Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Doesn't Work At Microsoft Anymore
itwbennett writes "The recent Fortune article on Bill Gates' post-Microsoft life made one thing very clear to blogger Steven Vaughan-Nichols: 'Bill Gates was, and still is, the face of Microsoft. What Microsoft doesn't want you to know though is that Gates has almost nothing to do with the company anymore.' The fact is that Microsoft doesn't want to draw attention to Gates' absence because the company 'has been tanking in recent years,' says Vaughan-Nichols. 'While Microsoft's last quarter was far better than it was a year ago, thanks largely to Windows 7 finally picking up steam, neither Microsoft's growth nor its profits are what they were like when Gates was at the helm.'"
Microsoft is in such a bad shape, it would be good for them if people thought Bill Gates still worked there :-)
neither Microsoft's growth nor its profits are what they were like when Gates was at the helm.'"
And what do they think Gates could do differently if he was still calling the shots? For better or worse most of Microsoft's key markets are saturated.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
There's a pretty heavy recession going on, there wasn't one when Bill was at MS. I wonder if these two points are related.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
shocked that this is considered news. I thought that pretty much everybody knew that Bill Gates has basically zero involvement with MS since he retired from MS and left that chimp Balmer running things.
Ford is not being run by Henry Ford. Shocking news to everybody who thought that the latest version of the Model T would come out any day now.
In other news, Richard Petty Motorsports has only one race victory in the past decade. Questions of why the King hasn't been driving are unanswered.
When will /. replace the Locutus of Microsoft icon with Ballmer throwing a chair?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Bill was always the cutthroat business nerd. I wouldn't miss him.
Now if Larry and Sergei leave Google, I'd be pretty damn worried. I really like everything I've ever read about how they ran the company.
This has very little to do with Bill Gates, per se.
Microsoft managed to get itself into a monopoly position while the PC market exploded. The PC market has since stabalized, and people are realizing there are options.
There was no where for Microsoft to grow to. So they can't grow anymore.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The "recent Fortune Article" link is to the front page of CNN's Money website. Not exactly useful when the front page updates constantly. Can an admin fix the link in the submission?
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
He may not be here right now, in Microsoft Corporation Edition 2010; but a ground-up managed-code rewrite of him is definitely on the roadmap for Microsoft Corporate Edition 2012, as part of the Microsoft Enterprise Management Foundation suite of technologies. All his memos will take the form of powershell-compatible cmdlets remotely executed on his subordinates, and his rolodex will be replaced by a WinFS based structured-datastore.
Version N+1 is going to be the best version ever!
That aside - I don't think Mircrosoft is doing poorly because "Gates doesn't work there anymore" - quite conversely - I always said that I believe that his departure deliberately coincided with Microsoft's decline. Wether you like them or not - he started Microsoft - created new products - built the company from the ground up - and grew it through the years. At some point - it really flatlined. They weren't doing anything new - creating anything new - growing - etc. As an entrepreneur myself - that would be the time an entrepreneur would get bored - with just running the day-to-day of a big company, and move on to new adventures.
Really just recent years? MS stock has been on the steady downslope since December 1999.
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Don't forget that Apple has become the new Microsoft, in a sense. They've adopted Microsoft's approach of vendor lock-in, and taken it to a degree that Microsoft never could.
Not only does Apple lock you in at the software level, like Microsoft did, but they go so far as to limit what programming languages you can use when targetting some of their platforms. Microsoft never stooped that low.
But Apple takes it further, by holding a monopoly on the hardware stack their software runs on. Microsoft never managed this. They may have had deals and influence with some PC hardware vendors, but they were never really in control like Apple is.
Then Apple takes it yet a step further, and basically dictates how you can use your device when it's networked, and who can provide that access. Microsoft never did anything like this.
So as the Microsoft generation retires from the workplace, we're beginning to see a new generation of Apple supporters move in. Except they're far more gullible and brainwashed than the Microsoft supporters ever were, and these Apple users are willing to accept a far greater degree of dictatorship and vendor control. It makes me weep.
I mean, besides being obviously anti-MS (standard /. fare).
If you look at MS's financials and check the annual reports, it doesn't much look like a company that has been "tanking in recent years". Most companies would kill for the revenue growth and operating margin Microsoft has had since 2005. Tanking in recent years, my ass.
Compare MS stock and Apple and Google and go back 5 years, or even 3 years. Look at the hype for the iPad, for Android. Notice the FTC looking at Google, Notice no one cares about MS anymore; They're becoming irrelevant. They're were IBM was in 1990, or Novell in 1998. Ballmar really wasn't/isn't up to the task of running the company. In 2000 they should have copied Apple again and based their next windows(that would become Vista) on a BSD or Linux kernel. It is very likely that they will continue to shrink and in another 15 they'll be just another softare vendor like Adobe.
This calls for a new Borg icon with Ballmer's mug. Or at least a new one with both Gates' and Ballmer's faces.
From Borg Gates to Ballmer ?
There's a pretty heavy recession going on, there wasn't one when Bill was at MS. I wonder if these two points are related.
This goes back to before there was a recession. Illustrated in pastel loveliness.
... leave, let the company tank, then make a triumphant return! :-D
They cut off his salary, and moved him to a basement office - but that darn Gates keeps coming in! Can't a guy take a hint?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I concur that this really isn't news, and I don't see lasting ties between him and his "brainchild." I mean this isn't Stan Lee we're talking about here! Why should he worry? He only just got put to Second richest man in the world...after George Bailey. (Atta boy, Clarence...)
One way or another, I doubt if Bil Gates really cares very much. I seem to remember him saying right at the beginning that if he made it big, he would end up giving his money away.
Well, kudos to him: he is actually doing that. I dislike Microsoft on many levels (but mostly technical, since I am well and truly old enough to have only a remnant of my ideological principles), but Gates is doing more good with his own money than most of our governments are doing with ours.
Microsoft can start be developing an Open Source OS based on BSD. Migrate their business to services and support and they can still release closed source MS Office but for free.
x
Good to see Bill focus. Three cheers for a remarkable career and his personal culling of the chaos in his life related to Microsoft.
I don't think MS profits have anything whatsoever to do with gates they have to do with the fact that MS finally got an OS that works in windows2000 SP3 and XPSP2 and later, and an office suite that works in office 2000 I was happy as a clam with my 2001 HP laptop running windows2000 and office 2000; I replaced it in 2009 because the HARDWARE broke - i would still be running that OS/office if my laptop hadn't busted a screen I'm a bit of retrogrouch (def below) but I havn't found that vista/win07/office 07 do anything whatsoever that i want. wait, thats not true: In office 2007, if you do a graph in excel with a log axis, you can have set the axis endoints to somethinhg other then a multiple of 10, eg you can scale an axis from 3 to 300, which is great for certain data retrgrouch: in bicycles, people who long for the old days (pre 1980s) when bikes were simple
You just wait people! Bill is going to go back to Microsoft and rally people, like Steve did at Apple, and the Zune will inherit the world!!! The 2010 will be the Year of the Zune!!!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
He'll always be the face of Microsoft here on Slashdot.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
I'll bet they're trying to copy Apple again. They're in Step 2. 1. Get Gates to leave for a few years 2. Turn into a brand that can be described as mediocre at best, always playing a game of catch-up 3. Bring back Gates and simultaneously introduce a new "revolutionary product". Give Gates the credit for "inventing" said product 4. Paint Gates as a messiah that will pull Microsoft up out of the ruins and guide all of mankind to better computing 5. Profit!
If Bill is no longer "the face of Microsoft", perhaps we can change the Bill of Borg icon that's associated with Slashdot stories about Microsoft with one of Ballmer throwing a chair?
Very old news, this has happened such a long time ago that it doesn't really matter anymore. I don't really know why people still bring up Bill Gates aside from his involvement in early desktop computing. Someone needs to file this story under "no shit"
He is still the largest shareholder. He gave some to his foundation and has been diversifying.
I almost feel sorry for them. Quick, somebody slap me...
Because Windows and Office are proprietary software, the onus is on Microsoft to shoulder the entire effort of development. It was a model that worked extremely well in the old days when hardware was less varied and complexity was significantly less. However, each iteration of Windows seems to be more painful to release. However, the fact still remains that Microsoft is an extremely good business because each copy of their software costs only a handful of dollars to produce and package while pulling in several hundred dollars on store shelves. The result was a net profit margin of 24.94% in FY 2009. Contrast that to Apple (19.19% net profit in FY 2009), which charges top dollar for sleek hardware but shoulders higher expenses as a result.
Much as we like to whine about Microsoft, the truth is that there is no other well marketed consumer operating system brand apart from Mac OS. Until well marketed competition arrives, Microsoft still drives the market.
Reality check: Microsoft is quite profitable. So is IBM. They make the wheels go around, and that's a solid business. That's what matters, not how much commentary the company gets on Gizmodo and Techcrunch.
There are other big companies like that. Consider Consolidated Edison, the power company for New York City. They've been selling electricity since 1882, and they made $14 billion last year. General Electric is still around, and with about the same product line they had a century ago - power station equipment, appliances, lamps, and turbines. (Along the way, GE entered and left semiconductors and computers.)
Google, on the other hand, is quite vulnerable. They've never had a second profitable product. Google has whole lines of money-losers, from YouTube to GMail. 97% of Google's revenue is still from search ads.
If you invest in individual stocks, it always pays to watch the insiders. As they say, watch the hands, don't listen to the mouth.
Remember when Case sold AOL?
Gates is pretty clearly a different story, but I suspect he decided it was time to move on at something close to what he saw as the peak.
A big one to watch: 10Ks for now, but pay attention when Larry Ellison changes roles.
I forget what 8 was for.
In 2000 they should have copied Apple again and based their next windows(that would become Vista) on a BSD or Linux kernel.
I have never heard anyone say a bad word about the actual NT Microkernel, or, for that matter, about Cutler et al's work on VMS [which, to this day, has a reputation as being one of the most rock-solid, 24x7x365, 5/6/7/8/9-sigma operating systems known to man].
Even the old embedded versions of NT, although they never gained all that much market share [vis-a-vis VXWorks], had a reputation for being very solid operating systems.
Now you might not like some of the cruft which has been bolted on top of the NT Microkernel [Win32, Win64, NTVDM's, DirectX, etc etc etc], but if anyone has a beef with the underlying microkernel, then I haven't heard about it.
You moderators need to catch up on your classic geek movies more.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
3. The failure to see the rise of the netbook/tablet.
This is I think somewhat unfair, in two ways (since those are two different markets).
For Netbooks, Microsoft didin't really see that coming but reacted very quickly and with skill, to where Windows dominates Netbooks when it looked at first like that would be the realm of Linux. They may not have seen that coming but they managed to win that one anyway to the point where it does not matter that they didn't see it coming.
Now tablets, that's a different story. They saw that coming, something like ten years ago? Off and on they tried VERY hard to make that market work. There they had vision, but no execution - and that I think is mostly the problem, Microsoft still can have vision but they have (for whatever reason) a ton of problems executing. It really seems from the outside like this is the old ossified company syndrome where endless layers of management just boil away any real innovation from a product because real innovation is too risky and focus groups all say they hate the new thing you are trying to do because it is different than what they are used to. I think even if Microsoft made their own tablet hardware (like Apple) they would have had the same issues.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's quite a sentence. Someone give this man a prize.
What Microsoft completely failed to appreciate is the need to make good mobile OSes. If Windows CE hadn't been such a pathetic afterthought, and if it had been given away for free to suffocate the rest of the market, MS would have been in a pretty good place right now. They should have been leveraging their monopoly into other markets, and they would have gotten away with it if they had even had an actively-developed product for the mobile market.
Microsoft just got complacent and lazy, because they were too accustomed to people buying their core products no matter how shitty they were. BillG knew that when they move into a new field, they actually have to win on quality. Office did this, IE4 did this, DirectX did this, but that's about the end of the list.
Apple doesn't magically create compelling products because they're a charmed company. They have to drop lots of money on designers, UI research, testing and all that stuff. None of those things are our of reach for MS. They just don't research, focus and blitz the way Apple does. Maybe the government lawsuits had something to do with it. Steve Jobs asks his board every week: Where do I want to jab my sharp elbows today? They research it and come back with a plan for new conquests. Microsoft seems to be focused on answering the complaints from their present customers. There's no vision there. Sometimes, when their lunch gets eaten, they respond with Zunes, Xboxes and Bings - also-ran products that, at best, slightly improve on the established players that they ape. Witness the recent effort to make Hotmail relevant again! It reminds me of Communist countries who thought the best response to Western temptations is to make homegrown "equivalents" for Levi's and Coca Cola. Not long after this pathetic attempt, Communism collapsed.
Apple and Google are sniffing around for unfilled needs, and designing products to fill them. Microsoft is looking at filled needs, and asking "how can we get in on this and also fill these needs?" Maybe that's in their DNA, because they got rich from an OS that basically innovated nothing. But the difference is that MS-DOS jumped into an unsaturated market and took ownership of it. MS product lines of the 21st century haven't even tried to do this. They've released fixes for established apps, and Zunes (and other Borg knockoffs of what's hot yesterday). If I were an investor who intended to hold stock for a while, it wouldn't be Microsoft.
People have been saying for years that it is Steve Ballmer whose business sense made Microsoft a juggernaut.
Bill Gates just got lucky...
Microsoft tried so hard to be a monopoly in the desktop market that it actually succeeded. Where is Microsoft going to find any growth in anything other than the overall growth of the desktop market itself?
It either must find new markets, or be content with the "public utility" form of growth - like an Electrical or Natural Gas utility, which rises and falls with the overall economy. The only way to get more growth is to find other markets.
Microsoft has big problems trying outside of its core competency of Operating Systems and Office divisions. These two divisions make the bulk of the profits for Microsoft by far. The other divisions, not so much. The Xbox division is a huge money sink. Winmo is laughable as witnessed by the KIN phone. Sony and Nintendo bend Microsoft over a chair and take turns having their way. Nobody likes Windows Mobile based devices. Apple has recognized that a market for tablet computing works if the interface isn't a pain in the behind. Where is Microsoft's tablet OS? I'm not talking about a tablet-ized 7, but something meant for lower power and a desktop meant for fingers.
Microsoft has become what they hated - the IBM of the 1980s. They are big, fat, and slow, with a forest of deadwood rivaling the trees of the Great Northwet. A government breakup of Microsoft would have been a boon to investors and the computing community at large, but they fought it tooth and nail, and here they are, a lumbering monolithic sloth of a company.
It should be broken up, by division for each to sink or swim on their own merits. This would set fire to that deadwood. Every forest needs a cleansing burn from time to time.
They are worth more in pieces than they are as a whole.
--
BMO
All they need are some fresh developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Does this mean /. will replace the Borg Bill avatar with something else?
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is still retired from Microsoft.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft" video, shown at CES 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lE21kpE3M0
Obviously you don't know that Microsoft wants to go to a yearly subscription model where you don't own the OS, or any of their other software, you pay something like $50 a year and are forced to install all updates.
.Net. I guess really it is the major changes they make even between minor version. New versions come out every 1-3 years, mostly towards the 1 year time line. Our company is mid-sized and our projects are usually under 7 months development time, but bigger, or more robust software can run 2-3 years to develop with out any changes to the platform. To put this in perspective of the OS that means that the program would come out for 3 OS versions back from what your customers are running.
.Net causes us problems though because we have to quickly find what bugs have been fixed, what commands have been deprecated and what new bugs there are. That takes time. Also we want to maintain the software we write for the companies that employ us. They don't want to pay for us to upgrade the code to a newer version of .Net, unless they get something in return. We have some code that isn't all that old, but it will take us 3 months to upgrade to the latest version of .Net just because of the changes Microsoft has decided to make.
It is the market that is pushing against this, not Microsoft. Businesses especially need the stability of a set OS for a number of years. It can take months, or even a year to test if your company can move to a new version of the OS, or even just Service Pack. If Microsoft goes to this model, they effectively remove their OS as an option to be used in the business environment.
I am a programmer and one of the problems we have is with how fast Microsoft releases new versions of
This release schedule for
These same development problems would exist with having a yearly OS release cycle. With a constantly changing platform, it would increase development time for programs, increase how buggy code is because of an unstable platform, basically make Windows not a very practical platform to develop for.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
It's quite the irony that, now that Microsoft is finally making products that actually perform as advertised, they are doing poorly financially and in stock price.
Goes to show you how little bearing stock price has to do with anything.
Hopefully, this does not mean that MS will try to revert to their previous 'crippleware' model. A subscription based model for updates would be preferable to that.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
He's this guy. Been writing about the industry, specializing in open source, for a couple decades now.
Best Slashdot Co
Get rid of Steve Ballmer. His leadership skills are nil and his management skills are from the 50's. Send him on his way and turn MS over to someone with a FORWARD-looking vision.
"neither Microsoft's growth nor its profits are what they were like when Gates was at the helm."
Isn't this because people started to see just what Microsoft was up to?
Having to pay to upgrade the operating system every two or three years (which is what Microsoft would have liked).
Having to pay for new hardware in order to run the new operating system.
Having to pay to upgrade Microsoft Office every two or three years or be unable to open newer documents.
For a few years people were blindly paying out to keep up with new technology, until they suddenly realised they were spending too much with very little gain, purely in order to keep Microsoft afloat.
People used to think that operating systems and software were expected to crash multiple times each day. It was at the point when Linux and Open Source software was in the mainstream news that people realised that security and stability could be achieved.
People have become wise, and they're no longer just accepting everything Microsoft produces as 'normal'. Microsoft has had to work overtime in order to overcome this.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Well, I must say I have made more money in Msft stocks than any other. Its a golden rule that everyone knows - Buy msft below $25 and sell(or short) it above $28. Really, the stock price now-a-days has a lot to do with speculation and short-ratio than other fundamentals
... or is Bill Gates gone because Microsoft was tanking? Gettin' out when the gettin's good....
--- What?
Bill Gates left Ballmer in charge when he knew Microsoft would do poorly?
Gates is doing more good with his own money than most of our governments are doing with ours
More importantly, he's choosing to do it out of his own will, quite unlike the situation where government takes money from some people (by force) and distributes it to other people (while keeping a cut for themselves). The two scenarios can't even realistically be compared, because one is voluntary and the other coercive.
This is TRUE altruism, not forced altruism (which of course really isn't altruism at all).
You may not remember, but back in the day, before Windows Mobile was called Windows Mobile, they competed on quality on it as well. Their main rival, Palm, stagnated for years rehashing the same products and Microsoft swooped in and ate their lunch.
With Palm dealt with, Microsoft then went on to do what they do, and stagnated Windows Mobile until someone else came along and ate their lunch.
Does he work at Google now? ... * ducks a chair *
Bill Gates is a geek, Steve Balmer is a salesman. Microsoft (a technology company) is tanking because it's being run by middle management now, while previously it was run by geeks. Expect the same thing from Google eventually, and Apple when Steve Jobs leaves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It would be pretty fun to watch a return of the Bill and see if he could rescue the company.
"Men willingly believe what they wish." - Julius Caesar
I personally was hoping that Microsoft would at last become of benefit to the computer community. Bill Gates consistently corrupted the computer community in his favor. Having him gone was potentially the moment for positive change at Microsoft. Instead Microsoft fell into the all too common pit of hell known as 'Marketing As Management'. There is no more efficient way to destroy a company than to put marketing into the position of management, which is exactly what Microsoft have with Steve Ballmer. Until such time as Microsoft put someone with an entrepreneurial spirit at the top, expect decline.
Maybe sometime in 1998 he decided that he had "won" whatever his goal was, evaluated the methods he had used to win, and decided to spend the rest of his days doing penance. Perhaps his first humanitarian endeavor was to pull the teeth of the monster he had created and set it on a course of eventual destruction, for the good of progress. So he depletes the huge cash arsenal with special dividends, demands the company pay out much of its profits in dividends and fritter away the rest. Then, just to be sure, appoints the guy most capable of destroying a company that turns a billion dollars a month in profits he can find to replace him.
Then he set about getting rid of the resulting vast personal wealth in the least harmful way he can find - no mean trick in and of itself.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
HP didn't buy Palm and Dell isn't selling Android slates because they want a better deal on Windows. If they want to live they have to compete with Apple, so they must break free of Microsoft's control no matter how hard their arm is twisted.
It's not the money. It's the control that's Microsoft's milkshake. Apple is indeed drinking it - drinking it up.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Nice to hear from you folks in Cupertino. How's the weather in the valley today?
Now if I were an investor (oh that's right, I am) I'd be shorting AAPL for sometime early next year. Am I? I'm not saying. :-)
Did you miss where they discontinued XP despite the fact that Netbooks couldn't run their new OS? Leaving them no way to sell into the whole market until they reversed this incredibly stupid decision?
Oh I saw that. But the "skill" part was that they in fact DID reverse that decision, instead of sticking to it. Skill doesn't mean you never make mistakes - to the contrary, skill is in part being able to come back from stupid mistakes rapidly and to your benefit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, let's take a look at that second link of yours. In July 2009, the market share of the three major versions of Windows listed was 91.72%. In May 2010, it was 90.48%.
Meanwhile, Linux dropped from 1.05% in July 2009 to 0.94% in August, then managed to climb to 1.13% by May 2010 for a 20% growth rate in 9 months. OS/X went from 3.44% to 4.3% for a 25% growth in 10 months. Even the category of Other rose from 3.78% to 4.09% (~8% growth).
So, relevance based upon a trend line moving visibly upwards? I don't think Microsoft Windows qualifies. Still dominating, yes, which most certainly makes that OS relevant. But I think Microsoft has plenty of reason to be worried about how relevant they'll be in the future when the others are growing so fast.
Sony and Nintendo bend Microsoft over a chair and take turns having their way.
are you sure? xbox recently overtook both PS3 and Wii in market share, although they are all very close.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/slideshow/npd-console-marketshare,0101-243018-0-2-3-1-jpg-.html
the hardware itself is a money sink, as it is for other console vendors. they make $ on games / licensing / peripherals / online services.
Apple's big run started with the iPod on October 23, 2001, about the same time that Microsoft released Windows XP. Since then Apple has release a bunch of iDevices, upgrades to their core line of computers, and a handful of other products many of which have been very successful in the consumer market. Microsoft however operates in both the business and consumer market, and saying that they have been sitting and twiddling their thumbs on their Windows and Office empire for the last 10 years would be incorrect. In the same amount of time Microsoft has released:
Not to mention large investments in online search, software as a service, and cloud computing. With the exception of their Online Services Division (MSN, Bing, Hotmail, advertising) Microsoft makes significant income from each of their product divisions and has more than twice the income that Apple does. Many of their business products are doing very well, and Sharepoint recently became their latest billion dollar sales product.
I will admit that Apple's products are more popular than Microsofts, but that is because they are tailored to the consumer market. Most business uses Microsoft because it costs less and makes users more productive. I personally think that the Zune HD and Windows 7 are great consumer products, and the Windows Phone 7 is designed to compete with the iPhone as opposed to the Palm OS for Windows Mobile, so it will be interesting to see how the next 10 years progresses.
Balmer does not assimilate chairs. I don't know what the suffix "imilate" means, but what he does with chairs is not related to the ass in any way.
Well,way down yonder in redmondville,
Lived a cat named big bad bill,
I wants to tell ya,
Ah the cat was rough and tough and would strutt his stuff
Had the whole campus scared to death,
When he walked by they all held their breath,
He’s a fighting man, sure enough
And then bill got himself a Billion,
Now he's givin away Millions...
Big bad bill is sweet william now,
Philanthropy done changed him somehow,
He’s the man the town used to fear,
Now they all call him sweet pappa willie dear,
Stronger than samson I declare,
Til Warren Buffett bobbed his hair
Big bad bill don’t code any more,( no he don’t )
Saving Africa, mopping up after the UN(yes he is )
Well he used to go out geeking,
Wantin to be right,
Now he gotta see that portfolio statement, everynight,
Big bad bill is sweet william now
Ah play it boys.
Yes of course, that's perfectly logical. All the investors know the stock price was over inflated for a company that's merely "profitable".
Companies likely need some new form of governance or stock incentives that prevents short term thinking. A successful approach is if executives options vest only years after they depart the company. Another approach would be dividing the board into two houses, one elected by the investors, and one elected by the employees. Another might be some form of deliberative democracy for validating the board's decisions, like say trials where random employees are jury members, and different opinions on the board are the advocates.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
If Gates sees the company going downhill that much he will be back. Gate is a business genius and a true geek his business sense rivals that of the greats. No doubt he could help the company by a return and another run as CEO.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
This article is exceptionally vague. The declines in revenue over the last year or two are a couple of percentage points, and there were declines from 2005-2006 too when Gates was at the helm.
Nothing moves straight up forever. To have your revenue fall a couple Billion to $60 Billion is certainly a problem I'd like to have.
Microsoft doesn't get nearly as much a cut of the games as Sony and Nintendo do, especially Nintendo. Indeed, Nintendo has an iron fisted grip around their publishers because they own so much of the market. They couldn't do so otherwise, unless they decide to pull a Texas Instruments and become suicidal over principles.
It's only since last year that the XBox division came out in the black. It's a money pit for Microsoft, who can afford to subsidize it with the amount of cash they have on hand. Indeed, if you look at 2009's 4th quarter, where the Entertainment division was all to itself, it posted an operating loss (real loss), but in 2010, you see Entertainment grouped with Devices in the earnings reports. The earnings reports are no longer as broken down now as they used to be. This allows for Microsoft to hide the losses and subsidizing better - buying a Microsoft mouse or keyboard subsidizes the entertainment (Xbox) division.
If the Xbox division had to sink or swim on its own, it would have sunk before the 360 came out.
--
BMO
4) Office suites: As far as I can tell, Microsoft generates a huge proportion of their profits from the never-ending cycle of Office upgrades. As Open Office becomes ever more competitive and in certain areas (eg the lack of ribbon, the ability to open previous Microsoft doc formats more reliably) even more attractive than the expensive Microsoft suite, that profit is threatened. Even worse, because of this the customer lock-in to Microsoft Windows is further reduced, when customers realise that they can run Open Office on other platforms too.
5) Browsers: OK so Microsoft don't generate much profit from selling IE, but the rise of Firefox's popularity is further weakening the customer lock-in to Microsoft OS. More and more of the commonly-used software can be run on non-Microsoft desktops, and for many customers, the cost of retraining from XP to Vista or XP to 7 is not much different from the retraining cost from XP to non-Microsoft OS.
5 versions of the .Net Framework = what profits?
2 generations and 6+ versions of Xbox = what profits when it cost them billions to create and in one year they had to write of something like $3 Billion just for Ring of Death heating issues. Profits? really?
4 generations of Zune = what profits? Again, nothing.
2 major desktop and 2 major server updates = most of their profits. OK but are you kidding me by counting Vista? Forced OEM pre-loading is all that got but yes, they took in money for that.
You can't tell me they are making money off of 4 Mobile/Embedded upgrades when they lost over $10 billions and it's probably close to $15 billion in the last 10+ years of that product. MSN, BING and probably Hotmail all are money losing ventures too.
So their desktop OS, their server OS, along with their desktop OS tied Microsoft Office and Microsoft server based server software( all PC based ) are their income makers. The only new comer was the Sharepoint stuff and they purchased that and it was profitable then IIRC.
From the looks of it, Microsoft is still pretty much tied to the desktop while other companies like Apple and Google have created profitable revenue streams during the recession.
Do investors really want to wait another 10 years to see if Microsoft can come up with something not tied to the desktop and actually make money off it? As you said twice, Microsoft continues to design its software to compete with what others have already invented and created a market for. Following used to work on the desktop because they could throw their weight around and entice vendors to install their software. That does not work outside of the desktop PC world. The world we live in today and into the future. There is no historical data to show Microsoft even has a chance since they've never done that before and made money at it.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I think that's more likely. Exponential growth always saturates at some point. The entire GDP of the world will never be spent entirely on Windows.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Under threat how? While OSS will continue to grow in the business space, the biggest gains have already been made. Most of the companies that would ditch Unix for Linux have already done so..
Post proof. Otherwise, the assertion stands, that the biggest gains to be made in growth of OSS have yet to be made, by companies which do not yet exist!
Most of the companies which would run Linux are start-ups with no infrastructure investment in either Unix OR MSx.
Companies that run Windows Server are generally satisfied with it...
For values of "any universe" in which "any universe" != the one in which all of us actually live day-to-day. I've never seen OR heard a
conversation involving someone belowe CTO level, wherein a person who actually worked with Windows Server claimed they were
"at least passably" satisfied with the product. Never. Feel free to post your qualifications, experience with the Windows Server product
and support, and state that you are at least "generally satisfied" with it, if you wish to increment this beyond zero.
I think the Billy the Borg icon needs a replacement.
I think it would be better to have an animated gif of Ballmer going buck wild on stage
WOOOOOOOOO! YEEEEEAHHHH!!!
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
A nonprofit affiliate of my company received a Gates grant that included funding for a new Web site. We hired a consulting firm who built us a nice site in Drupal running on LAMP. We were never told we had to use Windows, avoid open source, or really anything at all about our technology choices.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
All of the things the article mentions have almost nothing to do with Bill being or not being at MS.
What the guy did, however, was to have good timing. He stepped out at the top. He will always be remembered as the one who made MS great, and Ballmer will always be remembered as the guy who brought it down. I wonder if he knew and if he made them pay extra for that.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You, sir....
..
umm
\ .
JUNK?
are a raving loonie.
.
- aqk
F U
MS used to be an engineering company. BillG was a deadly combination of engineer, and ruthless businessman. SteveB isn't. Marketing and business people run the outfit now, and PC technology has stagnated. There was a time when MS teams had the option of building something cool, and Sales would sell it. Now Sales people promise a product X with features A-Z on schedule M, and engineering isn't even in the room. We used to do great things. Remember Flight Simulator? Force-feedback joysticks? Multi-mon? DirectX? UPnP? Net Meeting? Photo Draw? Ten years ago, we got things done. We brought a Kick-Add OS to market (W2K), we introduced a revolutionary API (.NET). Anymore it's all derivative. The next rev of Office, woo hoo! Oh, a new rev of Sharepoint. Awesome! Shipping what Vista should have been 3 years ago. Laying off 5000, and the following year Apple introduces a game-changing platform. Where is Win7-tablet-on-ARM?
The only innovation I'm seeing now is MS open-source projects like MVC2 and MEF. Those guys get it, and innovation is theirs.
That seems to be only sales in given month, not "marketshare" (no way there would be 20% swings on a monthly basis); highly deceiving.
And hardware is never a money sink for Nintendo, even right after launch.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I have no desire to ever live in Florida or Texas. You can have them, not me...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
they've booted windows out of their office...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
I rather think I did. (Lord Vetinari)
Over the past fifteen years I have known various Microsofties. Whenever the Apple/Microsoft "conflict" was discussed they would laugh and point out that the biggest selling applications on the Macintosh platform were (and still are) Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. If the discussion got techy and they were feeling nasty they might mention NeXT.
I do think the pocket is the next great computing frontier. While Microsoft has been messing about for a good decade without producing anything spectacular, I think this was less due to any shortcomings of Microsoft than to it being an idea for which neither technology nor the buying public was ready. I notice none of the Apple fanbois has mentioned the Newton. Stylish and overpriced like everything else Apple peddles, it fell slightly short of the mark in every way. Don't bother to contradict me, this is the voice of experience. I had one and adored it, but the only thing it was really good for was making a space in people's minds for something that couldn't be built, like Leonardo da Vinci's submarines and helicopters.
Times changed. Now you can buy (commercial qty prices)
Giving you a bill of materials cost for iPhone equivalent hardware of about $180. Since retail price for a typical consumer product is nearly always four times the cost of manufacture, I would expect an iPhone to retail for $800 - which is pretty much what they do cost. (If you think all these prices are wrong then you probably live in another country.)
The Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series has almost exactly the hardware spec I describe above. It's basically an iPhone, except that unlike Apple, Microsoft is all but giving the development tools away. Microsoft is commoditising phones, just as they did to PCs twenty years ago. I don't know about you but I rather like that idea.