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Five Years of Ballmer -- the Effect on Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "In the five years since Bill Gates surprised the technology world by announcing he would give up his title as chief executive at Microsoft to Steve Ballmer, the company has changed significantly. Ballmer is largely credited for tripling the company's cash balance, with sales growing from less than $23 billion in 2000 to $36.8 billion last year. Critics claim that today, we see a much 'gentler' side of Microsoft and Ballmer seems to have received an "A" in Wall Street's eyes."
When your software comes with 99% of new PC's and is already recognised as part of a computer itself, who needs advertising?
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Why should they advertise?
When was the last time they had a major product rollout?
Most of their software is so well known that they do not need to advertise. If you buy a computer, you get Windows, if you want word processor/spreadsheets etc., you buy Office. They are not a convicted monopoly for nothing.
Wait until Longhorn rolls out, then you'll see the major advertising campaign. As was the case with the X-box.
Of course not, they like his money, that's all...
Lets see..
.COM bubble burst, but while it seems that the the dow jones and Nasdaq have had a bit of a rise in profitablity, they seem to be leaving MS behind.
Now in the past 5 years of Balmer the stock of Microsoft has dropped maybe 50% or so in value.
Now of course since 5 years ago we had the
I figure it has to do with no new OSes for people to buy and MS's inability to profitable merge into other tech markets.
Of course if you invest 10 years ago, then you would of rocked the house.
But if you invested 5 years ago you would of lost almost half of your investment and if you invested your money in them anytime between now and then you would of been better off keeping your money in a savings account.
Hell you would have at least had some profit if you invested in Apple...
hmm....
You know you can go for a very long time in the stock market without rising or falling much at all. Could it be that when you have 95% of hte market your prospects for growth don't seem to hot to investors?
So 5 years of mediocre performance. What will be the next 5 years? Even them returning a large part of their cash reserves to their investors had little to no effect on their stock... Unless it prevented it from falling further.
It seems to me like nobody in Walstreet gives a shit about Balmer, but PC and financial magazines sure love that ad revenue!!!
look fer yerself.
"Ballmer is largely credited for tripling the company's cash balance, with sales growing from less than $23 billion in 2000 to $36.8 billion last year."
their main revenues are form selling the OS and Office suites, right? well, he was still in the luxury position of building on a monopoly. i'm pretty sure it won't stay like this as competition gets more stiff.
and yeah, OSS and/or Free software are a big competitor in the fields where MS wants to make money in the future (embedded space, servers, for example).
It is precisely because of Ballmers orientation toward marketing and finance that MS's real potential is WEAKER than it was in 2000. For every temporary balance sheet win he has made, there has been permanent 'hearts and minds' damage.
Communication is the issue; MS no longer listens to clients at the tech level. Up until a few years ago I rated MS very high in terms of listening to the marketplace and creating technology to match -- in fact, where governmental bodies and cross-industry standards groups constantly failed, and giant companies simply didn't give a good gosh damn, MS habitually actually listened to people who knew technology and produced what the world needed. This might have been more striking in my area than in some others, but it was certainly a general rule.
Fast forward to the present day. The world asks MS , "What is your
So financially, I agree that Ballmer has really done a lot. But putting the emphasis on extracting money from clients, rather than delivering benefits to clients, can only work for so long
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
An A on wallstreet a D for operating system and a F for security... that is still below average to me...
Really?
Hmm.. you know, as an actual developer of software, it really actually had it's intended effect.
The tools MS is providing for developers now are really great. Such an improvement to five years ago. The resources available are just pretty great.
Software sells systems, and MS is doing a good job getting and retaining great ISVs for their platform.
What do you expect if you where the CEO of world biggest software company?
Ofcourse he is out there to make money and to sell Windows.
He would say anything to make sure his biz stays in biz, just like any other CEO but besides that he is perfectly reasonable, in real live.
That man is not stupid neither evil, he sells his product in which he believes.
The only "crime" he would be guilty of is the crime of commerce.
Well, as far as Microsoft's concerned, these "best people" aren't innovating for anyone else, and that's worth paying their salaries for.
deus does not exist but if he does
I couldn't care less what histrionics Ballmer goes into on stage - his monkey dance neither amuses nor disturbs me. I judge Microsoft's committment to developers by looking at their current and upcoming tools, their developer resources, etc.. And their committment seems pretty good to me.
Sure, if you ignore everything and just use something irrelevant as an example. Ever since Visual Studio 6 from 1999 the developer products seemed stuck, but they have been revived the last 2 years. C# has arrived. The command line compilers are now a free download. The whole .NET platform is innovative and a lot of work, and you talk about a color scheme in XP ?
That just proved you're a mouse clicking monkey instead of someone who really uses software.
However, need I mention Channel 9, which is run by 5 Microsoft employees. They interview a lot of people within Microsoft and you really get a feel for the stuff they deal with. There is the *free* ISV Buddy Program, a Microsoft employee assigned personally to help answer questions/issues you have with many of their products.
And I could go on for quite awhile about
There is INETA, which has over 300,000 members worldwide and is promoted a lot by Microsoft.
There are many, many community websites put out or suppported in some way by Microsoft, like GotDotNet, MSDNAA (for students), Free ASP.NET starter kits, etc.
There are the helpful Shows and Webcasts highlighting and explaining new Microsoft products, which are especially helpful for .NET developers here.
There is the Student Ambassador (to Microsoft) program where a student serves as the liason between Microsoft and students and provides software, information, and community for students. This is run by Microsoft, and I play a small part as one SA among ~146 on college campuses in the US alone.
There is the Imagine Cup contest, which is geared for students which provides a programming competition for anyone interested. The website for that is here...
There's more, but you get the point.
As far as previous stuff (MFC, COM, etc.) I have not been involved at that stage, and a specific business may have had a different experience.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Heh.... "mission critical" and "Linux" (or even "Windows") in the same sentence... good one :) I'd mod this post up as Funny +1 if I had mod points right now.
If you actually know software history, Linux isn't that far ahead of anything. Neither is Windows, really. They are both still tired old horses in the scheme of things. I haven't seen anything from either that is really innovative that is/can be used in a production environment. Everything they do is just either copies of what other people are doing on other platforms or even just copies of what other people are doing on the same platform even. I can't even think of one thing on either platform that hasn't already been done by someone else (including themselves) sometime in the past.
Ballmer has probably done a pretty decent job considering the circumstances. I think the cash horde was originally for a potential SAP acq/merge. When that was a no go, the only battle big enough and worthy of a fight was the very one that Microsoft was hoping would go away...the web.
The real story here is the failure of Microsoft's Chief Architect to deliver a compelling vision. Longhorn, Avalon, Betting-on-Rich-Clients, Blah-Blah-Blah, No-One-Freakin-Cares!
It's telling that the big technology stories of 2004 were 4+ year old technologies: javascript, DHTML, XMLHTTP, RSS, Wiki.
They probably thought it was pretty funny sending the IE team on a 4 year sabbatical and releasing multi-gigabyte developer studios without a proper web development tool. But lately the belly laughs have turned to nervous grins.
Microsoft has real problems and here is why - they approach the market reactively, "innovating" by relying on surveys, focus groups, market analysis, whatever you want to call it. To sum it up -
if (no complaint)
stick to status quo
else
fix complaint
The problem is that complaints are usually symptoms of larger problems, and by tacking on simple fixes, Microsoft usually just ends up with a convoluted framework for whatever product they happen to be fixing.
Your average joe doesn't understand the potential of new technology, he is just reacting to the new-fangled features you just put in. This is why technology design by survey fails miserably. You need someone who fully understands what is at the edge of current technology, and who can creatively apply it in ways that enhance the average joe's life. This is so goddam simple, but Ballmer misses the point. I have heard through the grapevine that this is ingrained in Microsoft company culture, and no one challenges it, because the company is conservatively micro-managed from the top.
Microsoft gets away with this model because the average joe is unaware of innovative concepts while they are new, before Microsoft has copied them. But the software remains clunky, akin to cars of the old days, where you cranked the thing up by hand and put up with the smell, noise, and breakdowns - because there was still a tangible benefit. People thought this was the nature of cars back then, and accepted it because they couldn't see any better. Similar stylistic comparisons can be made between Microsoft and George Lucas, but I digress.
Microsoft hasn't re-invented itself, it has only re-hashed itself into something superficially better. Until the old guard leaves, that isn't likely to happen. This can be witnessed in the company's financials - growth continues, but is slowing in a growing market, despite a monopoly. If you want to make some dough, invest in some Apple stock and short on Microsoft - since it is pretty clear that they will be sticking to their guns with Ballmer. I've never owned an Mac but I've used a few and I see them as the next best thing, especially with the affordable mini model out, a good architecture to boot, and style that drops Microsoft right on its ass.
Seems to me msft has been on autopilot for the last five years. XP and Win2K are both about five years old.
I suppose there have been a few standard application updates. I don't really consider that to be managerial genius.
Longhorn is way behind schedule. Windows is way overloaded with security issues. Msft is being sued left and right - msft paid out about $3 billion in lawsuits in the last year. Stock price is way down. Market share is erroding. XP-SP2 was a flop (IMO). Msft's support for scox has been a scandle and a disgrace. Msft's huge push to patent the work of others as their own isn't helping msft's image.
"For instance, Microsoft, the world's most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers. "
So they're saying that if everyone at the company cashed in ALL of their options (which didn't happen) MS would have lost 18 billion. The includes all outstanding options awarded in previous years, and options awarded in the current year.
However, everyone did not cash in their options, so MS did not lose 18 billion. Hence, the accounting was correct.
Even more amusing is the assumption that Microsoft would have bought shares from the open market instead of issuing new shares...
Claiming that proper accounting would have reflected an 18b loss is misleading at best, especially considering that no accounting practices I've ever seen require treating all outstanding options as an excepse in a report. Hell, until recently accounting practices did not require listing options as any sort of expense at all.
Hardware is a commodity, but software is quickly becoming so as well. This is how it should be.