Steve Ballmer: Microsoft's new chief

Steve Ballmer gets to grips with Microsoft's top job

Steve Ballmer is a bear of a man. He is as loud as he is built, and retains the skills of a successful marketeer and salesman.

His personality and appearance are about as far removed as it possible to get from that of his old friend Bill Gates.

Ballmer may not be as rich as his friend, but with a reported fortune of more than $20bn, he is, in his own right, one of the world's richest individuals.

It is a long way from his upbringing in Detroit, where his father, a Swiss immigrant, worked for the Ford Motor company.

He met and became friends with Gates at Harvard University in 1973, where both were students living just down the hall from each other.

Unlike Gates, who dropped out three quarters of the way through a four year course, Ballmer graduated from Harvard, earning a degree in applied maths and economics.

He then worked at Procter & Gamble as an assistant product manager, before attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

In 1980, Ballmer was invited by Bill Gates to join him at Microsoft. He has since held a number of positions at the company, among them executive vice-president of sales and support.

Best man

During 1985, he was in charge of making sure that Microsoft's new Windows operating system would be ready on time.

As the deadline to produce Windows slipped behind, Gates reportedly called Ballmer into his office and threatened to fire him if the software was not on the shelves by the end of the year.

Few people believe he was serious about firing his friend, but Windows was ready by November.

The friendship prospered, and Ballmer was later best man at Gates' wedding.

As the 1990s wore on he began to take over much of the day-to-day running of the firm after being appointed president of Microsoft.

The more gregarious Ballmer has introduced a wholly different style to the company founded and still chaired by the more softly spoken, cerebral Gates.

Public face

A much larger man, he has a personality to match, retaining the the air of the marketing professional from his Proctor & Gamble days.

He has increasingly been taking centre stage, representing Microsoft at events across the world.

The announcement on 13 January 2000, that he had been promoted to chief executive, seemed to have been a logical progression.

With his outgoing personality and new status, it seems inevitable that he will become more and more the public face of Microsoft.

In the meantime, his old college friend, at which much of the anti-trust fire has been targeted, is left free to concentrate on the software stuff, in theory out of the firing line.