Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft and current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers is the latest person to be featured in the Wall Street Journal’s “My Tech Essentials series. In the short article (behind a paywall), the man who has a very long history with Microsoft share some interesting details about the tech he uses every day, and you may be surprised to learn that the Surface Pro 4 user has gone completely paperless:
There are people who still come to meetings and bring paper. I say, “Please, please either email them to me or bring them on a thumb drive.” I don’t have a laptop, just my Surface Pro 4 tablet. I take Word files people give me and write directly on them with the Surface Pro and the OneNote app. I am paperless. I have one piece of paper in my briefcase, along with a letter somebody sent me at home that I had to bring to work.
Additionally, Ballmer praised the Amazon Echo that sits in its kitchen, a device that allows him to rely less on his phone for simple tasks like asking trivia. He explained:
We’re kind of in love with the Amazon Echo in our kitchen. It’s far more valuable than I ever thought it would be. I like the fact that you can ask it trivia. That’s something you usually look up on your phone, but it turns out Alexa can handle a lot of that.
Since the Echo became an unexpected success for Amazon, smart speakers have quickly become one of the most interesting tech products on the market today, and Microsoft is watching this space very closely. Last week, we learned that the company may be currently working on its own set of digitally-assistant speakers that work with Cortana.
As for the rest of the interview, Ballmer revealed that he’s a big Twitter user but doesn’t tweet as much as before. “I’m primarily a reader on Twitter. I used to tweet about the Clippers a lot, but I wasn’t saying enough interesting things, so I stopped tweeting as regularly,” he explained. The former Microsoft CEO also has a passion for hi-tech golf clubs, Ford cars and of course, the NBA.
Overall, it seems that even if Ballmer no longer works at Microsoft, he remains a true technology enthusiast and early adopter. It’s especially interesting to see how the Surface Pro 4 has become his main computer and allowed him to become completely paperless. Can you relate with Ballmer’s personal experience, and does using paper bother you in 2017? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
