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The turnout at Microsoft's annual shareholder meetings is often sparse, with loads of empty seats in a conference hall in this Seattle suburb.
Not the one on Tuesday.
A nearly full house showed up at this year's event, the last one with Steven A Ballmer as the company's chief executive. While Ballmer is known for occasional raw displays of emotion, he kept his composure during a speech recapping the high points of Microsoft's last year.
Instead, it was the usually stoic Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates, who choked up. During short remarks, Gates noted that Microsoft has had only two chief executives in its history - Ballmer and himself - which he said made Microsoft "quite unusual." The company's board, he said, wants to make sure that the new chief executive is the right person for this time in the company's history. Then the voice of Gates began to break and he paused for a moment.
"We share a commitment that Microsoft will succeed as a company that makes the world a better place," he continued.
Gates said the Microsoft board had been doing "a lot of meetings" with internal and external prospects for Ballmer's job. "We're looking at a number of candidates," he said. "We're not giving a timeline today, but we're pleased with the progress."
Ballmer repeated elements of stump speeches he has used in the past. He parried a shareholder question about Microsoft's weak stock performance under his tenure by saying that company profits had tripled under his watch. He predicted that Microsoft's brightest days were ahead of it and that a decade from now people would marvel over how small the company was in 2013.
Much of the meeting featured the same scripted demonstrations of important Microsoft products and a tallying of votes to re-elect board members, all of whom sat sober-faced in the front row of the hall. A question-and-answer session from Microsoft's shareholders was no more contentious than it has been in years past.
When a shareholder asked Ballmer if he would be considered a government post, such as a nonexistent position as secretary of national information technology, Ballmer deflected the question by saying he didn't think such a job made sense because of the different needs of various government departments. He concluded with an acknowledgement that he would soon have free time on his hands.
"Thank you for helping try to find me work," he said.
©2013 The New York Times News Service
