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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, kind of a no brainer here. Growth at a large company in a mostly saturated and slow-growing market during a recession is less than growth of a mid-size company in a largely uncontested and growing market during an economic boom. My god, it's the end of the world, sell all your MS stock!
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
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.
your not thinking like an investor.
Are they growing by more than 8% per quarter! then they are FAILING!
Screw this long term planning stuff, strip R&D, lay off most of your developers and outsource your coding to a cheaper country. We need you to show much improvement next quarter, so my stock will go up a point or two!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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.
As an outsider to investment, it seems to me like this happens a lot with large public companies. It appears that investors get really upset when profits this year are less than profits last year (even if profits are huge) and they encourage the company to start sacrificing long-term stability for short-term income.
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.
"Without him, that voice of command is gone and none too soon as the core software and business model itself are under threat from OSS."
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. Companies that run Windows Server are generally satisfied with it... the server platform was never the problem at MS, the desktop was, particularly Vista. And open source doesn't have a chance in hell of threatening Microsoft on the desktop. The biggest potential threat there is a resurgent Apple, especially on the consumer side, but increasingly on the business desktop for smaller organizations.
The fact is, for large enterprises, there really isn't an alternative to Windows on the desktop, and Microsoft knows it. And Linux certainly isn't a threat there, that's for sure. This whole "OSS is about to rule" thing is just another silly variant of "this is the year of Linux on the desktop!"... it's the Duke Nukem Forever of software fantasies.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
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.
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
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.
I think OP seriously overestimates the threat of OSS of the desktop, but has a point of sorts. I see three major threat vectors affecting MS right now, and it's losing ground on all of them. Two it's losing ground slowly and may recover, the third it's already come closing to losing entirely.
1) Enterprise Data center: MS is losing ground to OSS here. Apple has made some small inroads, but basically this is Microsoft vs various Linuxes. They are not being pummeled by any means, but definite inroads are being made, and MS is slowly losing ground. This is bad because MS thrives on its ecosystem. You buy MS servers because they integrate so well with other MS servers and the MS desktops. If you have fewer MS servers then the need for more MS server seems less pressing. Then there's the:
2) Desktop: Obviously at the moment OSS is a minimal threat here, but Apple is more serious. They are making serious threats on the consumer side, and once people become used to it at home they ask about it at work. As things stand now, it's mostly smaller businesses that go for Apple on the desktop, or switch partially, but I've seen Macs creeping in larger businesses too (I used to do work with a Fortune 50 Aerospace company that had buckled and allowed some Macs for video editing in our facility). As bits of the data center go OSS, Macs become less of a liability too. Changes made to accommodate Unix based servers work just as well for Apple's Unix desktops. Installed an AD to OpenLDAP translator for the new web server? Oh look, Macs can auth against OpenLDAP. Again, Apple isn't anywhere close to "winning" on the desktop, but they're making inroads.
3) Mobile platforms: This is where MS is losing big time to Apple and Google (and RIM, and possibly a couple kids with tin cans and a string). This is a pretty serious problem IMO, because this is the next platform. I see mobile platforms, tablets and phones, doing what laptops did 10 years ago and desktops did 10 years before that. Taking over. Not to say that there won't still be laptops, and in the medium term it might even help desktops, but I've already found that my laptop is a bit redundant because of my iPhone. Last trip I went on, I didn't even take it out of the bag. Next time I'm debating leaving it at home. If Microsoft can't own this space, they're going to be in trouble. Not, "OMG they're going out of business" trouble, but growth will become mostly a thing of the past in the next decade.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Making tons of money doesn't mean they have a future. IBM was in the same position.
Yeah, it's a real shame about IBM, especially how they evaporated into obscurity and powerlessness. I miss them.
No, wait, what?
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