More than two decades after Steve Ballmer’s frenzied “Developers! Developers! Developers!” chant became a viral sensation, the former Microsoft CEO said it wasn’t just for show.
Ballmer broke down the iconic moment — sweat, shouting, and all — on an episode of the “Acquired” podcast published Monday. He said it was a strategic “call to action” for Microsoft then.
Ballmer was frustrated with how Microsoft’s culture in the early 2000s still saw itself as “just a platform company,” he said.
Internally, teams were focused on building the infrastructure — Windows, Windows Server, ActiveX — but weren’t doing enough to engage external developers to build on top of those platforms.
“I’m trying to tell people at that time that third parties really mattered, and you got different opinions inside Microsoft,” Ballmer said.
“I was just frustrated with myself and my inability to get people out of, ‘We’re just a platform company,'” he added.
So when he took the stage at a Microsoft developer conference in the early 2000s, Ballmer shouted the word “developers” over and over, hoping to drive home a simple message: Microsoft needed third-party developers to survive.
“You have to be able to communicate that you really care about developers who are not your own,” he said. “We just had to tell people, ‘We want you, we want you, we want you.'”
At the time, Microsoft was battling competitors including IBM and Linux. Microsoft needed developers to back Windows and its fledgling server products — and eventually, .NET.
“I have my own kind of wild style,” Ballmer said.
“How do you end a speech? You tell people you love them, that you want them. That’s sort of the call to action,” he added.
Ballmer was well known for his playful and energetic personality and would often shout, scream, and run around at Microsoft events, to great cheers from the crowd. His unfiltered public personality stands at odds with more conventional and controlled business leaders.
The owner of the LA Clippers basketball team is a longtime associate of Bill Gates. Ballmer joined Microsoft as an assistant to the president in 1980 and, 20 years later, climbed his way to the top as CEO. He stepped down in 2014.
