Crazy Apple News Site > A Steve Ballmer Fable

Since there has been so much clamor for a fable, here’s a post I was already working on cleverly re-worked as “a short story, typically with animals as characters, conveying a moral”¹

Once there was a dorky man named Mister Gates.  He wrote software on punch cards.  Everyone thought he was a geek, but they were kind to him because he made lots and lots of money.

One day Mr. Gates found a bald monkey living a sad and dejected life. The monkey had no name, so Mr. Gates called it Ballmer, because it was, well, a bald monkey. For years Mr. Gates tried to teach Ballmer to behave properly around people. He spent his time teaching Ballmer how to speak, how to walk, and how to motivate people, until one day he decided to let Ballmer out in public.  It didn’t go well. Ballmer got scared of all the people looking at him, started sweating profusely, and suddenly started clapping his hands together and shouting “Developers! Developers! Developers!” while dancing around in a circle.

Mr. Gates was sad, but he took Ballmer back to his home in Seattle and worked with him for several more years.  It got to the point where Mr. Gates couldn’t even clean his Windows because he was spending so much time trying to get Ballmer to act like a human.

Finally, after years and years, Mr. Gates believed that Ballmer was ready to be let out into the real world.  In fact, he was so confident that as he left his company he gave Ballmer the keys, and told everyone to listen to the monkey.  Everyone was surprised; the monkey had learned how to form full sentences, and even some basic math:

“Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux.  How are we doing? Forty is less than 60, so I don’t like it. … We have some work to do².”

Although some of his sentences are a little convoluted:

“We want software more powerful than software that runs in a browser³.”

In the end, Ballmer hauled Mr. Gates back from his retirement feeding starving children in Africa and working on a cure for AIDS so that Mr. Gates could star in a pointless series of commercials with a comedian from New York. And while nobody laughed at the commercials, once again everybody laughed at Ballmer.

The moral⁴ of the story:  Don’t dress a monkey in a suit and call it a CEO, lest it start flinging things in the board room((Like this. Caution: linked story contains naughty words that Steve Ballmer allegedly said to an employee.)).

Okay kids, settle down now, it’s time for bed.

1. courtesy of the Apple built-in dictionary [↩]
2. from Macworld [↩]
3. also from Macworld, but a different article [↩]
4. Does anyone remember the Wheel of Morality from Animaniacs? [↩]

Tags:Ballmer, story