The quotes about borrowing money are truly telling and we shall find out how Microsoft really operates (financially) some time in the future. Ballmer lobbied very aggressively for the bailout and also checked the bank at the end of 2008. GM is bankrupt already (who would have guessed?) and Ballmer’s dad has background in this industry too. Microsoft lost $18 billion in 1998 but concealed it. A year later an employee blew the whistle on Microsoft fraud.

“Well, first let’s start with the basics. It is really a bad economy. Business is tough. People really are being laid off. We had a round we did yesterday. It really is a tough, tough, tough environment. There is no question about it. And I like to characterize, at least for folks at Microsoft, that I don’t actually think what we’re doing – we didn’t go down, and we’re going back up. The economy is kind of resetting over a year, two years, three years, at a lower level. And then we will build from a lower base. And that happened because essentially the world borrowed too much money. The question I got here five years ago, should I go borrow a bunch of money, it’s a prescient question. The world had too much debt, just as a statistic.”

A different tune than at the Democrats a month earlier where he told an anecdote that tried to hint at an homosexual relationship with Bill Gates (don’t be surprised to find even more gay hinting from Microsoft, that is the way they challenge Apple) and stressed the value of mind and hand (in the middle we find the heart as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis told us) with his typical stereotypes, the brain (gates) and the hand (ballmer), optimism and education overcomes the crisis, reboot the American dream for the next cycle.

“When I got to Microsoft and we were this tiny little company, we didn’t have the budget to put people up in hotels, so I lived with Bill. And every time I sat down, in every corner, nook and cranny of couches, tables, I’d find these little yellow pieces of paper with Bill’s writing that had a bunch of people’s names and companies’ names and numbers….. So, finally I said to Bill, what is this? He says, Steve, I’m really always worried about whether we’re going to have enough cash to pay people. So, every night I write down everybody who works for us and how much we pay them, and every contract we have and how much it’s worth. I’ve got to count the pennies tightly and that’s why you’re here now.”

http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/05/01/latvians-love-firefox/