Steve Ballmer: “Toilets, toilets, toilets”

Since leaving Microsoft, ex-CEO Steve Ballmer has devoted his life to the Los Angeles Clippers, transferring his enthusiastic, typically scary keynote vitality into pure, sport-oriented hype. But what about his passions? What’s changed Windows “developers, developers, developers” within the coronary heart of the person who’s spending round $1.8 billion to construct the brand new Intuit Dome enviornment in Inglewood? One phrase: bogs (via ZDNet).

“I’ve become a real obsessive about toilets,” Ballmer shared at the groundbreaking for the new arena. “Toilets, toilets, toilets.” To be truthful to the enterprise software program evangelist turned NBA chairman, it does seem to be the Intuit Dome may have lots of them — one rest room for each 27 seats within the enviornment’s higher deck, The Washington Post writes, “an unmatched ratio in the NBA.” The ballooning prices for the complicated, which incorporates area for the Clipper’s coaching facility and enterprise workplaces, might reportedly value over $2 billion.

Ballmer’s new dome feels like a predictably over-the-top affair. The enviornment will characteristic a big, 44,000-square-foot LED scoreboard, a concession stand idea that sounds so much like Amazon’s cashier-less Go shops, and a set of 51 rows of baseline seats dubbed “The Wall” that Ballmer hopes will rival Fenway Park’s Green Monster when it comes to recognizability.

But actually, it’s all concerning the bogs. “The architects keep getting on me. You’re supposed to call them ‘fixtures’ instead of toilets. But it’s the same thing,” Ballmer says. “We’re putting a whole lot more toilets than anyone else in the NBA.”