I never felt any respect for Mr. Ballmer (, unlike Bill Gates), and I am just thinking aloud as to why: I wonder if, like many other people, Mr. Ballmer found

I never felt any respect for Mr. Ballmer (, unlike Bill Gates), and I am just thinking aloud as to why: I wonder if, like many other people, Mr. Ballmer found the existence of Google a perfect fit to his personality, which involves finding an anathema, a thing to be hated, and then sublimating one's energies into productivity by feeding on that hatred. Let's call this Hatred-Driven Development. Or rather, considering we are talking about a CEO, Hatred as a Strategy (HaaS). The reason such behaviour feels petty is that these people literally don't exist without the external object which forms the focus of their lives. As others have pointed out, he had enough time to do something about Google, and failed, and that shows that HaaS is not enough. If you want points just for trying and just for hating the competition ferociously, there's a heaven for that kind of person; middle-management at a large corporation. I believe that this is a story of how to make $15.2 billion in net worth by being in the right place, a rocket called Microsoft, at the right time.