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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
While what you said has a lot of merit, there are obviously other contributing factors as well.
Windows failed to advance for a long time while other alternatives DID progress.
Windows was plagued by a slew of very public security "whoopses."
The MS alternatives came up with some great marketting and sales lines that pulled a lot of people away.
I'm sure other people could add plenty to this list.
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.
It doesn't help that Microsoft is giving people plenty of reasons to switch to competitors though. Not upgrading their flagship browser for 10 years was a big mistake. Taking so long between XP and Vista, and then Vista being a flop was a big mistake. If Microsoft wants to stay at the top, they should constantly be releasing real upgrades to their products, to keep pace with how all the other guys are doing it. There's no reason they couldn't release a new version of Windows ever year, charge $50, and have everybody upgrade. The current model of, wait 3 or 4 years between versions, and charge $300 for it doesn't work, because nobody wants to drop $300 all at once, and they also don't want to have to buy a new computer, to get the price discounted.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
still allowed to pedal Microsoft software
"peddle", not "pedal".
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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.
No. He got 10,000 hrs of computer programing time before he finished college, he was well connected, well educated, was in the right place at the right time and he was a bully. The total package is nothing like luck. Luck is only one limiting factor for growth, to become the richest man on earth you need a shit load more than luck.
p.s. On a side note MS needs to fire Balmer. He was OK when being a bully was effective, but that time is gone.
p.p.s PAY A FUCKING DIVIDEND YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER.
Microsoft managed to get itself into a monopoly position while the PC market exploded.
Not exactly; there's more to it. Before IBM PC came on the market, there were a lot of competing PCs from different companies. All of them had proprietary busses, proprietary OSes, proprietary BIOSes. Although many if not most had variations of CP/M, you couldn't buy a CP/M program and expect it to run on any but one make of computer.
Then IBM came into the scene with what IBM considered a toy, and after being rebuffed by the top CP/M guy went to one of its lawyer's children, Bill Gates, who bought an OS and tweaked it to work on IBM's machine. Microsoft had already been shipping BASIC to many computer manufacturers.
Back then the battle cry was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" and all the other companies* went out of business. Gates wisely held on to copyright on his OS, then named PC-DOS, rather than letting IBM get it. Then a few years later, Compaq reverse engineered and legally cloned the IBM BIOS, which allowed it to run Gate's OS, now named MS-DOS. This was before very many people had computers in the home, but PCs were saturating offices everywhere. Compaq came out with a PC that used the much faster 386 chip when IBM was still using 286s, and ate IBM's lunch.
IBM unwisely decided to ditch DOS and use its own in-house offering OS2, which bombed badly.
So it didn't exactly get itself into a monopoly position, it actually inherited its monopoly from IBM.
people are realizing there are options.
No, just us nerds. Non-nerds I know are amazed when I tell them there are not only options, but virus-free, more secure options that cost nothing.
* Except Apple, because it had gotten a foothold in the schools and graphics houses before the IBM PCs were capable of graphics.
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