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Ballmer Hits 10th Anniversary As Microsoft CEO
bednarz writes "Ten years ago on Jan. 13, 2000, Microsoft's Bill Gates turned over the CEO reins to Steve Ballmer. Back in 2000, Microsoft was still under threat of being broken up by the Department of Justice. Today, Ballmer is trying to meld enterprise and cloud computing. He has spent the past decade working through lawsuits, mergers, acquisitions, competitive battles and, of course, new software including Windows 7, which could become the legacy of his leadership at Microsoft. Not that we'll ever forget Ballmer's 'developers, developers, developers' rant."
Or flying chairs.
After Bill Gates resigned, many of the Microsoft middle managers came up to Steve Ballmer's office to talk about all the problems they had under Gates. Sensing the opportunity for change, nearly all of them said, at some point, "I simply won't stand for this anymore". Ballmer just got tired of this after a while and decided to manage more efficiently.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Funny how Vista is oddly missing in that list of achivements. But then again, there are times when a hole in your CV is preferable to being truthful.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Does anyone have numbers to compare from 10 years ago?
Revenue should scale up with inflation and standard growth. I'm particularly curious about profit margin, and market share.
In this past decade Microsoft lost market share, presided over the Xbox's massive hardware failures, and the massive failure of Windows mobile. IE went from utterly dominating (95% plus) market share to having less than 50% market share in some areas. Most people expect Firefox to overtake the majority of market share in all markets. Microsoft has also lost market share in search, got blasted by the EU, and had to back-pedal on several key strategies.
All those things go on his resume.
Microsoft also has to look where the future takes them.
A linux netbook with a random distro without many packages, and no big brand name behind it may not set the world on fire. But when Best Buy starts selling Chrome OS netbooks with a big Google brand on it, Microsoft will start shitting themselves.
Google has a lot of pieces they've yet to put together, but when they do, Microsoft's business model in several markets may suddenly shrivel and dissapear. Microsoft won't disappear overnight because they're diversified, but a company can rule a specific market one day, and then disappear the next if they're not careful.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.