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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."
"Everyone is fooled, prepare for phase 2..."
Give it up for meeeeeeeeeee!!!
----- "All right. It was a miracle. Can we go now?"
Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
(Anyone still have that video?)
So the Wall Street monkey like the Monkey Boy. See, there's your proof of evolution!
He scares the shit out of you so you have to buy his product or face his wrath.
I haven't noticed this. What with the patent assault they seem to be preparing for.
This really isn't a troll, it's an honest statement when I sat that it was the "Monkey Boy" video that really put me off Microsoft. I remember thinking "this idiot is in charge of what happens to our Windows PC's?".
It was shortly after that I decided to switch to Macintosh for my primary platform. Obviously I still have a PC but I only use that for games now.
Five years of FUD, but financial success... He is feeling rattled by Linux though, as the recent FUD he's been spreading about patents shows. One imagines this will continue for some time to come, since his style may not be popular, but it's certainly effective.
"Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend." - Emil Michel Cioran
The stock price has been in a rut for years, the only positive has been the large cash payout to stockholders. Microsoft has yet to find the next growth opporunity that will replace the very mature operating system and office cash cows. Microsoft is losing ground in the next huge growth market, China, to Linux. I'd say that the past five years have been a failure for Ballmer. All Microsoft has done on his watch is tread water.
Maybe the reason because they don't advertise as much is this.
When your software comes with 99% of new PC's and is already recognised as part of a computer itself, who needs advertising?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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.
You'd think Microsoft would/could advertise more. What's up with that?
Everyone thinks that they're a monopoly. Isn't that the best advertising?
You'd think that they could innovate with their $65 billion in cash. Instead, we get a grand total of - not one, not two - but THREE color schemes for Windows XP. It is arrogance like this that will eventually displace Microsoft. Not that color schemes matter, but the company hasn't come up with anything original in a long time. This is just a good example.
And they spend billions on R&D every year. It is like there is some law that prevents them from coming up with something both useful and non-evil. I have about a hundred ideas that they could use right now.
More
Not trying to make fun, but ive NEVER seen a fat man move like that and have that much energy...except Chris Farley
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...
It is interesting to see how this $23 to $36 billion growth compares to the drop of the USD value during those very years. Do the math.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
And they spend billions on R&D every year. It is like there is some law that prevents them from coming up with something both useful and non-evil. I have about a hundred ideas that they could use right now.
In the last year, there was an article in Scientific American (I think it was the June issue ) that described Microsoft's R&D department. Essentially, they are buying up some of the best people out there to innovate for them. Of course, the next question is always "What have they produced?" I don't know. Maybe they have produced something, maybe they are getting ready to, who knows? They might just be storing up patents. They have the money and capabilities to innovate, but I think it may take a while to come to fruition.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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."
And yet, where is the stock price in comparison to five years ago? Sure the bubble broke, but MS is sitting at less than half of the price it was back when he took over. How is this an "A"?
Just another day in Paradise
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.
Call home software activation forced everyone to pony up. But have you noticed the thrust behind open source since then. He may have won the battle, the war is still raging and the winner is not clear. With six computers in my home and many more within my area of influence via family members I support it's not hard to understand that I now recommend "good enough" alternatives such as OO, and "Best of the breed" Firefox.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
While it's nice that Wall Street loves Balmer, it doesn't change the fact that Microsoft is facing a real challenge to its primary revenue streams as we begin to enter a post-PC era. While the PC is not going to disappear, prospects for growth are not good as other devices (that don't and won't run Windows) take the place of PCs for many functions. Microsoft has made some efforts to get out of the PC box, but so far they still seem inclined to try to stuff Windows into everything (Xbox, set top boxes, etc...). They've got to free themselves from this kind of thought if they're going to have a chance to create something new that people will want.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I think that bringing that idea up at a Coca-Cola board meeting would get you a one way ticket out the door to find a bottle of Moxie.
Why?
Because aside from New England, the rest of the world forgot about Moxie during WWII, when the decision was made on the corporate level to use their budget on sugar (a crucial soda ingredient) instead of advertising. The taste of Moxie didn't change during WWII, but since Coca-Cola decided instead to use a substitute, but leave their advertising budget intact, the world remembers Coca-Cola and has all but forgotten about Moxie.
Companies rarely innovate.
But the ones that do are the ones that make the big bucks. Look at DigiCypher. The first company that implemented a practical digital compression scheme for video files. Or IBM for the PC (as opposed to mainframes). The japanese company we just had that came up with a Blue LED. Nintendo came up with the Play Station, but sold it to sony because the load times were too long for them when compared to the Cartridges. They waited till the Cube to do disks. Also, Nintendo for having a portable game system. Xerox, for the Xerox Machine. Sony, for the VTR/VCR. There are plenty of examples.
Although in the case of Microsoft it seems like they just wait for someone else to come up with the ideas and then copy them badly.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Come on, Bill made comment that would make you laugh and think "get real", "whatever" (One day hardware will be free and people will pay for software). Steve, on the other hand, just pisses people off to the point of demonstrating the bird.
What's the deal with Asia's Windows XP watered-down edition. With a continent that doesn't care to much about thier pirate mafias, that is sure going to move the governments away from open source.
Oh yeah, and since it didn't work your going to sue an entire continent over patent infirgements? How about trying that in our country first. Oh, right, you can't becuase you know you'll lose. But I guess Steve must think he can bully those he thinks are ignorant. (If I were you, I won't mess with a peoples that know kung fu).
And how about comparing a copy of $1000+ CD vs a bottle of cognac? I'm sorry Steve, but people paid for the software, not the medium the software was bought on. And since a backup is like less than a dollar, your comment doesn't justify.
So, what does that say about the people who seem to think Steve created a gentler M$? (RLOL) In my opinion, I think Steve is having it REAL lucky right now, or pulling an Enron. The way I see it, more and more people are moving to linux open source. Apple did it. Novell did it. IBM and Walmart are using it. Companies and government agencies are moving to it. Pretty soon the gaming industry, the only driving force that is keeping MS afloat, is going to switch over faster than you can say bubblelusicous. Then we will see a slow horrible death to MS (and their BS).
Perhaps I don't understand the subtleties here, but why should Ballmer get credit for piling up a lot of cash?
Shouldn't this be going towards developing new products and services (whether they are internally developed or just bought lock-stock-and-barrel from outside)?
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.
Chairman Gates: Lord Ballmer.
CEO Ballmer: Yes Chairman?
Chairman Gates: Rise...
Emper^H^H^HChairman Gates: Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design. Your friends, up there in the Justice Department, are walking into a trap, as is your OSS community. It was *I* who allowed the users to know the location of the source code. It is quite safe from your pitiful little band. An entire legion of my best coders awaits them. Oh, I'm afraid the DRM will be quite operational when Longhorn arrives.
Another Ballmer-inspired change: Fostering a kinder, gentler image and greater trust among both customers and partners.
Note, Ballmer hasn't changed Microsoft to be kinder or gentler, he has just fostered an image of Microsoft being this way.
Ballmer tackled Microsoft's image problems almost from day one.
We haven't seen Microsoft change. Although the message it's getting across has changed, everything is still running as normal back at Redmond.
There have been a great deal of issues concerning frustration with security, Microsoft's licensing, and incomplete projects.
Microsoft is still attempting to rule the roost, dominate the industry, and force its own standards upon us. Microsoft has had plenty of trouble breaking into new areas, and it really needs to keep the cash flowing in. Leveraging its monopoly seems to be the only safe way to do this. This certainly doesn't relate to 'gentle'.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
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.