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A Steve Ballmer story that helps explain Microsoft

Steve Ballmer surprised the world when he resigned from Microsoft, and everyone wondered what he would do next.  Well, he surprised everyone again in announcing his impending $2 billion purchase of the LA Clippers.  Boom!  What a way to get a second at-bat.

For those of you living in the figurative sports cave, the LA Clippers were for sale because its previous owner, Donald Sterling, said some pretty bad racist stuff.  That resulted in Sterling getting banned from the NBA for life and a forced sale of the team.  It’s a big story.

That’s how Ballmer came to acquire the team.  Anyway, I’m not writing about the LA Clippers or about racism.  I’m writing to share a Steve Ballmer story.

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Microsoft, please fix this – embarrassing that it’s still broken two years later

I love gadgets. Having worked at Microsoft in Redmond, WA for a little bit (on Windows 7), I have a soft spot for the Evil Empire. Nevertheless, I’m a consumer first and an advocate…tenth, which is why I’ve bought seven iOS and four Android devices.

Excel and PowerPoint matter a lot to me. It’s the main reason I could never get used to Macs; I have grown so reliant on keyboard shortcuts that the Mac experience feels frustratingly alien.

I also travel a lot for work, so the idea of a highly mobile, Office-capable device is appealing.

So unsurprisingly, I jumped all over the Surface Pro when it came out. Good machine, but the battery life was a deal breaker and it was too heavy for such a small tablet. Surprisingly, I also realized I hardly used anything outside of Office on desktop — the screen was just too small. And so I got the Surface 2.

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