After former owner Donald Sterling let his racist flag fly and the world heard the tapes, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer swooped in and bought the Los Angeles Clippers for a reported $2 billion. The deal finalized last month, making Ballmer the official owner of the NBA franchise.
Now, in true Ballmer fashion, the Clippers are on the way to becoming an iPad-free zone. Well, probably not just iPad-free. Soon, if Ballmer catches someone with an Apple product, they’ll likely get that famous Ballmer earful.
This is from Reuters:
[T]he Clippers will be a Microsoft organization. The son of a Ford Motor Co manager, he’s always been a company and product loyalist, banning his own family from using Apple’s iPhones.
“Most of the Clippers are on Windows, some of the players and coaches are not,” Ballmer said.
“And Doc kind of knows that’s a project. It’s one of the first things he said to me: ‘We are probably going to get rid of these iPads, aren’t we?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, we probably are.’ But I promised we would do it during the off season.”
Though Ballmer resigned as CEO nearly seven months ago and removed himself from the board last month, it appears that he’s still a Microsoft guy through and through.
Sure, you can put Surface tablets in everyone’s hands, but that doesn’t always eradicate the culture of Apple. Microsoft knows this all to well. Despite signing a $400 million deal with the NFL to product place the hell out of its products during games, everyone in the NFL is still calling any tablet they see an iPad.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
