and then attended Stanford Business School before Gates invited him to Redmond.

“They have been a formidable combination,” said George Colony, president of Forrester Research, a technology consulting and market research firm in Cambridge, Mass. “They tend to compensate for each other’s weaknesses.”

As a marketer, Ballmer sometimes immerses himself in a region, living for a few months in Europe or acting as sales manager for the Phoenix area, to get a better feel for the process or customers.

“Ballmer is the best salesman I’ve ever met,” said Stewart Alsop, an industry columnist and venture capitalist. “He’s the guy who figured out how to get all those manufacturers to pay for DOS and then Windows so happily and to set up Microsoft in such a position of influence.”

Ballmer is also Microsoft’s other billionaire, though his $3.7 billion fortune is half of Allen’s and nearly a fifth of Gates’.

Now executive vice president for sales and support, Ballmer is responsible not only for getting Microsoft’s message heard by customers but getting customers’ message heard at Microsoft. The second task can be harder than the first.

Microsoft was months behind other big technology companies in recognizing the growth of the Internet and the implications that would have on its business. After the launch of Windows 95 last August, the company scrambled to adapt to the change.

Gates, Ballmer and other executives are consumed with the idea that Microsoft could lose its influence, not just in product sales but in how software is created and used, because of the Internet’s rise.

Ballmer and other executives now often point out that no company has been able to maintain its influence from one computing era to the next. Microsoft wants to be the first.

That’s why Ballmer is looking at the server computer market. Marking up that whiteboard, he boisterously meshed sales growth figures of small computers with installed base figures of big computers. The data came from public sources like investment reports and news accounts, he said.

“I just sit there and keep picking away at new data,” Ballmer said. “That will be a valuable asset for us, to understand this market in ways that others don’t.”