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San Francisco: Steve Ballmer doesn't take no for an answer.
Microsoft Corp.'s chief executive officer lost $7 billion on the Xbox video-game console before turning a profit. He poured an estimated $7.5 billion over 2-1/2 years into an internet business that still trails Google in ad sales by a 7-to-1 margin. And he isn't going to let a February 2007 rebuff by the Yahoo board keep him from buying the company to catch up.
Ballmer, who a year ago hadn't laid out more than $1.5 billion on an acquisition, upped the ante. Not only did he propose what would be the largest technology takeover, he also made the first unsolicited bid in company history. Ballmer gave Yahoo's board less than a day's notice before going public with his $44.6 billion offer for the No. 2 seller of internet advertising.
Ballmer, 51, credits Microsoft's successes to persistence and a willingness to make long-term bets, a strategy that sometimes infuriates investors. He is also taking on Microsoft investors who complain that the Yahoo price will be too high and say it will be hard to integrate companies that have a duplicate set of almost every product in their internet divisions.
Lisa Brummel, a Ballmer deputy, knows his determination first-hand. Three years ago, she returned from vacation to find he had scheduled a meeting with her on a Thursday. By Wednesday night, he drove to her office to convince her to leave her job in the hardware unit for human resources, to shore up employee morale and compete for engineers.
She turned him down four times; he spent three hours persuading her. He is using a similar style now, persistence and a willingness to shift strategy, she said. "Leaders often have a way of doing things, and they keep banging away with the same methods," Brummel said.
"It takes a lot of courage and insight for Steve to say we've never done anything like this before, but we're going to do it, and we're going to do it in the biggest way possible."
If Microsoft buys Yahoo, Ballmer's legacy will hinge on the deal's success.
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