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Why Ballmer Should Leave Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of the announcement of Bill Gates' departure from the top spot at Microsoft, CNN Money is carrying an article arguing that Steve Ballmer should step down as well." From the article: "Since Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000 in favor of Ballmer, the company has floundered technically and strategically. As the company's chairman, chief software architect and supposed visionary, Gates deserves blame for missing the wave of Web-based software that has propelled Google and Yahoo. But Ballmer has made gaffes of his own in his longtime role as head of the company's business side. They include an undistinguished push into business applications to compete with Oracle, financial maneuvers that have failed to stir the stock - which has slumped 16 percent so far this year - and continuing antitrust problems in the United States and Europe."
Indeed, the MS anti-trust case is going well for us.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
MSFT sales figures are skyrocketing..
Xbox 360 Sales figures by Peter Moore at E306
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnufsctQnpU
Full 1 hour Microsoft E3 press conference (May 10th 2006)
main speech comes after the "Gears of War" showdown, its worth the wait..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnufsctQnpU
"Gates deserves blame for missing the wave of Web-based software that has propelled Google and Yahoo."
Yes, instead they concentrated on making software people actually pay good money for. Google and Yahoo have revenue based for the most part on ads. MS is not in the ad business, though I am sure they sell a few on MSN, it's not really what they are good at.
MS didn't 'miss the wave', they just continued to make their spectacularly successful products even better, and made a lot of money in the process.
I am certainly glad that the google's and the yahoo's of the world exert competitive pressure on MS, which helps it overcome its monopolistic inertial. But this impetus is best directed towards adopting and innovating in its core business however. Leave search to google, but if Google Office has some interesting ideas, by all means, MS should use them, improve on them, and hopefully come up with innovative new ideas in an effort to best Google.
Enderle appears to be ignorant of Microsoft history, despite his claimed 20-year record. The other Microsoft founder left many years ago (long before Gates).
Ballmer was just an employee. Gates supposedly promoted him because he was buying stock while other insiders were selling it, demonstrating his faith in the company (and making him very rich, as this was back when MS was much smaller).
Nah. You're wrong. I'm not sure where you get these ideas, but they aren't based in fact. Lets see...
.Net isn't that hot
.Net experience? Okay, maybe thats not completely true, but in my chosen field of programming (web dev) it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a job that doesn't require .Net experience. I'm sure others in the field can vouch for that as well.
Have you -tried- to get a programming job lately without having
Nothing special is going on with Office
How much special stuff do you expect to go on with an office suite? They're obviously making a feeble attempt at it with this ribbonb nonsense and all, and their "open" xml format. But seriously, an office suite is an office suite is an office suite. I'd like to see you innovate on that.
SQL server doesn't seem like anything special compared to oracle or even MySQL
I use MySQL for a lot of projects, however, I'll be the first to point out that it doesn't have -nearly- the features that MS SQL does. MySQL has improved lately, but if you look back at version 4... Compare that to what was available from MS SQL at the time, and you'll see my point.