LOS ANGELES — Speaking last month to a few hundred M.B.A. students at the University of Southern California, Steven A. Ballmer, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, broke into verse. He recited a snippet of a song from the Broadway musical “Pippin”: “Rivers belong where they can ramble. Eagles belong where they can fly. I’ve got to be where my spirit can run free. Got to find my corner of the sky.”
Ballmer sensed his audience was more attuned to cloud computing, which he seeded while running Microsoft, than to Stephen Schwartz’s “Corner of the Sky.