steve ballmer

Of all the most cloying and over-rated virtues, for me self-deprecation is the worst. You know the sort of thing: people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them I write a bit, only when they press me do I confess that I write for most of the national press in the UK other than the tabloids.

This is all good fun and most of us do it, particularly the Brits. Thing is, when it's someone like Microsoft telling us it's not such great shakes it starts to look like a simple attempt to ingratiate.

Take Steve Ballmer, who has just told the BBC that he thinks Microsoft is David to Google's...

Microsoft's stock managed to go up by 6.72 percent today, which undid a great deal of damage and put the company ahead of its opening price from Friday.  Just the same, Steve Ballmer has taken the unusual step of warning onlookers that the economic problems are likely to affect everyone.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is not only an apish buffoon, but he also apparently lacks a backbone. It was revealed today in a letter to Yahoo shareholders written by “activist investor” Carl Icahn that Ballmer expressed fears that the current Yahoo board—hostile to a takeover by Microsoft—could put the huge bounty needed for the acquisition into question.

“If and when a transaction is consummated,” Icahn’s letter states of Ballmer’s acquisition logic, “Microsoft would be guaranteeing a great deal of capital at closing.

Is the Yahoo deal done yet? The stock market thinks so, slicing Yahoo’s financial value by 15% in the last two trading sessions.

If the deal were still alive, then the stock would be moving the other way around. Yahoo’s chief Jerry Yang says the $37-per-share demand wasn’t etched in stone but he’s sporting a good dose of Wall Stree’s most lethal cologne – desperation - for anyone to take him too seriously today.

Still, I think he wants Steve Ballmer to come back to the table and do the deal. But Ballmer and Microsoft seem to want to move on.

Traders are still buzzing about how...

Okay, let the finger-pointing begin. Should Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer take the heat for the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo merger falling apart?

After all, didn't he say that Microsoft wouldn't raise its $45.7 billion bid for Yahoo, then weeks later, say he'd raise the bid, from $31 per share to $33 per share?

And shouldn't Ballmer have thought this deal through? Why Yahoo? After all, the search engine battle is over and Google is king.

Why the need for Yahoo in the first place? Or what about Yahoo chief Jerry Yang - the guy who dug his heels in at $37 per share and seemingly chased away what...

StreetInsider.com Notable Mergers and Acquisitions of the Day:

• "We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Yahoo!
  
  (Nasdaq: YHOO) and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to provide greater choice and innovation in the marketplace and create real value for our respective stockholders and employees," said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft.
  
  "Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly US$5 billion, Yahoo!

There was plenty of blame to go around on the msnbc.com board discussing Microsoft’s dropping its bid to acquire Yahoo.

A lot of it was aimed at Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his Yahoo counterpart Jerry Yang. Here’s a sampling of some:

In a letter to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the software giant had been willing to raise its offer to $33 a share—a $2-a-share increase on its initial offer of $31 a share, or $44.6 billion, back in February.

I’ve never liked Steve Ballmer very much as president of Microsoft. I don’t know the man personally, of course, and I could never quite put my finger on my reasons for disliking him.

Until today, that is, when I read an Associated Press story that included allegations that the Microsoft CEO once said he wants to “kill Google.” If I heard about the quote—from which I’ve removed an obscenity—in Sept., 2005, when he supposedly said it, I must have forgotten, because it came as news to me.

And it seemed to epitomize my disdain for the man who in some circles has come to be known...

As Yahoo continued to resist Microsoft's $42 billion takeover offer, a key question was just how far Microsoft's excitable CEO, Steve Ballmer, was willing to go in hopes of defeating online advertising and search leader Google.