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Does Ballmer Need To Go?
Pickens notes a TechCrunch analysis wondering — after Windows Vista and the failed Yahoo bid — whether Steve Ballmer's days at Microsoft are numbered. "Ballmer has been the big driver behind [the Yahoo] deal at Microsoft — some would say to the point of obsession. After the disaster that has been Windows Vista, Ballmer may have realized he needed to redeem himself in the eyes of Microsoft's board. And the 'transformative' deal with Yahoo was the way he was going to do it... If Microsoft's board loses patience with him, it might have to ask Bill Gates to temporarily come back as CEO until it finds a replacement. After all, Ballmer has already made a strong and convincing case for why Microsoft needs Yahoo to make its online and advertising strategy work. It's not clear whether Microsoft can achieve its objectives on its own or through other acquisitions. Maybe Ballmer thinks he can still do the deal by making Yahoo's stock price collapse and come back with a hostile offer."
And, the slowest moving company award goes to.......
How we know is more important than what we know.
The fastest moving chair in a company award goes to...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
As the summary said, he still has a chance to get Yahoo. We, who see him as a sweaty gorilla, are not necessarily see his qualities as the M$ board sees them.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
YES...YES...YES...!!!!
Microsoft dropped the Ballmer.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
TFA seems to assume that Balmer wanted to aquire Yahoo, and then did it entirely on his own initiative. That is certainly not the case. Even in a company as big as MS, the CEO does not go about spending that kind of money without the approval of major stockholders. He must have had the blessing of at least Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and probably others.
All of them knew going in that Yahoo had to voluntarily cooperate. So they know that Balmer is not to blame. So they are not going to dismiss him. They are going to go to plan B: the hostile takeover.
And what kind of person do you want leading a hostile takeover? You want the most vicious, gut-ripping, back-stabbing, ball-cutting executive you can find. They'll give him a raise.
all the conspiracy theories are too over the top. the business world is no where near this dramatic.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The yahoo board are more likely to be fired by the shareholders than Balmer.
For that matter Vista isn't really all that much of a failure in the long run, it gets a lot of bad press, but it's not a horrible OS, and even if financially it does turn into the next ME, the lessons they've learned will still be useful in the next OS.
Balmer has been with Microsoft for a long time, and given that everyone will think that the Microsoft CEO is a vicious, greedy, vindictive SOB even if they put a saint in the position, they may as well get the benefits of an actual vicious, greedy, vindictive SOB.
That Microsoft did not get Yahoo is not something that Ballmer or Microsoft will not be blamed for. He set a price and when it was not accepted tried various negoiations and when that failed he walked away. Smart business.
He now just has to show how Microsoft will build software to fit the roll Yahoo would, but he has this year or longer to do that.
Now if you are the CEO of Yahoo you better be about to deliever the golden goose.
What?!? The White House? ( couldn't resist that one :( ).
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
The yahoo board are more likely to be fired by the shareholders than Balmer.
I don't think anyone is saying people at Yahoo are not going to face some heat either. They're just saying that the whole deal was really pushed by Balmer and since he couldn't make it happen, he may well pay.
For that matter Vista isn't really all that much of a failure in the long run, it gets a lot of bad press, but it's not a horrible OS,
Doesn't matter how good it is if it continues to get horrible press.
Balmer has been with Microsoft for a long time, and given that everyone will think that the Microsoft CEO is a vicious, greedy, vindictive SOB even if they put a saint in the position, they may as well get the benefits of an actual vicious, greedy, vindictive SOB.
But there's the problem. He doesn't come off looking very vicious or greedy when he backs off at the first counteroffer. "Lame Duck" springs to mind.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ballmer took over in 2000. Here is Microsoft's stock performance since 2000:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=MSFT&t=my&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=
Ballmer is responsible for:
* The 7+ billion dollar Xbox fiasco
* The Zune marketplace flop
* The PR disaster that Vista has become
* Mass exodus of Microsoft employees to Google and other exciting and growing companies
* A total failure to get anywhere with Search and Advertising
Ballmer has been a complete failure in every single effort by Microsoft to create viable products outside of their core OS/office software/server software products.
I doubt it, but you never know how Wall Street will react. I've become more convinced lately that individuals like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and that guy who built Sony, are critical for stellar growth in high-tech companies. After David Packard left, HP floundered for years. I suppose Gates could revive Microsoft, much like David revived HP for a time, and Jobs has revived Apple.
However, it seems to me that the writing is on the wall: cheaper computer hardware means cheaper software. $200 PCs are a bad sign for Microsoft. Android built on Linux for cell phones is a bad sign for Windows Mobile. Losses in Xbox and other non-core divisions don't help, and defocus Microsoft from it's primary mission: Windows. I'm a big fan of Intel's Atom processor, and I suspect Intel can make the transition to cheaper computing, although with lower revenue. Microsoft... I'm not so sure.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
He and Gates surely control enough stock to do as they please. After all, if the board hasn't come after them after six billion down the hole for Vista, they aren't going to come after them for anything.
;-)
Both those guys are convinced they're geniuses, too, which is not conducive to stepping aside for someone else. And to be fair, given the corporate culture they've carefully nurtured, I seriously doubt any of those waiting in the wings could do a better job, anyway, so fuck it you know?
I bet they still both wish they were Steve Jobs tho.
expandfairuse.org
I quite like to see MS going down the tubes.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The SlashDot Borg Icon for Microsoft needs to be Ballmer not Gates.
In Microsoft there are two sets of crowds, the Gates set and the Ballmer set.
The Gates set is more apt to give stuff to users, do things the right way, and has been the underpinnings of things MS has gotten right or had done right by the IT world as a whole. They tend to take what they do seriously, have pride in Microsoft and want it to continue to succeed for the right reasons, etc.
The Ballmer group are the business minded, make a buck, and screw you type of people. They step on each other, screw over other projects if it gains them something, and could give a crap about the IT world or even Microsoft itself in the long run.
When you see the 4 versions of Vista, this was the result of the Ballmer crowd and OEMs wanting a dirt cheap version. The Gates crowd kept NT as two roles, Desktop and Server, but sadly the Ballmer nuts won that war cause they thought it would make MS an extra buck.
Gates = technology and empowering.
Ballmer = dominance and money.
Sadly Gates assumes that because most businesses think like Ballmer that Ballmer is doing the right thing, when Microsoft could be structured more like Gate's foundation and not only help the IT world more, but be just as profitable.
I would love to see Ballmer retire and the idiots that think like him go as well.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Developers developers developers developers.
There, I said it.
God that's such a stupid catchy song.
I hope I got that wrong, but that's the first impression I got from reading your post. Although I would agree with you that Gates is less of a bull in a chine shop than Gates is, I don't think I'd trust Gates as far as I could throw him either. We have seen enough charades over the past (and these days with the Foundation) to be pretty sure Gates isn't a fair player either.
:-).
However, Yahoo as well as buying their way through the ISO process are indeed very much Ballmer. Gates would have been a lot more subtle. He'd have worked the buy-in of many shareholders well before he'd approach Yahoo - Yahoo would have been taken over from the inside before the offer would have ever been made. The way it's now done is 100% Ballmer: "do what I say or I'll destroy you", which is soo 90s
Insert
Vista is indeed a disaster. It failed to stop Apple from continuing its growth. Macs are less value performance-wise than PCs, and regular people still buy ever more Macs. I think it is because OS X is easier to use and more secure than Vista. Microsoft is losing its grip on the consumer market, and will most likely end up competing on the corporate market. Oh, and XBox360. I'll give them that - the XBox360 is not so bad.
Stop the brainwash
Bill Gates is still the Chairman, the largest shareholder and founder.
Stevie B is the second largest shareholder.
Between Billy G and Stevie B they hold over 10% of the company (a lot for a large cap company).
Surely the only way Steve gets rolled as CEO is if Bill loses all faith in him, and given their long relationship this seems unlikely.
I doubt very much that in the face of a hostile Bill the board has any hope of removing him even if they, and their institutional shareholders are unhappy with his performance.
It seems exceedingly unlikely that on the back of these problems they'd get rid of him. If it ever got remotely near that, he and Bill would have a word and he'd "retire to spend more time with his family".
--Q
but i have to give it to him (or microsoft) this was a great move, now yahoos own disgruntled shareholders will do the dirty work for Microsoft
i mean the whole takeover thing was a win win for microsoft
they managed to seriously knock their competitor of-track withoutt spending a penny
"Ballmer has been the big driver behind [the Yahoo] deal at Microsoft -- some would say to the point of obsession."
Yet when the bid failed he seemed quite able to drop it. I wouldn't call that obsession, obsession would've been continuing the bid until they got Yahoo no matter how costly and damaging to Microsoft. He knew when to quit and he did.
Of course then the summary goes on to bitch at him FOR dropping it. Make up your mind, was it bad that he continued as far as he did to the point the summary feels he deserves to be called obsessive over it or not?
whether some of these fiascos are Balmer's fault. Particularly, what happened with vista. It's very plausible that Vista died of feature bloat because Balmer didn't pay enough attention to it in the beginning; however, it's hard to tell from the outside who was really responsible.
Either way though, It's clear that some kind of shakeup needs to occur for Microsoft to continue to compete. I just don't see Microsoft being able to expand into new markets using the clumsy "throw money at the problem" approach that post-gates Microsoft has used. Money's an important tool for a company the size of Microsoft, but it can't cover up underlying problems, like a project that suffering feature creep, or a corporate culture that suppresses bottom up innovation.
Bill Gates seemed to run a much tighter ship overall, with a supposedly fairly "hands on" management style. However, it is true that Microsoft was a much smaller company under Gate's tenure, and I'm not sure he would be the man to put back in charge of the new Microsoft.
Most Yahoo and MSN are going south and Google is going north.
Its unfortunate. The last thing the world needs is a company with a monopoly on internet search, any company. And that includes google.
If you think Bill Gates is the "chair"man, you must be new here...
MSFT has been underperforming the exchange indices for as long as Ballmer's been in charge. Now that MSFT is not, and will never again be a growth stock, it should be a dividend stock. Every billion dollars that MSFT pisses away on failures like the zune or the Xbox, is shareholders' money being wasted on Ballmer's ego trips.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How long has he been in the car?
I'm not pulling over ten minutes after we leave the Denny's and if he touches his sister one more time I'm going to turn this car around and we won't go back to Disneyland until next year.
Who do you think the biggest shareholders of microsoft are?
Banks, pensions and mutual funds, why?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I left at the peak. Not just luck of course. Also not just smelling the coffee. It was a feedback effect. By leaving, someone not quite as talented took my place. And soon more people decided it was time to leave. Of course, it didnt just happen to me, but I really do feel if I had stayed things could have been different. Its just that, well, too many parasites and glommed on and it just wasn't worth fighting them anymore.
While I think Ballmer is certainly responsible, the problems really started much earlier. I blame Melinda for taking the edge off Bill, seriouly, he was a changed man after he got married. Balmer picked up the slack and quite frankly, hes an overbearing personality with no technical knowledge.
One of my heroes, Chris Peters had said that in order to have a successful product, you must reduce all dependencies. After he left, Ballmer changed the strategy: he actually told everyone to increase their dependencies on other teams. I think he must have been influenced by some of those self-help gurus who talk about the stages of maturity (dependence,independence, inter-dependence) and misapplied the lessons. Whatever it was, working at MS became a real chore and jerks, megalomaniacs and scammers began get power and the BS built up.
I doubt MS can ever recover from this period, its stock will never rise significantly again.
I agree that fundamentally monopolies are bad for consumers. In the case of Google, today, it's not a problem. Google isn't the default search engine in a clear majority of computers shipping today. That's quite telling. People have to seek Google out on purpose and chose to do so because Google works and works well. If you remember, Google rose to that position due to the arrogance of other search engines. Pay for top ranking, ads disguised as links in the ranks, eye candy over functionality. Then Google came along and said, why don't we try making a search engine first and generate revenue second. They are one of the few dot com companies that tried that and succeeded. Remember when ad words was first added and how "controversial" it was? It was ultimately accepted because Google MUST generate revenue somewhere in order to actually function.
In terms of online advertising, they may end up being a problem. All those ad words customers they generated ended up being very attractive to 3rd parties. Google will pay to put their customers ads up on your site, same basic market model as someone like doubleclick. It is here that a monopoly will end up costing consumers, given the proper board and CEO of Google. They have neither a monopoly there, nor the apparent corporate culture necessary to make this a problem. Yet.
This revenue is what Microsoft is interested in. In order to get there, Microsoft needs a functioning web site with an astronomical amount of users, to attract advertisers. Then they can take that customer base and start sharing it with 3rd parties, which attracts more customers. From what I understand, Yahoo has far better advertisement position than "Live" does. Combined with Yahoo, Microsoft would be in a position to make an advertisement company that could ultimately rival Google, doubleclick, etc. They failed because ultimately Yahoo's internal culture is against Microsoft. From what I can see, it's to the point that employees would have left the company in numbers significant enough that Yahoo would have ended up worthless. This is something the guys at MS didn't see happening. They assumed the amount of cash offered and the overall chance to rival Google in both search engine and advertisements would have been good enough for both management and employees. It clearly wasn't and now Microsoft understands that, which is why they recalled their bid and aren't chasing the hostile take over option.
Burn Hollywood Burn
As much as I dislike him, but it's not Balmer who needs to go, it's Microsoft. The problem isn't that Balmer drove the company into a corner, but that it's been driving towards that corner for at least ten, if not twenty, years. Nothing that has happened surprised anyone who's been watching MS for some time, it's all just standard operating procedure. Their problem is that the world has changed, and what worked in 1998 simply doesn't work anymore in 2008.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
He doesn't get how Google or Yahoo gets success. They get success because there are purely oriented to services they provide and how a bigger audience they can reach.
Yahoo can spend months trying to make Yahoo Mail beta compatible with one of the fastest moving browser targets on planet, Safari (and Webkit). Same goes for My Yahoo beta which can easily be called a full feature RSS reader APPLICATION running from web browser.
Google guys do everything to keep compatibility with Safari/Firefox and even as a user, I know Safari isn't the easiest browser to code for.
What does Hotmail do? It suggests user to "UPGRADE IE version" to get better experience. Problem? It is/was Safari 3.1 for God's sake.
If they want success on Web, they should fire the first person to suggest IE for better experience, adopt the "Graded browser support" scheme of Yahoo, stop advertising joke like things like Silverlight OR make Silverlight 2 something that people will show Adobe as an example. For example, Silverlight 64bit edition for Linux/FreeBSD , actual MS release without using any puppets.
As you mention Google Android, you know Android syntax is based on J2ME since it is the most known, distributed, multiplatform thing on mobile space. Did MSN code ANYTHING for hundreds of millions of mobile devices having J2ME? Symbian? No. Why? Because they see every device not running Win CE as some sort of "enemy".
On the other hand, Yahoo Go is a full feature application written in J2ME, Youtube (Google) ships an excellent performing J2ME application to mobile devices.
It is not only Ballmer to be fired. It is those idiots at MSN who once dared to block standard WAP browsers except their MS WAP browser (old Sony GSM) from mobile hotmail. As far as I can see, that group of idiots are still active at MS.
Their problem is that the world has changed, and what worked in 1998 simply doesn't work anymore in 2008.
Actually, Microsoft's changed a lot since 1998, though they were already setting down the road to where they are now... they introduced ActiveX in 1997, for example... they still had NT running on at least four platforms, they were still supporting more than the Win32 subsystem in NT, and while they'd moved GDI into the kernel both NT4 and the initial release of NT5 (Windows 2000) were still decent desktop operating systems. They didn't really start going round the twist until Windows XP came out.
If Microsoft in 1998 had been like Microsoft in 2008 there's no way I'd have picked the Citrix-based solution over one of the emulation schemes that were starting to show up back then.
And all that really crazy stuff came about after Ballmer became CEO in 2000.
Anyone who's seen that windows 1.0 sales video will probably get the same vibe. He just feels sleazy.
That's probably why he went so far.
He's like the Dick Cheney of Microsoft.
They're using their grammar skills there.
- Headcount has increased from 35,000 to 80,000 Chair count has fluctuated wildly and now stands at 52,000.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Asus (EEE PC), Ubuntu and Apple have taken significant desktop market shares away from Microsoft.
No, they have not.
I challenge you to find even the slightest bit of evidence to demonstrate otherwise.
(Apple might just barely qualify for taking away a small part of Microsoft's desktop market share. The other two wouldn't even qualify as rounding errors.)
Had to stop at "been treated like an ATM machine by the EU". Ever consider there might be some merit to the EU's side of the argument?
you had me at #!
that would be hilarious! They could put him in charge of a division called 'Boogle' where they all dance like monkeys and play musical chairs!
which is totally what she said
Hate to break it to you, but beer is a human creation.
you had me at #!
1) it's not "internal" business that is the problem. It's how MS fucks customers, the marketplace, the ecosystem, the truth, etc.
2) "Better for consumers"... Now you're on to something. When a single company can sit on its fat American ass telling the whole world that it has the only single option you should use (and it would criminalise/destroy every other option if it could); overselling the abilities of its product, lying about the competition (insofar as competition survives); use predatory and dishonest bundling/lockin/selling practices; manipulate governments, companies, and individuals through bribes, threats and coercion; it's breaking the law (and not just in the EU, you may recall).
Your post, besides being all of AC -1, is so incoherent and apparently contradictory I don't know why I bothered answering, really.
you had me at #!
Ballmer took over in 2000. Here is Microsoft's stock performance since 2000:
I'd like to see that chart adjusted for inflation. Bet it tells an even more interesting tale.
Microsoft's corporate execution wasn't great before Ballmer got there, but since he took the reigns it's been positively dismal. There aren't many people who can run a multi-billion dollar software company into the ground, but he's managed it. Everything he touches turns to absolute crap.
Ballmer has been a complete failure in every single effort by Microsoft to create viable products outside of their core OS/office software/server software products.
I'd argue that he's turned Office into an expensive piece of bloatware. And Windows should have been replaced after XP with a more flexible and slimmer OS product.
Microsoft execution has been horrible and that includes their core profit centers. Instead of putting their efforts into producing the best software products available in the market (not the same as the most ubiquitous), Ballmer put his efforts into flying around trying to strong arm big cities and companies not to jump ship for Linux and OpenOffice.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Oh how frustrating when the mighty haven't fallen.
Vista is not wowing critics. Nevertheless, 140 million PCs have sold with paid copies installed. Granted, some of those buyers may in fact be clamoring to keep using XP...But Microsoft's problems are merely normal challenges for a still-growing behemoth.
At the Motley Fool, Rick Aristotle Munarriz titled his recent article "I Spit on Vista's Grave." The best part was his lead paragraph, in which he asked "What do the future of computing, a hurricane-ravaged home, and Fred Flintstone's car have in common?" The answer, of course: no Windows. He suggests that Windows is fundamentally in trouble.
Give me a break.
Yes, Wall Street expected the company division that sells Windows to have higher revenue than it did last quarter. Results in the group were distorted by unusually high revenues and profits a year earlier...And sales may have subsequently slowed.
But those dollars flowed in because the product sold a lot, not a little, albeit much later and with fewer features than originally planned. Plus, the Vista disappointments are relatively minor in the larger scheme of things. The company projects a level of operating income for the current quarter which would mean that by the end of the June 30 fiscal year the total would be a minimum of $22.6 billion. That's not only a lot of moolah by any standard, but would represent a 22.1% increase over the previous fiscal year. Your list of $60 billion companies with profit growth that healthy is likely to be rather short.
Let's just say for a minute that you could somehow convince yourself that the Windows business, which in the "disappointing" last quarter threw off $4 billion in operating profit, is at risk of drying up entirely. It's salutary to remember that this group only represents about 27% of company revenue. Microsoft has done a phenomenal job diversifying into a wide range of software businesses.
Says Gates: "Exchange is out there cleaning up, SharePoint is out there cleaning up, doing super, super well." He's referring to the company's messaging software product line as well as SharePoint, an unheralded and little-appreciated dark horse in the company's arsenal.
SharePoint has evolved far from its roots as a mere corporate collaboration tool. Now it encompasses a full range of functions a company of any size might need for creating and maintaining applications on the Web. That means everything from a big-time corporate Web portal to your workgroup's document-sharing site. SharePoint this year will surpass $1 billion in revenues, getting to that scale faster than any product in Microsoft's history. But don't forget - according to the blogosphere, Ballmer is screwing up.
Speculation on whether or not Microsoft will succeed in buying Yahoo, and then integrating it, is rampant. It's a gutsy move and by far the company's largest attempted acquisition ever. Such deals are fraught with peril.
Those who sneer at Ballmer's supposed ineptitude or, as Wired puts it, "mismanagement," are simply engaging in speculation and armchair quarterbacking. They also show a poor understanding of internal dynamics at Microsoft. The real strategist behind the Yahoo assault is Kevin Johnson, who heads the group responsible for Online Services (and who also oversees Windows). Ballmer was sufficiently confident that "KJ," as he's known, could handle this project that two weeks ago he took a trip to the Amazon which put him completely out of touch with the office for days.
Ballmer, of course, remains the chief corporate strategist and the ultimate decision-maker. But the grown-up company he now heads, soon even to be sans Bill Gates, is one far more decentralized and well-managed than any version that has come before.
It is simply false to say Microsoft is in real trouble.
Microsoft: Decidedly not R.I.P. [May 2, 2008]
But we knew that already. That's why we don't make good CEO's, and often not even good managers.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The man is so obviously bad for MS that the only thing worth doing is to keep him on. I would even go as far as to say promote him, but I don't think that is possible any more.
A man with such vision should have much more day to day control over how projects go, for the good of us all. Without Me II, I would never have moved to Ubuntu full time, and I credit Ballmer for a large part of that.
The man is a genius, and we will sing his praises for years. Keep up the good work Stevie.
-Charlie
Just to clarify, I meant the parent, not the AC.
Running mate for McCain? following in the Dick Cheney tradition of dark lord of the underworld?
Take over for Castro in Cuba?
Still time for a new manager of the Olympic Games in China. (or compete in the 500m chair toss.)
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
best chance to use 'defenestrated' in a headline ever. Save that for when he actually *does* leave the company!
Cheers,
Matt