Shortly after he joined Microsoft 12 years ago in Washington, D.C., Martin Taylor was tapped to help an executive from Redmond make a sales presentation.

The silver-tongued son of a Baptist minister and civil-rights activist was ready to show his stuff. "I was, what, 23, so I was like, 'Steve, Joe, I don't care, some bigwig from Redmond. I just want to go do this presentation,' " he said.

The executive was a vice president named Steve Ballmer, and the presentation was a disaster.

Ballmer was pitching a new operating system called Windows NT, but the hundreds of software vendors in the audience didn't care. They wanted to gripe about problems with Microsoft, so Ballmer and Taylor stopped showing slides and started taking notes.

Afterward, Ballmer kept on Taylor for months to be sure he followed up on the complaints and figured out how to solve the problems.

Ten years later, when Microsoft realized it was caught flatfooted by the rise of Linux and other freely shared open-source software, Chief Executive Ballmer called on Taylor to step into the fire once again and lead the fight.