Microsoft's Steve Ballmer Talks About Windows 8, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — and Why Microsoft's Lost Decade Is A Myth.
and Why Microsoft's Lost Decade Is A Myth. — On July 9th, I did an onstage interview with Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, at Microsoft's annual Worldwide Partner Conference. The venue was Toronto's Air Canada Centre …
Context & Ripple Effects
This interview lands in the middle of a long-running narrative fight over Ballmer's leadership. The tech press turned openly on him back in 2010, and the 'lost decade' framing he now disputes has been building since the post-Gates transition covered by Fortune in 2008. His 2011 habit of mocking Mac sales while touting Microsoft's own products shows the combative posture he brings to these stages.
The setting matters: speaking July 9th at the annual Worldwide Partner Conference at Toronto's Air Canada Centre means the audience is the reseller and partner ecosystem that carries Windows into enterprises — exactly the constituency that needs confidence ahead of Windows 8. That Forbes's account was picked up same-week by WebProNews, The TechBlock and Betabeat shows how much appetite there is for any Ballmer defense of the record.
First-order effects
- Ballmer uses the WPC stage to hand partners a ready-made rebuttal to the 'lost decade' critique — a denial of the narrative, not new financials — so channel players can repeat it to enterprise customers weighing Windows 8 migrations.
- By invoking Bill Gates and Steve Jobs alongside Windows 8, he reframes the company's story around founder-era legitimacy rather than the stock-price record critics cite.
Second-order effects
- Apple sits implicitly in the frame: with Jobs's legacy central to the 'lost decade' argument, every Ballmer defense invites renewed Apple-vs-Microsoft comparisons in the press rather than settling them.
- A CEO publicly disputing the decline story raises the stakes on Windows 8 itself — if the launch underperforms, the gap between rhetoric and results becomes the story, sharpening the leadership-pressure dynamic documented since 2010.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Microsoft's public narrative becomes a recurring cycle: each major platform bet preceded by executive reassurance, with the partner conference functioning as the venue where the company tests whether its channel still believes the story.
- The episode points toward leadership credibility — not product roadmaps alone — becoming the axis on which Microsoft coverage and investor sentiment turn during the post-founder era.
The trend: Microsoft's post-Gates era is increasingly fought as a narrative war, with Ballmer using partner-facing stages to contest decline stories ahead of each major platform launch like Windows 8.