Will Ballmer Be Replaced As Microsoft CEO?

Strudelkugel writes "The Beast reports unhappiness with Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft: Sources say the talk around Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters — which has grown increasingly loud ever since Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization — is that the company's stock suffers from a 'Ballmer discount,' and that the CEO is on the clock to significantly move the needle on its share price over the next two or three quarters or face a potential move to oust him. 'Ballmer is on the list of mega-executives under pressure,' says a banker who has negotiated deals for Microsoft. 'If he was asked to leave the building, I suspect there would be more happy than unhappy people.'"

Comments

the Balminator

[KernelMuncher]

He threw a chair at one of his staff. What's he going to do when they come to fire him ? Throw an entire office set ?

Re:the Balminator

[ZeroExistenZ]

What's he going to do when they come to fire him ? Throw an entire office set ?

He'll cash in his layoff-bonus he surely has somewhere on contract, and start up something of his own.

Microsoft will flourish again with all the young idealistic minds working hard and get slowly more solid and standard-comliant, but wont get so much back into the front-game.

Balminator, on the other hand, will be very loud with his "next new best thing" and go after Apple's marketshare. Ultimately, he'll end up as a lonely old but relatively rich man and being moderatly successful in the furtniture durability testing-industry.

Re:the Balminator

[Anonymous Coward]

And you have a bright career ahead of you as a beta-tester for companies that write spell-checking software.

Re:the Balminator

[ZeroExistenZ]

And you have a bright career ahead of you as a beta-tester for companies that write spell-checking software.

I have copywriters, websales, marketting and a legal department for that.
And most certainly for content in my 4th language.

Now, you can judge me on my code as it's my field of expertise ;)

Re:the Balminator

[MemoryDragon]

Sorry to say that but Microsoft wont change too much, it is almost in the stage of an engineering driven corporation.

First stage: Founders and young engineers develop products

Second stage: Founders and young engineers drive the company to a corporate status and have a good sense of what has to come, corporation becomes successful (Google is there currently) and dominating

Third stage: MBAs and sales guys take over more and more, engineers are leaving en masses as soon as possible or give up internally to develop something amazing, company is still thriving with new products from the back catalog and the left talented engineering force which becomes smaller and smaller and is replaced by mediocre people

Fourth stage: Company is entirely MBA driven, engineers are seen as commodity and work is more and more outsourced, product development is miserable and often behind the competition, the company becomes more and more like a bank (Microsoft today), depending on the business and assets built up in the initial stages this state can last for decades.

Fifth stage: Company either folds or becomes slowly a bank with some other assets which are dropped if they are not profitable enough (Siemens and others which are on their way out of engineering)

Re:the Balminator

[jgagnon]

Arguing with AC is like arguing with yourself. Even when you win, you lose.

Re:the Balminator

[MoeDrippins]

Where is IBM in this continuum?

Re:the Balminator

[Anonymous Coward]

...so where would you see Intel in this (rather interesting) timeline analysis?

Re:the Balminator

[Anonymous Coward]

OR...

They can be like Bosch

Sorry to say that but Microsoft wont change too much, it is almost in the stage of an engineering driven corporation.

First stage: Founders and young engineers develop products

Second stage: Founders and young engineers drive the company to a corporate status and have a good sense of what has to come, corporation becomes successful (Google is there currently) and dominating

Third stage: MBAs and sales guys take over more and more, enginhttp://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/26/1425244/Will-Ballmer-Be-Replaced-As-Microsoft-CEO#eers are leaving en masses as soon as possible or give up internally to develop something amazing, company is still thriving with new products from the back catalog and the left talented engineering force which becomes smaller and smaller and is replaced by mediocre people

Fourth stage: Company is entirely MBA driven, engineers are seen as commodity and work is more and more outsourced, product development is miserable and often behind the competition, the company becomes more and more like a bank (Microsoft today), depending on the business and assets built up in the initial stages this state can last for decades.

Fifth stage: Company either folds or becomes slowly a bank with some other assets which are dropped if they are not profitable enough (Siemens and others which are on their way out of engineering)

Re:the Balminator

[MemoryDragon]

Between stage 4 and 5... ibm is already on a slow road down...

Re:the Balminator

[MemoryDragon]

Three and four Intel never got that excessive MBA crowd for now.

Re:the Balminator

[MoeDrippins]

Mm. I ask because IBM's been around SO LONG, and they still seem to have a hell of an engineering presence.

Re:the Balminator

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting points, and certainly catches a lot of companies. The only thing I'd like to add, is that from the inside, it feels like Google is approaching stage three very quickly.

Re:the Balminator

[Alex Belits]

Not really. IBM just had a relatively modest computer engineering company in the guts of a massive IT services conglomerate.

Re:the Balminator

[DowdyGoat]

Balminator, on the other hand, he'll end up as a lonely old but relatively rich man and being moderatly successful in the furtniture durability testing-industry.

Yeah, but he's currently worth $13.5 billion--even without a good-bye bonus (which I'm sure would be tens of millions). Ballmer is currently the 33rd richest person on the planet. He's not "relatively" rich--he's in the very top crust. And with money like that, it doesn't disappear quickly.

Re:the Balminator

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh
top poster
top poster
from fuckin' whence dost thee come?

From a gutter or brothel
From a ghetto or slum?

Or more truly are you just
Too far over the hill
To understand that top posting
Is a total buzzkill?

Re:the Balminator

[Anonymous Coward]

Mm. I ask because IBM's been around SO LONG, and they still seem to have a hell of an engineering presence.

My brother works for IBM as a consultant for over 5 years now. What he has to tell me is sortof depressing:

The latest years they are more into consulting and are laying off people, or give employees reasons to leave (train consultants, disallow training and benefits for internals) and have become maintenance drones with insane procedures. ("I have to call before plugging in a cable, which has to go through a flow of 5 people who approve. Before I can plug in the cable, we've passed a week.")

There's been rumoured for years they'll be moving most of their datacenters to Africa (and have been doing case-studies how to virtualize everything to make it possible with a switch of a button) and slowly drain EU-presence.

No wonder people are running there, or are trying to get retrained and reoriented.

Re:the Balminator

[Anonymous Coward]

We've got the chair throwing reference...now we just need to include sharks, lasers, a car reference, ???, and profit ... and we'll have a royal flush.

Re:the Balminator

[MemoryDragon]

There is not too much engineering going on at Big Blue anymore... IBM is on its way out of the business they deal mostly with consulting nowadays. Engineering is mostly still kept alive as legacy ivory tower and safety net if consulting does not work out anymore.
The big hardware business is not IBMs core business anymore, IBM does what MBAs understand best, they do pointless consulting mostly.
I personally think there will not be an IBM anymore in 30 years if they do not change their course.

Re:the Balminator

[MemoryDragon]

It really depends on how fast the MBA middle management can get in and slow down things. It is really that once the engineering focus is lost and the MBA guys have marched in things change and definitely not to the better.
Things move from an engineering driven place to a place of politics and forms with engineering being a pestillence which has to be silenced and tamed...

Re:the Balminator

[yuhong]

I know, I has said that board of directors should stop defaulting to MBAs for a while now.

Not Surprising

[Nerdfest]

I find it amazing that he's lasted this long. The man has a bit of a history as a public relations problem.

Re:Not Surprising

[beakerMeep]

Seems they have had some decently grand failures too as of late. WP7 looks almost dead out of the gate, Kin was dead out of the gate and they killed Courier before ever seeing the gate. Couple that with continual loss of browser share versus Firefox, and you have some pretty bad failures. While Windows 7 did well I think many havent forgotten how badly Vista sold. Now, being MS I'm sure they had quite a few spectacular failures over the years but it seems they are pretty inept at reading the marketplace as of late. Though they seem to be doing OK with Xbox.

Still, the thing that bums me is that Courier could have been so great.

/speculation

Re:Not Surprising

[UnknowingFool]

Though they seem to be doing OK with Xbox.

In terms of marketshare, Xbox is a success. In terms of finances, Xbox is a failure. It has been profitable for a few quarters but has yet to pay back the $7-8 billion spent over the lifetime of the product. Most companies would have declared bankruptcy or killed a money-losing product. But as CEO, this is a decision he has not made.

Re:Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the XBox is seen more as marketing that has the potential to make money.

Re:Not Surprising

[MBGMorden]

You have to remember though that the original Xbox was essentially not expected to turn a profit. Their goal was to use it as entry into the home console market. If you consider that as an end goal (rather than profits), then it was successful. It got Microsoft into a VERY difficult market. Look at all the companies that failed in that area, some with MUCH more experience in that domain: Sega, Atari, NeoGeo, NEC (TurboGrafx).

Microsoft broke into the market and has turned their unit profitable. As laughable as most people considered their first product, in North America Xbox360 is the de-facto standard console for traditional gamers (Wii is more profitable overall, but it targets a different market).

There's essentially no question that Xbox has been trending upwards the whole time. If they continue, then they'll make their money back overall.

Essentially, Xbox was loosing money at first, but is now profitable and trending up. Compare to Microsoft's other businesses: still profitable, but trending downwards, and it's easy to see which will work out better in the long run.

Re:Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Spend $8 billion to make $200 million a year 9 years later. ROI is pretty shitty don't you think?

MS willingly taking losses to gain market share = buying market share. No wonder stock is stagnant.

Re:Not Surprising

[interval1066]

This guy Ballmer hasn't shown me that he has any "vision", something that simply oozes out of Jobs. Ballmer and his team appear to constantly be playing "catch-up"; Apple trots out an mp3 player that becomes the rage of the info age, Ballmer says "ooh, I want that!" and they scrape together a brown thing that no one buys. Jobs presents the iPhone to a cheering crowd, now people ask me where my iPhone is (I don't have or want one), Ballmer is still trying to get his mobile acto together. They can't produce a successful, hip marketing campaign if Ballmer's mother's life depended on it, and haven't since those losing commercials Gates did with Sienfeld. Before even. Remember the Vista install "party" commercials? Holy crap. Maybe Microsoft simply needs to shake things up? They kind of did that over the spring, but two executives isn't really a shake-up.

Re:Not Surprising

[zach_the_lizard]

I don't really remember thinking that the original Xbox was laughable. The console of that generation that I thought was laughable was the GameCube; it gave me really low hopes for the Wii, until I played one. Perhaps the Kin disaster isn't foreshadowing what's to come; maybe it's just a misstep on the path to success. For the sake of MS, I hope so, because they will eventually be boxed into a small corner if they can't gain traction in the mobile market.

Re:Not Surprising

[tomhudson]

No, the original xbox was supposed to be the gateway to Microsoft being the centerpiece and rent-seeker of your home media center. Didn't work out that way. Too bad, so sad.

But this, like almost every failure in the last years, isn't Ballmer's fault - almost every one of these sucky projects was started under Gates.

Re:Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

The console of that generation that I thought was laughable was the GameCube

Speak for yourself, the Gamecube had a really great library of games for people who are into the kinds of titles that Nintendo produces. I always kinda viewed the original Xbox as a gaming PC for people who couldn't afford a gaming PC.

Re:Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep up, the old Zune is long gone. The brown thing no one buys has become a black glossy sleek beautiful responsive elegant thing that no one buys.

Re:Not Surprising

[UnknowingFool]

Essentially, Xbox was loosing money at first, but is now profitable and trending up. Compare to Microsoft's other businesses: still profitable, but trending downwards, and it's easy to see which will work out better in the long run.

While it is profitable now, even if you take out the original Xbox, the product line is still in the red overall even more so with the Red Ring of Death problems. At the current rate, it will take decades to pay back the original investment. As an investor, how much would you tolerate the company spending money only to get market share. Contrast that with the Wii which was also money losing at first but has since paid back the original investment.

Re:Not Surprising

[postbigbang]

You can still make money by not innovating, and sucking the blood and energy out of a marketplace that you don't own by doing it patiently. It takes Microsoft a half-dozen versions to get close to 'right'.

Then you put your heal on the throats of your OEMs, and banish them from the money kingdom if they don't tote the line. You pour FUD where possible, get sued successfully in many jurisdictions, and don't believe that anything you didn't think up could be any good.

The black-widow effect is famous for decades at Microsoft. Go back to 3Com.... SQL Server, even Windows then MS-DOS itself. There. Now let's see. Was Ballmer there when all of that stuff happened? Yes. Did he help architect the insanity of Windows code? No, that guy retired, and the people that drank the koolaid, like Allchin.

If Ballmer leaves, it's a good thing. Fresh blood, blocks of Microsoft as new business units, somebody taking all that cash and making astute acquisitions that would in a post-tracking stock era, pass the FTC and SEC and maybe even EU smell tests.

It's not like he needs any money..... or reputation.

Re:Not Surprising

[conares]

successful, hip marketing campaign

Seriously... is someone paying you to post here? No one talks like that....

- Jerry, we need a successful hip marketing campaign!
- Yes siree Bob!

Re:Not Surprising

[MBGMorden]

Speak for yourself, the Gamecube had a really great library of games for people who are into the kinds of titles that Nintendo produces.

I must agree with you. From a technical perspective, I felt Nintendo's choice to go with a limited capacity disc to be odd, but other than that, Gamecube's controller was fine, and hardware wise it certainly held it's own.

As a matter of fact Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is in my top 5 list of "best games I've ever played".

It's kind of weird but despite being a die-hard Nintendo fan over the years, the Wii was the first thing that I didn't buy. My brother has one. I've played it. There are a few fun games for it, but not enough to make me want to buy one. The only console I have from the latest gen is a 360. I'd LIKE to have a PS3 and Wii, but not at their current price points. I think I may buy them and play some of the back catalog whenever the next gen hits and the older consoles all get marked down.

Re:Not Surprising

[psbrogna]

That the ROI is abysmal is beyond a doubt. What's just as alarming to me is that they spent $8B. Successfully launching a new platform shouldn't take anywhere near that amount. Look around- people are doing embedded, non-MS O/Ses on all sorts of intriguing new platforms w/innovative new applications and spending a tiny fraction of what MS spent to get Xbox going. That's the way the industry should be - FOSS has served as a very effective catalyst for indy product development. I feel the tier 1 vendors have always resisted this sort of thing and done what they could to stifle it because it means the R&D / ROI cycle is much much faster then they want it to be. There's always some rock star cooking up something new in his garage that can threaten them and they can't reap as much profit off something new they took forever and spent a bundle to make happen.

Re:Not Surprising

[RoFLKOPTr]

Keep up, the old Zune is long gone. The brown thing no one buys has become a black glossy sleek beautiful responsive elegant thing that no one buys.

I bought one. I love it.

I was also using the Zune Pass long before I actually bought the Zune, and it left me wondering why people don't demand that kind of model from iTunes. You pay $15/mo and get unlimited (DRM-laden, but that's to be expected) downloads on nearly everything in their library. Some albums don't want to be downloaded for free, so they give you 10 song credits every month with which you can buy any song and receive it in DRM-free MP3. It really is a great deal. The software has absolutely no support for plugins and new visualizations like WMP does, but you can still listen to all your DRMed music with WMP if you must have support for that.

I hate sounding like I'm being paid to write this, but I think more people need to know about it so they can stop paying $1.29 for every song they want to listen to. In iTunes terms, I have about $3000 worth of music.

(Oh also, I was pirating all my music before I discovered the Zune Pass. Now it's so fucking easy to get new music and without the need for microtransactions that I pretty much stopped pirating cold-turkey.)

Re:Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

The Xbox is a disaster It's one huge joke everyone else except Amoreica, where dumb consumers they just buy what the media tells them to buy.

Re:Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

The trouble is that they've been able to rely on their monopoly position for too long. That safety net is faltering. It's only natural that they'd be off balance. Now that they have to compete by pushing quality products, they're in panic mode trying to figure out how to produce competitive products instead of the just barley good enough to work products that a monopoly allows for. They haven't a clue because it really has been a long time since they've done it.

The days where the fat man can just push products out as fast as he can while being loud and hyper are over. Sadly that's just about all he has ever amounted to.

Re:Not Surprising

[cowscows]

Well if he's really the guy in charge, why doesn't he drop some of that crap? It'd be one thing if Ballmer got the job 6 months ago, but it's been 10 years. Look what Google's accomplished since 2000. Look what Apple's gotten done. If Ballmer was going to get microsoft anywhere near the cutting edge again, we'd have seen some of it by now.

If he feels somehow tied down by Gates' legacy projects, then he either needs to get over it or be replaced by someone who's not glued to the past.

Re:Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

> They can't produce a successful, hip marketing campaign if Ballmer's mother's life depended on it,

You mean like this spoof? :-)

"If Microsoft designed the iPod"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=36099539665548298#

UnknownSoldier

--
Censorship (of breaking HDCP) is Intellectual Immaturity by another name

Re:Not Surprising

[poliscipirate]

You have to remember though that the original Xbox was essentially...

There's essentially no question...

Essentially, Xbox was loosing...

So essentially, essentially is an essential word... =D

Re:Not Surprising

[peragrin]

Your an idiot. Spending $180 a year for nothing. The day zune pass closes or you stop paying all your music is gone. You can never listen to it again. You signed up for unlimited nothing. Stop paying them and listen as your music stops.

At least with iTunes and amazon. If you cantafford to buy more music youcan listen to what you have already bought instead of losing it all.

Re:Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

> You have to remember though that the original Xbox was essentially not expected to turn a profit. Their goal was to use it as entry into the home console market. If you consider that as an end goal (rather than profits), then it was successful.

That seems a kind of revisionist statement - at the time, they were *willing* to lose money at first, but only because they wanted to dominate the market, thus making huge profits later. Generation 1, profits did not ensue. Generation 2, profits did not ensue. Both generations have basically been Microsoft bleeding money for the privilege of fighting over who gets to be the distant #2 console maker.

I should add that you can't really say those billions bought Microsoft some magical brand loyalty that will pay off later, either. Console gamers have notoriously little brand loyalty, as the past decades have demonstrated. What little loyalty MS gained in generation, they burned a lot of moving to generation 2 (the promised backwards compatibility wasn't good). They burned more potential loyalty with their horrible hardware failure rates. (I know ten or so people with 360s, and all of them have had at least one hardware failure. The current recordholder is on his eighth system. Eighth! None of them are buying whatever MS's next system is, not until it's been out in the wild a few years and proven to not die).

The occasional neat things the 360 does by being networked are, IMO, more of a liability than a brand loyalty guarantor. They're all things that need to transition perfectly to the next generation, or else Microsoft burns those users.

Re:Not Surprising

[Mongoose Disciple]

Actually, if you'd stop frothing at the mouth for a moment and read what he read, he said he gets 10 unDRM'd songs a month for his $15.

Which is more expensive than buying 10 songs on Amazon, but still invalidates pretty much everything you said.

Re:Not Surprising

[zzsmirkzz]

in North America Xbox360 is the de-facto standard console for traditional gamers

Citation please? I know of no such fact or any de-facto standard consoles. I know there are three current generation consoles; and depending on the gamer, they own one or more of them.

Re:Not Surprising

[JayWilmont]

Why does the market share matter if there are no profits? From what I have read Microsoft is still billions of dollars away from breaking even on their Xbox.

In contrast, when Apple broke into the smartphone market, they almost certainly made up all of their R&D costs within the first year, and is now very profitable in that market.

The markets are different, and traditionally consoles are loss-leaders in order to sell videogames but it has been 9 years since Microsoft entered the market.

Re:Not Surprising

[JayWilmont]

I agree. Ballmer keeps trying to beat others at their own game, and loosing.

Microsoft makes most of its money selling to businesses (Windows to OEMs, and Server software, Exchange & Office directly to companies). But they keep trying consumer projects like the Xbox (decent product but no profits after 9 years), PlaysForSure, Zune, Kin, Hotmail/MSN/Bing, etc. and are being beaten by Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Google and others.

You would think somebody within Microsoft would realize that their strength isn't being a "cool" company, but rather one that businesses trust.

Re:Not Surprising

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention every time I hear or read about x360 I read all these guys bitching about the cost of getting into the market but missing the elephant in the room: Integration. Remember awhile back the video of Ballmer screaming "Developers developers developers"? The x360 keeps them developing in the MSFT family and away from the other guy's products. "Hey, got an x360? It is trivial to stream video with Windows Media Center!" It makes it easier to port games between X360 and Windows, etc etc.

As much as I think Ballmer is an asshole (of course I think Jobs, Gates, and Ellison are assholes too) the man has had a plan for a number of years and despite fumbles have been sticking to it. Why do you think they have WMC in Windows HP, instead of selling it as a separate edition like with XP? Because he knows the future isn't so much in the home office as it is in the entertainment center. By pushing the x360 as the center of that entertainment center not only can MSFT make money off of games and licensed third party products, they can help push their other products by having streaming video and other features connect easily to the 360.

So while I think he ultimately needs to give up on the non corporate smartphone/PMP market, because frankly Jobs will just spank him, Apple hasn't really been able to get a real foothold in the entertainment center with products like AppleTV like they have with iPod, so it is a smart move. We'll just have to wait and see whether he is able to pull it off or not. But I wouldn't be surprised if Ballmer is ousted if they spin off the x360 division and bring in one of the office guys and change the focus to strictly Windows+Office. The only question with that strategy is where else can MSFT go, when they already own those markets.

Re:Not Surprising

[RoFLKOPTr]

Your an idiot. Spending $180 a year for nothing. The day zune pass closes or you stop paying all your music is gone. You can never listen to it again. You signed up for unlimited nothing. Stop paying them and listen as your music stops.

At least with iTunes and amazon. If you cantafford to buy more music youcan listen to what you have already bought instead of losing it all.

You're an idiot for responding in a fit of rage without actually reading (or at least comprehending) what I wrote. I get 10 DRM-free MP3s every month included in the $15/mo subscription and can download and listen to as many DRM-laden songs as I want. I can also log in online on any computer and listen to music there (though it could be a little better-integrated with the client... I'd like to have my playlists online for instance).

If Zune Pass ever shuts down, I still keep every song I bought with money or with the song credits... and what I downloaded on the subscription I will probably just start pirating again since they obviously don't want my money.

Re:Not Surprising

[zuperduperman]

the original xbox was supposed to be the gateway to Microsoft being the centerpiece and rent-seeker of your home media center

That is what I always thought but have always been mystified by why if that was their strategy they didn't stick a tv tuner in there? I think if they just added tv tuner + composite video input and let the damn thing record it would have been the complete system for the living room and competed in a different space to the other consoles. As it is, it's just "another console". I would have bought a box for my living room in a heartbeat if I could watch and record TV on it. In fact, I did - but it's not an xbox it is a small form factor Win7 pc running media center.

Re:Not Surprising

[toadlife]

I've read about zune pass and would sign up in an instant if I didn't have to buy a dedicated music device. My music device is my Windows Mobile phone (Touch Pro 2), and for some reason, Microsoft doesn't offer zune pass software for Windows Mobile.

WinMo users don't really have much of a choice (there is an Amazon music app for WinMo, but it offers no subscription service) in music apps, so offering zune pass to Windows Mobile users would instantly make them the only game in town. Yet, they don't. They've said they will offer zune-pass to WP7 users, but I don't get why they don't offer it to WinMo 6.x users until WP7 ships. It's as if they are trying to get as people as possible to switch to Android before WP7 ships.

Re:Not Surprising

[Swampash]

in North America Xbox360 is the de-facto standard console for traditional gamers (Wii is more profitable overall, but it targets a different market). Nintendo has sold 71 million Wiis last time I checked. That's almost two Wiis for every Xbox 360 sold - and Nintendo made a profit on every one of them. (PS: plus ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY NINE MILLION Nintendo DSs.) Xbox is a financial disaster, possibly the greatest clusterfuck in corporate history. It's just that Microsoft also has Windows and Office, which allow it to survive an epic fail like Xbox.

Re:Not Surprising

[tomhudson]

I'm not implying that Ballmer isn't equally responsible - just that Gates had his hand firmly on the tiller when it came to methodology, and he took someone who shouts just as much (among other things) - and unlike Gates mother Mary, Ballmer's mother doesn't sit in on meetings keeping her eye on her kid.

Re:Not Surprising

[rtb61]

The flies in the face of the original claims and marketing for the xbox. Ballmer made the claim it would dominate the market and generate huge revenues. The second version was an engineering failure based on readily stupid decision making.

Now M$ is er and umming about going back to focusing on PC gaming because that is the only thing that really drives the windows OS going forward (Android on mobile devices and Linux on servers and it's looks like Android and Linux will soon be 'harmonised')

Of course PC gaming is where they should have focused and made money right from the start instead of losing money.

M$ biggest failure, ie. Ballmers biggest failure is the money losing MSM. There are hundreds, thousands even tens of thousands of companies generating huge profitable revenues from the internet, M$ is the only company losing money. The whole search engine name double name change debacle was a pathetic attempt to finally generate an income from the internet in the end another failure.

All M$ has managed to do on the internet is steal other peoples ideas and laughably lose money doing it, really lame. That is what is destroying Ballmers rep, not just that the first OS under his control was a disaster and that most people hate the ribbon killing uptake of office upgrades.

Re:Not Surprising

[toddestan]

On the other hand, it's a pretty amazing deal compared to satellite radio, which costs about the same for one physical receiver, you don't get digital files at all, has no on-demand capabilities, the few portable players that exist have awful battery life, and the instant you stop paying it becomes a paperweight. It's actually a pretty good service for trying out various things and discovering new music.

Re:Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Ballmer's mother died, you insensitive clod!

Re:Not Surprising

[Lonewolf666]

You can still make money by not innovating, and sucking the blood and energy out of a marketplace that you don't own by doing it patiently. It takes Microsoft a half-dozen versions to get close to 'right'.

Then you put your heal on the throats of your OEMs, and banish them from the money kingdom if they don't tote the line. You pour FUD where possible, get sued successfully in many jurisdictions, and don't believe that anything you didn't think up could be any good.

Even if you disregard the "being sued successfully", that works only if you have a near-monopoly in the first place.

Microsoft could do that with Windows vs. Linux, because not getting a good deal on the OS with 90+% market share was sufficent to scare OEMs into toeing the line and dropping Linux. With XBOX vs. PS3 and Wii (for instance), that won't work because selling PS3s, Wiis and the games for them brings too much money. In other lines of business, Microsoft's market position is even weaker (mobile phones? AFAIK both Apple's iPhone and Android are ahead of the Microsoft products).

Re:Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Ballmer is a close personal friend of Bill Gates and was one before Gates and Allen founded MicroSoft. That's why he is still at MS.

It's not completely accurate but 'Pirates of silicon Valley' tells the early history of MS (and Apple) nicely.

Re:Not Surprising

[vuffi_raa]

I think that a lot of the failures you are listing certainly are situations where MS snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory, especially courier that could have been a fairly serious competitor to the ipad, for students and businesspeople you would have a device that was cool AND useful
they did accidentally piss in the fan when it came to vista but it seems like they have been purposely making their own screwups ever since then...

Ballmer Out, Dark Knight Radick in!

[DarkKnightRadick]

"Ballmer is on the list of mega-executives under pressure," says a banker who has negotiated deals for Microsoft. "If he was asked to leave the building, I suspect there would be more happy than unhappy people."

If he read /., he could state that as fact. :p

Re:Ballmer Out, Dark Knight Radick in!

[nschubach]

I'm not sure... Ballmer has done more for the "Microsoft driven by a crazy monkey" image than anyone. If they replace him with someone with a higher approval it may make a lot of unhappy people who would rather keep the lead weight at the top and bring Microsoft back down to the competitive arena.

Personally, I think the best thing all around would be to have Microsoft's market share crumble to less then 50% and promote more competition. With a competent CEO that may be a longer curve than leaving Ballmer in charge of the direction of the company.

Re:Ballmer Out, Dark Knight Radick in!

[MemoryDragon]

The problem is not Ballmer, the problem is generally the way they do business. Microsoft never was about invention it was about copying or buying the competition. This worked until the late 90s when most people were not exposed to the better competition. The game has changed now, and Microsofts problem still is the lack of innovation they still copy apple like they did the last 30 years but people know the original nowadays.
Add to that that Bill Gates despite his constant mispredictions had a good feeling where technology was heading or at least recognizing it before it was too late while Ballmer as the sales guy never had it, but also the upper and mid management does not seem to be in touch with that sense (probably an MBA thunking layer they built on top of engineering)

Microsoft simply has become what Bill Gates despised in the early 80s, the next IBM. Boring but there, earning lots of money, but not really that interesting anymore.

Re:Ballmer Out, Dark Knight Radick in!

[IICV]

How about we do like the Clinton DOJ proposed when Microsoft was found guilty of being a monopoly, and split it up into four parts? (IIRC they proposed three, but Microsoft has since added the XBox)

We'd have the Windows Operating System company, the Microsoft Office company, the Internet Explorer company, and the XBox Gaming company.

Microsoft is just too big. It seriously needs to be cut down to size, and if the MSFT executives aren't going to do that on their own then maybe we should re-start the antitrust case against them that the Bush DOJ quietly dropped.

Go read... Augustine

[Ancient_Hacker]

Not St. Augustine, Norman Augustine, ex-prez of many a big corporation. His book has dozens of interesting graphs, the most appropriiate one is a X-Y scatter graph of company president pay versus company stock. No visible correlation at all. When you get up to a certain level, you're mainly a figurehead.

Instead of developers... developers... etc..

[Anonymous Coward]

unemployment... unemployment... etc...

To be replaced by...?

[Just Some Guy]

I'm hardly a Ballmer fan, but what could he have done substantially differently? In my opinion, he inherited a pig with no obvious roadmap to future gains. He managed over the Kin debacle, sure, but he also managed the Xbox and that worked out pretty well.

I've read a thousand perfectly valid criticisms of Microsoft over the years, but I'm not sure that many of them can be traced back to Ballmer. For example, what changes could he have made to the Windows or Office lines to gain new growth instead of settling for trying to get current users to upgrade?

If anything, I think investors are expecting too much of Microsoft. Yes, it's somewhat stagnant. Of course it is! It already has something like 90% of the slow-growing PC market and roughly 100% of the "non-gratis office suite that runs on Windows" market. There's just not any growth left in MS's core competencies, and at least they're trying new stuff, even if the results are pretty embarrassing most of the time.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Zelgadiss]

The problem with the guy is he has practically no vision.

Most of what MS has been doing, ever since he took over, is playing catch up with Google and Apple.

For their investors, it's not enough that they try new stuff, the new stuff has to "work".

Re:To be replaced by...?

[FreonTrip]

A quick visit to Mini-Microsoft yields a lot of insight, especially in the comments thread. The management system's apparently poisonous and horrifically bloated, leading to lots of in-fighting and internecine political battles between rival divisions within the same company. Most employees also languish under a tiered review system that is overtly strict in its implementation and prone to misuse by the aforementioned management. I'm inclined to believe that a lot of promising developments are being sacrificed at the altar of upward career mobility for a largely administrative segment of the company, and that everyone else basically suffers and watches the rest of the world pull ahead.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[ooh456]

They should replace Ballmer with the guy who's running the Taliban in Afghanistan. I hear they're doing well lately.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Exitar]

"There's just not any growth left in MS's core competencies, and at least they're trying new stuff, even if the results are pretty embarrassing most of the time."

For a company of such size, they failed way too much in the new stuff they tried (Zune, Playforsure, Live Search, Vista, Kin...).
One could simply think that they're quite unable to come with something both new (or copied) and successful.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm hardly a Ballmer fan, but what could he have done substantially differently?

The three most obvious, from a commercial point of view, are probably (a) avoiding the whole Vista fiasco, (b) handling the release of the new Office UI better, and (c) not running so many loss-making divisions in the name of diversification.

Microsoft are in the business of making operating systems and office software, two products that almost everyone with a computer uses at some point. There is plenty that could be done to help people using these products to work more efficiently or enjoyably. That could legitimately drive both paid upgrades and, potentially, sales of back-end software and on-line services that support collaboration using those client-side tools.

But Microsoft aren't doing those things. They've had a catastrophic release for each of their main products, and in doing so, they have managed to kill the automatic upgrade cycle that has been their cash cow for a decade or more, with corporate IT types now seriously questioning why they should pay the Microsoft Tax and possibly upgrade their hardware as well every time a new release of Windows or Office comes along.

Not innovating merely requires laziness, but not innovating and killing a tried and tested business model that all but runs itself and has been successful for years? That requires serious talent at executive level, and the buck stops with the CEO.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[nine-times]

he also managed the Xbox and that worked out pretty well.

Except for losing out to the Wii, having a... what is it? 55% failure rate?

I'm not sure that many of them can be traced back to Ballmer.

When your in charge, lots of things trace indirectly back to you. Who did you hire, and who did you fire? Who didn't you hire, and who didn't you fire? What guidance did you give to your management team, and what guidance didn't you give? It's not just "What could he have done to make Windows/Office markets grow?" but "What other business opportunities did he fail to capitalize on while sitting on Windows/Office?" It's a whole wide world out there, with loads of opportunities.

I'm not saying that Ballmer is bad at his job. I honestly don't know enough to say, really, except from my perception of how Microsoft is doing. However, if you think Microsoft isn't doing as well as it should, then I think you have a hard time not blaming Balmer a little. He's in charge. If it's someone else's fault, he should have fired that person and replaced them.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so much what he actually has or hasn't done, I think it's more about the image. Ballmer has a poor image (even if profits are up) and that makes stockholders nervous. I've seen plenty of cases where two presentors get up in front of an audience and hand out the same info, but the audience will love one guy and hate the order. Ballmer is the guy everyone loves to hate.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[whoever57]

sure, but he also managed the Xbox and that worked out pretty well.

Did it? The entertainment division lost money last quarter. Has the Xbox actually made a net profit over its lifetime? By that, have the total profits on the Xbox paid for the total losses incurred over the years taking into account the cost of money?

The intent was to get the Xbox into the living room as an entertainment center. How's that working out?

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Monkeedude1212]

To say that Microsoft is trying new stuff is like getting your kids to eat Vegetables. Every one of their new products has been based off of something in their competitions line up - and the embarassing part is that the product ends up being WORSE than the competitor's somehow.

It's because Microsoft has been trying to mimick other companies. Apple has enough fanboys that it can produce a faulty product and still make money (See iPhone4), Microsoft however, doesn't have that kind of following behind it. Nobody is die hard Microsoft through and through so much that they would never try a droid.

If Ballmer is to be replaced, it should be by someone who will do 3 things:
Keep the focus on the PC. Windows 7 is nice, and is the OS that vista should have been, only a couple years late.
Develop an above average mobile OS. For someone with their size and their development team, its surprising that they lack in this regard. Every WinMobile release has been slow, laggy, and terribly designed.
Fix the entertainment budget somehow, without axing it. I don't know if its true or not, but I hear the 360 and it's market are not profitable, and are actually losing Microsoft money. I don't know if thats true, I don't know why'd they continue if it were, but it'd be nice if that made enough money to continue its growth.

Question is whether Ballmer can stop pushing products like Zune quick enough to not get outted.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

What has Microsoft done under Ballmer that could be considered a success.

Microsoft have invested heavily in the search business but have lost billions and continue to lose money without having any major impact on the market.

Microsoft's share of the smartphone operating system market has dropped from about 70% to 15%.

Far from "working out pretty well" and the first Xbox lost $5.5billion. The 360 is now making quarterly profits but is still in the red overall and at the current sales rate of the PS3 and 360 is set to finish in last place. Most investors want Microsoft to get out of consumer electronics completely and focus on software.

The Zune has failed to register.

Even in software their new products have failed badly and few people even know about things like Microsoft Expression Studio despite there being four versions over five years.

They're basically just living of the Windows and Office monopoly and everything else they do is a failure. XP still has over twice the number of users of Vista and 7 combined and early sales of Office 2010 have been "disappointing" according to NPD so things aren't exactly rosy in their two key monopolies.

As to what he could have done substantially differently I think the answer is anything but what he has been doing. He hasn't delivered a single success in the time he's been running the company but has delivered a multitude of failures.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[dzfoo]

>> It's a whole wide world out there, with loads of opportunities.

Oh, there's a lot of opportunities if you know when to take them, you know?
if there aren't you can make them--make or break them.

Money.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[TheRealFixer]

Really, though, the same could be said of any company that size and age. Very large companies nearly always, over time, develop into unwieldy mega-bureaucracies, comprised of individual fiefdoms solely concerned about their own headcount and perceived influence. They become microcosms of nations. They have well-defined class structures, their own culture, sometimes even their own currency internally.

Replacing Ballmer isn't going to change any of that. A new CEO might excite the board and top investors a little, perhaps shuffle some HR/management policies around a little. But in the end, the same issues that are inherent in being a company of that size are still going to be there.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Mongoose Disciple]

The intent was to get the Xbox into the living room as an entertainment center. How's that working out?

I'd say for the time in which Netflix was streaming on XBox and not yet on PS3/Wii, that was a pretty big coup in that department -- although I can't point to another one, and now the competitors have caught up.

Even when Microsoft actually does something new right, they can't seem to build any momentum off it. Whether that's in part Ballmer's fault or not I'm not sure.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[rev_sanchez]

They're being compared against Apple and that comparison is not going well for Microsoft. That isn't 100% fair as Microsoft's history of being primarily a software producer doesn't match up well with Apple's history of producing quite a lot of hardware but they're the 2 platform giants of personal computing and Microsoft has been throwing it's hat in the hardware arena lately.

Right now they seem intent on making poor copies of Apple's previous generation of products (Zune/iPod, Zune HD/iPod Touch, Zune Market Place/iTunes, Vista/OS X) and there's every sign that their Windows 7 phone software will follow the same pattern against the iPhone.

What they do have is business buy-in as the OS that runs all of their niche business apps on cheapish hardware but if cloud computing takes off and web apps become the norm for business then the winner will be Google because they're already pretty good at it and Microsoft is again playing catch-up.

Microsoft doesn't need more developers, it needs designers focused on the user experience and the next generation of personal computing. That's tough to do when your best customers are business who don't want the cost of teaching their users a new UI but if Microsoft doesn't do something they are in for the same slow, steady decline.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[jellomizer]

I think the fact that Ballmer bad PR is a big thing.

Early Microsoft it got Bill Gates who was considered the Wiz Kid who made it. The public liked it, and was willing to excuse any of Gates misspeaks as he was so young.

Then he got older and the general public (Sans the SlashDot and people who had interests in competitors) still like and respected Microsoft as it offered affordable software (Remember when Windows cost only $100).

Gates Jump ship when Microsoft was starting to suffer Gates wasn't the darling child anymore with the new Wiz Kids at Google, and Apple starting to come up with good products again.

Now with Balmer, he was generally a PR nightmare. His style is much like a 1980's infomercial which tries to get the crowd railed up, much like a cheerleader.

Microsoft needs a CEO who is much better at PR, who can Spin the Evil like Jobs does. And make us like Microsoft because we want to not because we are forced to.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Zelgadiss]

Don't think so.

MS is still making a hell load of money, it just that they aren't growing.
No reason to tear apart the company.

Changing out the currently water treading CEO for one who might be able to move the company forward on the other hand.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Pojut]

Sidestepping out of reality and into my own little world for a moment, this is one of the things that really bothers me about business.

The 360 HAS been succesful. Look at the various services it offers...Netflix streaming, gaming, zune streaming....and look at some of the exclusives on it. Shadow Complex, Limbo, 'Splosion Man, I Made a Game with Zombies in it, Geometry Wars Evolved, Fable II, Mass Effect 1 and 2 (counts due to being a Microsoft exclusive)...tons of games that have been cemented permanently in gaming culture.

So, realistically (i.e. from a business perspective) the 360 has been a failure. Culturally, it has been a sucess.

PS: I'm not a fanboy...I own consoles from every major company in the last 20 years, including Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, etc. I'm simply focusing on Microsoft in this particular post.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[UnknowingFool]

I'm hardly a Ballmer fan, but what could he have done substantially differently? In my opinion, he inherited a pig with no obvious roadmap to future gains.

Well, you could say the same of Apple when Steve Jobs came back. Actually Apple was in a more tenuous position when he took over. While many slashdotters might not like Apple products, Jobs (and I mean he led the effort as CEO) took the company from the brink of bankruptcy to surpass MS in market cap. He revitalized their core computer business and expanded into new product lines. All the while, Apple is also hugely profitable while expanding into new markets.

He managed over the Kin debacle, sure, but he also managed the Xbox and that worked out pretty well.

As a geek, I like the Xbox. As an investor, I would not as the Xbox has actually cost the company $7-8 billion in debt.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

having a... what is it? 55% failure rate?

Closer to 15. Still not good, but the 54.2 estimate is a joke.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[bigBlackSabbath]

Is this Steve Balmer's fake account? Xbox a success? Not if you evaluate its impact on the stock (little profit == no big deal).

I think the issue is in there: core competencies. Yes, they've pushed their core competencies as far as they can. That's NOT the issue. The problem is he has not been able to extend them into anything else which can contribute meaningful profits. Phones: no. Gaming: no. Internet properties: no.

They're locked into a slow death march to irrelevance as the world changes around them, and they know it. That's the idea behind reinventing themselves with things like Azure, Kin, Xbox, etc.. I don't know about Azure's impact on profits, but I'd argue it's closer to their core competencies than the rest. The rest may be nice products or clunkers -- it doesn't matter because they're not gaining significant profits.

That is what Ballmer should have been able to accomplish: growing teams which can succeed at expanding Microsoft's core competencies. He's got teams, but those teams have been largely ineffective in terms of adding to the bottom line.

They can't use the excuse of "we got into this business before this stuff seemed dated" excuse 20 years ago to justify their state of suspended animation. If they don't change in 20 years, they'll look more and more like a time capsule from the 1990's (which they kind of already do).

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Just Some Guy]

Except for losing out to the Wii, having a... what is it? 55% failure rate?

Look, I'm trying hard to think of MS products that aren't widely ridiculed. That's kind of a short list, and I'll thank you to work with me on this difficult project.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[LWATCDR]

Well lets take a look.
XBOX 360. Huge hardware problems. Huge charge to fix the problems. Slow in replacing the hardware.
Zune. What??? The original version had wifi but it was crippled by the RIAA. Microsoft played buddy buddy with the RIAA trying to get them to side with Microsoft vs Apple media player market.
The result was a media player that could have had some brilliant features being a bland second or third place device.
The ZuneHD is a really good media player. Maybe the best high end media player on the market... Who wants a high end media player today? Most people want a smart phone or an iPod touch which is really more of a PDA/Gaming device than a pure media player.

Window Mobile, Windows Phone, and the Kin.
The Kin is really a tragedy. It had some interesting hardware. It had some nice and really innovative features. It was killed.
It was killed by the company and by stupidity. Really folks what where you thinking. Twitter didn't work. No real app store. Smartphone data prices.
You can not blame Verizon. They are very invested in the Droid name and why not push kids to a Smart phone if you can. The Kin would eat up a ton of bandwidth streaming and uploading video so why put on the network for cheap.
Windows Mobile? How long did Microsoft have to get out a good version of it after the iPhone came out? Windows Mobile was just really left to sit and rot much like Palm OS. It predates the iPhone but never really inspired much love. It was frankly more of a hackers OS than Android was. People where cooking up custom roms, skins, and apps all over the place for it.
But it just never really worked all that well.
And now Windows Phone 7.... Yea Android, iPhone, and frankly even WebOS will have more apps available for them than WP7 will at launch.
All the old WinMo users will be kind of left out in the cold. WP7 doesn't run their old apps but worry not because WM is staying around for also!!!!

Even Bing is a bit of flop. Does anyone use it?
What about Microsoft Money? Is there an online version?

Don't forget the disaster that was Vista. Which frankly really helped Apple a lot.

Right now Microsoft is paying the price for having a terrible mobile strategy.
Things are going to get worse. Moblin is now going to really start to challenge CE in the automotive informatics space.
WP7 if it is anything less than an iPhone style smash will be seen as a total failure.
Office sales are lack luster because Office has reached good enough long ago ,OpenOffice.org is free, and Google Docs has a lot of buzz going for it.
Even outlook and exchange are going to feel the pinch from web mail soon if they have no already.

We do seem to be coming to the point where for a lot of people the browser is the OS. Even their you have FireFox and Chrome really taking a bite out of IE and practically nobody is going to make "Best viewed in IE" sites anymore.

Microsoft maybe in the same position as Wright Aircraft Engines was in the late 1940s early 1950s. The president was sure that they wold be making the R3350 motors forever. Or maybe DEC in the late 70s?
Things are changing and they are not.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Skuld-Chan]

Also - not that I was a big fan of the Kin, they really shouldn't have let it die in a fire like they did 48 days after launch for largely petty political reasons. When you ship a product - you stand by that product and make it the best possible no matter what.

The reason why is because doing anything else makes customers lose trust in your brand. Example - plenty of people probably can't imagine getting a Windows 7 phone at this point for fear they'll drop it as well or it won't be supported after 2 months.

Yeah one could argue they shouldn't have released it, but they did green light it and should have dealt with it better.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[JasoninKS]

You really hit the nail on the head. There are only so many bells & whistles you can add to Office, and most users don't use 90% of what's in there anyway. They seem to be playing a lot of "Me too!" when it comes to Windows. Their biggest failures come when they try to be a hardware company. XBox version 1? Red ring o' death. Kin? Huge flop. Mobile devices? Stagnant. I see two huge anchors weighing on Microsoft. Backwards compatibility & users refusal to upgrade. I can still run 15+ year old versions of programs on their newest OS. Keeping the ability to run ancient software has got to be adding bloat to Windows. And too many users are stuck in a "what I've got is good enough" mentality. Geez, they just finally cut off support for Win 2000? And Win XP will be supported way past its' prime. Apple's got a big plus in their corner. They control both their own software & their own hardware. Microsoft is dependent on whatever hardware someone else puts out.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

A new CEO might excite the board and top investors a little, perhaps shuffle some HR/management policies around a little. But in the end, the same issues that are inherent in being a company of that size are still going to be there.

You're right, of course, but remember that CEO hiring and firing decisions at huge companies are made by people who believe, or claim to believe, that top-level executives actually do meaningful work.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft needs a CEO who is much better at PR, who can Spin the Evil like Jobs does. And make us like Microsoft because we want to not because we are forced to.

Tony Hayward?

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Steauengeglase]

That is because as far as we are concerned it was a success. They had a golden goose, only they managed to accidentally blow its head off when they got it home with RRODs and other problems.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[kimvette]

WP7 took what was good about the Windows Mobile platform and completely destroyed it.

Windows Mobile/WinCE is actually a fairly decent OS. I have and on occasion still use an HP iPaq ( hx2700 series). What I like about it is I have full access to everything, if I want to I can code a utility and install it without having to buy a certificate or otherwise get Microsoft's blessing to install it. I can install software from anywhere without having to go through a particular store. I've installed a bunch of free software, but I have also purchased quite a few programs for it. 11-12 years ago on my first iPaq I had a PCMCIA hard drive and was watching movies and listening to music on flights - and it astonished fellow passengers that it was possible. It was something Windows Mobile could do ten years ago that everyone with an iPhone takes for granted now. Why didn't it catch on then? Microsoft really didn't market PDAs, and they just didn't see the potential it had. It took Apple to take the idea, merge it with a phone and give it a nice GUI, and now they're on top.

Also, I've worked with Windows Mobile phones in corporate environments. They're great because they are easy to deploy in a corporate environment, work well with Exchange and other email packages, and actually manage memory fairly well. Also, since it shares much of the API with Windows for the desktop, it's easy to develop custom corporate solutions. No need to "root" or "jailbreak" the phone.

All Microsoft had to do was implement a store in addition to the previously-open nature of Windows Mobile, clean up the GUI a bit (the GUI was always the weak point of PocketPC/Windows Mobile/Windows Phone) and they would have a serious contender. Instead, they took the most attractive features of Windows Mobile and threw it away, and turned it into yet another would-be iPhone contender: too much too little too late.

What could Ballmer have done substantially differently? First of all, he could have avoided the whole Vista fiasco. Microsoft could have stated "We're sorry, we're on the wrong track for both home and corporate users so we are delaying release another year and a half."

Second of all, WP7 could have been a LOT better, All they needed to do with the Windows Mobile platform was require vendors to meet or exceed iPhone storage and RAM specs, implement a GUI better suited to a smartphone/PDA (and retain stylus and handwriting recognition as input methods) and keep it open to remain a part of corporate solutions, and they would have been a very serious contender. Instead they locked it down and threw away everything that didn't suck.

Windows Mobile was one of the Microsoft products that I really liked for its utility and function (although its form was hideous - again, all it needed was a better GUI and a store). Sadly a useful Windows Mobile is now a thing of the past.

A "me too" product is not going to win the phone market. Microsoft needs to take what they did with Windows Phone 7, bring back the more open nature which made it usable in corporate and industrial deployments, and really push it as part of a comprehensive enterprise solution. Locking it down is exactly the wrong thing to do because iPhone and Android have too much of a head start so Microsoft needs to take a page from Apple's book and "Think Different."

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Best solution to in-fighting managers is: Your department/project lost money for 2 years, you're out. Apply to all managers and execs.

First job of Microsoft CEO is now trim the fat. Managers should absolutely be accountable for financial performance. No reason to pay for "talent" to cause a corporation to lose money. Robbie Bach and J Allard should have been ousted at year 3 of financial losses. These 2 got too comfortable losing money.

It's the only way to change Microsoft culture of apathy.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[zach_the_lizard]

To be fair, they are indeed growing, but they are not growing as fast as their rivals are. Who, in 2000, would have predicted that the Evil Empire would be surpassed in market cap by Apple? I certainly wouldn't. Not in the slightest. I think their problem is the legacy cruft that they have added over the years, but at the same time, that is about the only virtue that they have: you can many of your ancient apps from the 90s on your brand new PC. Getting rid of this cruft would remove the bloat and allow them to make a much more streamlined, modern OS, but it would also get rid of most of the reason to stay with Windows in the first place.

It will be interesting to watch what they do for the next version of Windows or two. I think the next version of Windows is supposed to be 64-bit only, so maybe they can get rid of some legacy stuff in that version.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[zach_the_lizard]

I hear he has an excellent guerrilla marketing strategy.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Mongoose Disciple]

There are only so many bells & whistles you can add to Office, and most users don't use 90% of what's in there anyway

True; however, to sell Office, you don't need the users to use every feature. You just need them to use one feature that OO or Google Docs doesn't have. In my experience, most businesses use just one or two of Office's obscure features, and they're almost never the same feature.

I am not saying that Office will rule the world forever, but we are a long way from seeing the end of its reign. Poll the Fortune 500 and probably 500 of them use Office. Even the death of Windows looks likelier to happen first.

Understand that even something like the huge mindshare in its space that something like the iPhone has (which is enormous) just utterly pales to the mindshare that Office has in its space. It is beyond ubiquitous. I have worked at clients who hated, hated, hated Microsoft and could or would not say one good thing about them, and yet they're still running Outlook.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think M$ are solely into OS and Office suites. They are into CRM, Gaming(big) mobile, web publication tools and most importantly server side tools other than OS like Exchange, Sharepoint, IIS, MS SQL et-al. Not to mention MSN, Live Bing and so forth.
It is not about whether Balmer should be replaced, it is about who do you replace him with and what new ideas does M$ need at the top.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Locutus]

the XBox has done pretty well? Are you looking at the profit/loss column or just the units shipped number because they still lose hundreds of millioins each quarter in that division and have had to write off billions just for RRoF so that excludes development costs and all the billions lost so far. In Microsoft's entire history, they've not made profits off anything which wasn't directly tied to desktop Windows and their only "growth" was with MS Office and then Windows Server. MS Office, like desktop Windows has saturated the market and Windows Server is being limited by open source. So how can they grow and there's not much of any growth in desktop systems? The only thing they have done well is protect that market since it has a 3-5 year purchase cycle and it keeps the money flowing in. Even that is now costing them lots more as they have to make deep cuts in licensing deals to keep customers looking to migrate to open source or as in the netbook segment and the handheld PDA segment before, they had to pay vendors to ship Microsoft product instead of the competitions product. Lots of Microsoft management would have to be let go before they changed how they thought of products and had a chance of creating something people wanted as opposed to creating things and preventing people from having a choice. They have lost the phone segment because Apple and Android is out there and vendors will not remove those choices from the customers options. But look out for the tablet and netbook segments, Microsoft under Steve Ballmer will do what they've done many many times before and spend lots of Microsoft money making sure the choice is iPad or MSPad unless Google puts a big foot behind Android and ChromeOS. There is the DVR segment which Tivo does pretty good at and Google is about to enter. But on the PC, what can Steve Ballmer or anyone do for Microsoft there? There's little to no growth there so strong arming their current partners to keep Windows significant is all they've got. IMO LoB

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Swampash]

I've read a thousand perfectly valid criticisms of Microsoft over the years, but I'm not sure that many of them can be traced back to Ballmer. For example, what changes could he have made to the Windows or Office lines to gain new growth instead of settling for trying to get current users to upgrade?

Your query illustrates the problem perfectly. The question should not be "what changes could he have made to the Windows or Office lines?" - it should be "what new product lines could he have created besides Windows and Office?"

Boats Microsoft has missed:

The Internet
Search
Gaming (MS gets a "tried hard" on this one. Shame Xbox was such a disaster.)
Mobile
Social Networking

Microsoft is dead in all of these. Microsoft makes a buttload of money out of Windows and Office, but after all these years it has only Windows and Office.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[zach_the_lizard]

Also - not that I was a big fan of the Kin, they really shouldn't have let it die in a fire like they did 48 days after launch for largely petty political reasons. When you ship a product - you stand by that product and make it the best possible no matter what.

I agree, they shouldn't have cancelled the Kin in the way they did, but then again, they shouldn't have had the political infighting that led to its demise in the first place. It's not a good sign when a fairly major product is a failure because of intense internal rivalry. They are supposed to be on the same team!

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Locutus]

the XBox has done pretty well? Are you looking at the profit/loss column or just the units shipped number because they still lose hundreds of millioins each quarter in that division and have had to write off billions just for RRoF so that excludes development costs and all the billions lost so far.

In Microsoft's entire history, they've not made profits off anything which wasn't directly tied to desktop Windows and their only "growth" was with MS Office and then Windows Server. MS Office, like desktop Windows has saturated the market and Windows Server is being limited by open source. So how can they grow and there's not much of any growth in desktop systems? The only thing they have done well is protect that market since it has a 3-5 year purchase cycle and it keeps the money flowing in. Even that is now costing them lots more as they have to make deep cuts in licensing deals to keep customers looking to migrate to open source or as in the netbook segment and the handheld PDA segment before, they had to pay vendors to ship Microsoft product instead of the competitions product.

Lots of Microsoft management would have to be let go before they changed how they thought of products and had a chance of creating something people wanted as opposed to creating things and preventing people from having a choice. They have lost the phone segment because Apple and Android is out there and vendors will not remove those choices from the customers options. But look out for the tablet and netbook segments, Microsoft under Steve Ballmer will do what they've done many many times before and spend lots of Microsoft money making sure the choice is iPad or MSPad unless Google puts a big foot behind Android and ChromeOS. There is the DVR segment which Tivo does pretty good at and Google is about to enter. But on the PC, what can Steve Ballmer or anyone do for Microsoft there? There's little to no growth there so strong arming their current partners to keep Windows significant is all they've got. IMO

LoB

Re:To be replaced by...?

[zach_the_lizard]

I can't remember anyone making fun of the Character Map program that ships with Windows. "Character map sucks" only brings up 36 search results in Google, so it can't be all that horrible....

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for losing out to the Wii

Boy would I love to lose the way the XBox "lost". I think I'd be too busy rolling in my piles of money to care that somebody else captured markets I wasn't even going after.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[mandelbr0t]

There's just not any growth left in MS's core competencies, and at least they're trying new stuff, even if the results are pretty embarrassing most of the time.

That's just it - there's plenty of growth left in MS's core competencies. A .NET development shop costs a fortune, mostly paid to Microsoft and its business partners. And, according to TFA, Microsoft has doubled its assets since Balmer took the lead. The major problem is that this growth is not translating into share price, which leads one to wonder why. Employees, whose compensation is partially in the form of Microsoft stock are starting to get pissed off, but for some reason the board of directors (who should have incentive to increase share price as well) still support him.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[zach_the_lizard]

The 360 used to lose money, but I believe that it is now profitable. Overall, it still has yet to cover all of the costs, but it is now on its way to doing so.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[nabsltd]

I'm hardly a Ballmer fan, but what could he have done substantially differently?

Toss native API backward compatibility for Windows, and build a more stable OS from the ground up.

By supplying a "on the same desktop" VM for older apps, MS could have moved to a fully 64-bit system that could be anything at all.

Instead, he let a slow, user-unfriendly Vista roll out to derisive laughter.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[steelfood]

I think that's untrue. Microsoft can continue to improve their office suite and operating system and generate sales through their traditional method of upgrades. Given that they already have a monopoly, it's not that difficult to compel users to buy the next shiny (TM).

The part they got wrong is in actually creating a product that people want to upgrade to. Office 2k7 was a pretty good attempt (personally, I like it and I find the ribbon interface more intuitive and easier to use than the old one), but Vista (and 7) was a solution looking for a problem. I know it wasn't supposed to be like that, but with all the major features cut, and all of the existing functionality unnecessarily additionally encumbered, that's how it turned out.

Nobody would complain if Windows Vista or 7 had been something incredibly revolutionary and game-changing, if it was faster, securer (safer from adware and such), and kept the Windows look and feel but made slight improvements. It didn't even have to be compatible with XP, so long as they included an XP compatibility layer, like they did with DOS programs.

But instead, it turned out to be a bloated lump of poorly-polished turd. It looked like Windows (XP), but it was different in many subtle and frustrating ways, i.e. configuration options that were hidden behind five layers of dialog boxes were suddenly hidden by two more layers. And having nothing new and exciting to offer to at least attempt to compensate, nobody wanted it. It may be easier for a beginner to pick up, but the power users, the sysadmins, the people recommending and installing PCs for their friends and family, sure as hell wouldn't touch it.

It's a management issue. Without a solid, cohesive vision from the top, everything ends up being decided by committee. And we all know that whatever comes out of the committee is going to be half-assed from all the compromises, a thing that can do a bit of everything but nothing well. Just look at the difference between Office 2k7 and Windows Vista/7. If there had been a visionary at the top, the look and (more importantly) feel would be the same across all Microsoft products. Instead, it's completely disjointed.

To top it all off, Microsoft has to then kick out their one visionary (yes, I'm talking about the Kin debacle)--the same guy who made the XBox what it is today--and replace him with a PHB because kissing butt and pushing paper is more valued than having interesting new ideas. So it's no surprise that people want Ballmer out. If he can't recognize top talent for what it is, and retain those people while getting rid of the leeching yes-men, then he's better off being replaced by somebody who can.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[RobertM1968]

The 360 used to lose money, but I believe that it is now profitable. Overall, it still has yet to cover all of the costs, but it is now on its way to doing so.

The funny thing about how math works is, that means, it is not profitable yet. Amortizing the costs of something does not make that item magically profitable because in a quarter or two, it takes in more than that quarter's expenses. It means, as you noted, it has yet to cover all it's costs - even when including all the add-ons that get sold due to it (subscriptions, games and game fees, etc).

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Locutus]

Ballmer must have read "The Innovators Dilemma" and has, as Bill Gates has before him, threatened and eliminated every threat to their income channel( Windows desktop and server ). They have always spent over a billion dollars per year on projects and marketing specifically targeting new products others have created and they've been successful protecting Windows. They have really never put much effort at all into making products better for customers for the customers sake, it has always been about limiting choice and preventing movement to other products.

They did Pen for Windows to block Go Inc from doing tablet computers in the late '80s and early '90s. They did Internet Explorer and Windows 95 to block IBM Web Explorer and OS/2 initially and then Netscape. Windows NT went from a failed desktop OS to a "Workstation OS" to a server OS to block OS/2 Server. Windows CE to block PalmOS, Xbox to block PS2/PS3, MS .Net to block Java, Silverlight to block Flash. All these things they blocked or limited their growth were already out there, ran on Windows and because they were not tied only to Windows presented a chance of a loss of control and therefore a loss of the Windows monopoly and income stream.

Microsoft has hardly ever had to innovate, they just leveraged the control they had and made something good enough to sell so people thought they were getting something new and improved.

IMO, the iPhone, iPod, and iPad all represent a threat to Microsoft not because they can take away Windows desktop sales but because they show Windows users that a different way to do something can be easy, can work better, and can be fun and enjoyable. Android and ChromeOS are what is keeping Ballmer up at night because they are being targeted across many hardware manufacturers devices and that kind of flood would quickly spread into Windows customers minds of a none Microsoft choice for doing lots of stuff outside of Windows. But, also with very little effort those same systems can do almost all of what Windows does.

Danger, Danger, Will Robinson! Steve Ballmer will be pissing off many because he _must_ spend spend spend to block Android, ChromeOS, and limit Apple iOS growth. So if they give him 3 quarters then he's out in 3 quarters and by then, if he fails to block Android and ChromeOS, Microsoft will be over the edge and headed down a steep slope of losses anyways so he'd welcome to chance to cash out. IMO

LoB

Re:To be replaced by...?

[JamesP]

Really, though, the same could be said of any company that size and age. Very large companies nearly always, over time, develop into unwieldy mega-bureaucracies, comprised of individual fiefdoms solely concerned about their own headcount and perceived influence. They become microcosms of nations. They have well-defined class structures, their own culture, sometimes even their own currency internally.

Yes, but that's why Google "allegedly" has a flat hierarchy.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[drsmithy]

But Microsoft aren't doing those things. They've had a catastrophic release for each of their main products, [...]

That's a mighty strange definition of "catastrophic" you have there.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[AltairDusk]

ESPN will soon be on Xbox LIVE, for some of us that's a pretty big deal, even if NFL games will not be included (curse you NFL!!!!)

Re:To be replaced by...?

[thesandtiger]

I'll add a biggie:

Recognizing that the marketplace is changing and that while Windows is dominant NOW, things are rapidly moving towards an OS agnostic world that uses open standards.

The people who, 20 years ago, were terrified of trying anything new are generally filtering out of the workplace and have been (and continue to be) replaced with people who grew up with computers as everyday things and aren't afraid to try something different. I can only imagine that as younger people who grew up with computers being completely ubiquitous, and with the stuff they use built on open standards, this will only accelerate.

Fear of change and a fundamental lack of understanding of tech were their bread and butter, but that is going to end, and soon, and they've done nothing to position themselves for the sea change that will be coming. They've been so intent on holding on their old (and, it must be said, profitable) way of doing business that when things do change they'll have to move faster than they ever have to adapt.

The marketplace has changed, too. It used to be that companies would try to compete with MSFT and get wiped out (bought or just crushed); now there are companies that exist solely to help their customers migrate away from MSFT products, or that develop tech that allow people to host their legacy apps on non-MSFT platforms.

Ballmer has been a caretaker CEO at best. MSFT is in a worse position, now, than they were when he took over, relative to the rest of the market. They've got massive resources and a really huge influence, but they're going to need to reinvent themselves in the same kind of way IBM did if they want to continue to be relevant.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Blakey Rat]

The three most obvious, from a commercial point of view, are probably (a) avoiding the whole Vista fiasco,

How? That's a lot easier said than done... I'm pretty sure there isn't even a clear consensus on what exactly caused the Vista fiasco in the first place. Everybody has their own opinion.

I mean, the last time they had an OS release that poor (Windows ME), at least the schedule was rushed to hell and back. Vista, on the other hand, was both slow *and* bad.

That all said, I think it was mostly a perception/marketing problem:

1) Vista wasn't bad on hardware built to support it... but Microsoft gave the logo to vastly inferior hardware that they had to have known wasn't capable of running it well. Vista should have been sold initially as a "high-end" OS, since only high-end hardware could *really* knock it out of the park. They could have set a high bar for the logo, and rebrand XP as their low-end, mobile OS. (Until Windows 7 could take over both roles.)

2) A *major* failing was getting hardware makers on-board with their drivers. I have no idea what they could have done more to solve this, but I think something like Windows 7's long free preview period would have been a good idea for Vista. (Part of the issue here was also the long gap between OSes-- hardware makers hadn't had to make or update drivers for a long, long time before Vista came out.)

3) Microsoft was never in control of the Vista brand, pundits were. The average computer consumer probably saw a dozen articles talking about how awful Vista was before they'd ever actually used it, or before they heard anything from Microsoft about it. (Their Mojave campaign pretty much proved this one)

Anyway, by the time Windows 7 came out, the hardware issue was resolved (both by making the OS leaner, and by the normal increase in computer performance over 2 years), the hardware issue was resolved (Vista drivers finally worked well, and Windows 7 could use those), and the marketing was much, much better. Result? Successful launch.

(b) handling the release of the new Office UI better, and

I don't agree with this; I think they handled it quite well. What changes would you have proposed?

One major gap, though, was the slooow availability of the Mac file conversion utilities. Microsoft has been doing pretty well with Office on Mac, but that one issue really reminded everybody that the Mac is a second-class citizen, which is a shame after all the work they've put in to applications like Entourage.

(c) not running so many loss-making divisions in the name of diversification.

I agree. I'd like to see them drop the pointless web search and advertising focus. Yes, this means giving Google a practical monopoly. But:

1) Microsoft has spent BILLIONS on this, and is barely any better-off than they were before, and

2) Microsoft is simply no good at it. But that's ok, you can be no good at things! Just accept it and move on.

They've had a catastrophic release for each of their main products, and in doing so,

The Office 2007 release was not catastrophic by any measure, except for maybe Slashdot chatter.

Not innovating merely requires laziness, but not innovating

Except Office 2007 is exactly the kind of innovating that people have been asking for, and you just panned it.

Man, I was enjoying your post until the last couple paragraphs. :)

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for losing out to the Wii, having a... what is it? 55% failure rate?

Look, I'm trying hard to think of MS products that aren't widely ridiculed. That's kind of a short list, and I'll thank you to work with me on this difficult project.

You're going for funny of course, but we should be careful to mistake 'widely ridiculed' in an extremely niche audience like Slashdot and similar as reflecting reality in wider audiences. In most general surveys (both consumer and enterprise customer) I've seen Microsoft continue to be in the top on liked, trusted, high customer satisfaction, etc.

Microsoft Outpaces Apple in Customer Satisfaction

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Blakey Rat]

They make excellent mouses and keyboards.

And frankly, the Xbox is doing well-- it's kicking Sony ass, or at least neck-and-neck, and Sony was a *really* entrenched competitor in the space. It's created new ideas that every other console maker has ripped-off, and it's gotten Microsoft a lot of goodwill from a lot of game developers that normally completely ignore them-- Japanese developers in particular.

Success doesn't necessarily mean "beat all competitors" or "low defect rate." I'm sure the Xbox is a success by the metrics Microsoft have set for the program; I don't see how it couldn't be.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[GillyGuthrie]

I can still run 15+ year old versions of programs on their newest OS

This is an exaggeration; Windows Vista/7 will not run 16 bit applications.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Archangel Michael]

No Vision is right.

Microsoft and Ballmer have both lost opportunities and blown the opportunities they've been given extra chances on.

Take Vista/7 OS for example. Is there a reason to have both 32 and 64 bit versions of all six (think there are that many) SKUs???

If MS had vision, it would have simply made Windows 7, all versions, complete 64 bit, and forgot about backwards compatibility when it didn't make sense; no 32 bit version. It would have solved all sorts of problems going forward. 32 bit is going away in the next year or two anyways. AND the only reason 32 bit exists is for "backwards compatibility".

Right now, I'm making the following recommendations for ALL OS choices, 32 bit gets XP, and 64 bit requires Win 7 (no 32 bit 7). If your app doesn't work in Win 7/64 then you get XP, and get stuck in the past.

THAT would be "vision" on a small scale. IT is what SHOULD have been done, by executive decision from the top.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[michael_cain]

Well, you could say the same of Apple when Steve Jobs came back. Actually Apple was in a more tenuous position when he took over. While many slashdotters might not like Apple products, Jobs (and I mean he led the effort as CEO) took the company from the brink of bankruptcy to surpass MS in market cap. He revitalized their core computer business and expanded into new product lines. All the while, Apple is also hugely profitable while expanding into new markets.

Jobs v. Balmer is a very interesting comparison to make. Jobs has been as successful as he has for three reasons, I think.

• He created an Apple "style". Clean, minimalist, emphasis on easy to understand. A simple example outside of technology is the "Mac vs PC" commercials that ran for so many years. Two guys on a white background making a particular point. The style provided the company with enough of a cachet that they could charge premium prices for hardware and make it profitable. And I suspect that Jobs consciously avoids products that don't allow that style to be an important feature. Jobs will never, I think, take Apple into the game console market; there's no way to make a console where the Apple "style" differentiates it.
• The iPod/iPhone/iPad set of hand-held digital widgets. He recognized that a digital device could be a better personal audio device than one based on cassettes and CDs. And as the price of various hardware components has come down to the necessary level, he added a screen, touch, telephone service, etc to the device.
• ITunes. He recognized that you could sell content in little chunks, not just big ones. Don't buy the album with two good songs and a bunch of filler, just buy the songs. Don't buy the package of little software apps that some manufacturer thinks is right, buy what you need one piece at a time. Or grab free apps from a company that wants you buy other little chunks of content. It is not surprising, though, that the apps you can get are filtered at least minimally by Apple; Jobs wants to preserve the distinctive style of the devices.

Balmer has done nothing like that. Perhaps it's because he was never forced into it, as Jobs was: Balmer sits atop a behemoth that has always been profitable based on its dominant position with Windows, Office, and a few other big applications. The company style, if you want to call it that, is "basic industrial". Despite some expensive forays into building their own hardware, one would be hard pressed to look at an Xbox, a Zune device, and a Kin phone and claim there was a consistent style and direction.

I used to hope that MS/Balmer was going to figure out that business people at work were their target demographic. Apple did "insanely great" widgets that fit in their target market's pocket; MS should have been building "insanely great" widgets that fit in their target market's briefcase or portfolio. I used to have hopes that MS would do something really good along the lines of the Courier form factor. Put a small but rugged display on the outside cover for phone and music player apps; two displays on the inside, one that was high-quality e-paper and one that was good for everything else. High-quality touch screen input so you could actually take notes on the thing. MS, I thought, had the bucks to get the right display technologies finished. And the clout to get the textbook publishers on board so the device family could move into college, then into K-12.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Blakey Rat]

Did it? The entertainment division lost money last quarter. Has the Xbox actually made a net profit over its lifetime? By that, have the total profits on the Xbox paid for the total losses incurred over the years taking into account the cost of money?

Man, does *anybody* at Slashdot work at a corporation?

"Total profits" is not the only measure of success, not even one of the most important. (Well, it is for the company as a whole, but not for any one division.) Every corporation of a decent size has divisions that do not, and have never, contributed directly to the bottom line.

Let's use a computer example: would you say that the Xerox Parc research and development was a complete failure? After all, it never earned Xerox more than a token amount of revenue.

Or to use a "Slashdot when taken as a whole is hypocrites" example: remember how people were railing against Carly Fiona at HP for cancelling most of their R&D and scientific product lines? Those product lines were not profitable at all, so by your (whoever57) measure, cancelling them was the right thing to do and should have been lauded-- right?

In any case, I believe the Xbox program has been a success, and I believe that Microsoft believes that it's a success as well. (I don't know what exact metrics they are using to determine this.) Xbox has done more to get Microsoft's brand noticed than anything since Windows 95, and it's in a hell of a lot more living rooms than (say) Windows Home Server or Windows Media Center. It's also gotten Microsoft tons of goodwill from developers who previously completely ignored Microsoft products.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[ConceptJunkie]

I think a simple proof of your thesis can be found at Microsoft Research, where a bunch of really sharp boffins are doing all kinds of really cool and ground-breaking stuff that never seem to make it into shipping products.

Microsoft is so non-innovative they are literally stagnating the state-of-the-art. As a personal anecdote, I had the dubious honor of taking over a non-trivial Excel application recently. Prior to this, I'd never done any app development using VBA, although I'd done some OLE Automation to drive Excel. This past several weeks has been an eye-opener to me, and more specifically, a strong reminder of how things used to be developing Windows software in the early 90s. It astounds me how crude, limited, archaic and poorly documented this stuff remains, even though Excel has been around for more than 20 years. As a spreadsheet, I always thought Excel was pretty good, but as a development environment, I haven't seen anything so backwards and limited in about 20 years.

The good news is that the people in charge are becoming open to moving towards a proper web app with a real database, which is the appropriate tool for this particular application.

But having a literal monopoly in Office software means there's no reason for Excel (or Word, etc) to ever get better. As long as there is an ever-expanding list of "features" most of which will never be used by more than 1% of users, Office will stay mired in its mid-90s rut.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[PingPongBoy]

The problem with the guy is he has practically no vision

I suspect his vision to be farsighted. With access to so much liquid money, he can investigate numerous ideas, but there are some factors that work against Microsoft.

• You can't win them all, meaning every company faces challenges. Apple and Google look like the winners of today but Apple and Google compete directly with each other in the phone market, and they are hardly in a position to guarantee dominance in their most powerful lines of business. Google works on a huge number of ideas, and most people only think of Google for a few things.

• Free software abounds, making it hard for Microsoft to sell something new. Microsoft also has the anti-Midas touch - the software they produce drives the price of that software down. Microsoft seems reluctant to compete directly with AutoCAD, but if they did, it would likely become a module of Office.

• Quantum leaps in software features outstrip hardware advances. As an example, almost 10 years ago the tablet PC was introduced but only recently I acquired one. Before that, they were too expensive and too slow. Even the one I bought isn't always smooth in capturing handwriting, it is very heavy, the screen is small, and starting all the software to handle pen input is time consuming. At this level of development, the platform is functional but has a long way to go. More computer manufacturers are needed to compete in order to bring the feature set to the next generation. Microsoft has been ahead of the curve already, and I think Apple's iPad will have to catch up, as I see newer tablets looking to make a kill based on Apple putting the idea of the tablet back into the forefront. I have yet to see someone actually using an iPad on a casual basis, but I have spotted many people reading paperbacks and newspapers. The iPad felt fun to me but it also felt like a big sinkhole of money that a tablet PC can work around. Today's tablets have as much RAM and disk space as any major laptop, but lag in CPU power because of the heating and battery needs of the mobile user. This lag will not be prolonged, I hope.

Another example of software that will emerge is automated car driving, not to mention many other kinds of automation. This is risky but has potential for a world wide customer base, so it is something along the interests of Microsoft and other big players. Again, hardware may be lagging the needs of software.

• People have not raised their purchasing power. Apple has had the foresight to understand this with the affordable iPhone and iPad.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[yuhong]

The 32-bit versions will.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[CAIMLAS]

Which is ironic, because under Balmer, MS has actually been pretty good about making its broken things work again.

Balmer should be put in charge of assuring maintenance quality, IMO.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[jbengt]

Best solution to in-fighting managers is: Your department/project lost money for 2 years, you're out. Apply to all managers and execs

That's an absolutely terrible "solution". First, it incorrectly assumes that each manager controls and independent fiefdom. In reality, some managers are making decisions that affect other managers' profits, and such a policy will generate more in-fighting to the detriment of the copmany as a whole. Second, not all groups have a bottom line profit that can be effectively rated. Some necessary functions do not directly generate profits,.but are done to keep the customer happy, to hire good people, to experiment with ideas that may or may not pan out, etc. Do you really want to punish the most creative managers in your company just because their last big idea wasn't successfully commercialized?

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Right now they seem intent on making poor copies of Apple's previous generation of products (Zune/iPod, Zune HD/iPod Touch, Zune Market Place/iTunes, Vista/OS X) and there's every sign that their Windows 7 phone software will follow the same pattern against the iPhone."

Oh goody! We will soon be able to buy a ZunePhone!

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Locke2005]

Point (a) is right on; the Vista release was horribly mismanaged over a period of several years, almost a textbook example of how not to release a product. I'm not sure point (c) was such a bad idea; much to my surprise, the XBox eventually became successful. However, Zune stands as a shining example of how poorly Microsoft understands the consumer electronics industry (which I believe is the largest single market in the world). Their attempts to port Windows to cell phones also betray a basic misunderstanding of the difference between and PC and a phone. I agree that what passes for "innovation" these days at Microsoft looks a lot more like copying Apple to me. You are correct that Microsoft's biggest advantage is that people are already trained to use their products, but that they insist on throwing away that advantage by changing the UI with each new release. We're still using Office 2003 at work, but if forced to upgrade, Open Office does look like a pretty viable alternative.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

How? That's a lot easier said than done...

Sure, of course it is. That's why someone who can do it is worth a seven-figure package.

In this case, however, the Vista project seems to have been a combination of poor expectation management in the market and poor technical management in the development team. The result was an OS that had promised a great deal for several years, but ultimately delivered almost none of the major technical innovations it was originally supposed to, and didn't even do as well as its predecessor on many counts when it finally turned up. That should all have been headed off years before the release, and failure to spot the over-ambitious requirements, mitigate market expectations, and refocus development on achievable technical goals is entirely down to bad management.

I don't agree with this; I think they handled it quite well. What changes would you have proposed?

They appear to have a product that is genuinely more usable than its predecessor for most people, given that the changes were based on hard data, and that the majority of people actually come to like quite quickly when they try it. And yet, in the wider marketplace, there seems to be a serious image problem such that those who have not tried it (who are the important ones from a commercial point of view, because they are your sales targets) assume they won't like it and don't want to upgrade or choose to look at other products instead. Again, this seems to be more about marketing than technical merit, and is something that should have been headed off long before the final release of the product, instead of letting the whole world get into some sort of echo chamber about how the new interface was all... different and stuff.

Also, they basically made the entire release about the new UI, and a few cute tricks you could do to format your documents with it (which are, in most cases, about as useful as WordArt: cute in a demo, but mostly pointless in the real world). There should have been at least one or two compelling improvements in the core functionality as well: a sensible stylesheet tool in Word, more powerful manipulation of multidimensional data in Excel, some improvements in the collaboration tools, something that isn't just pretty.

Except Office 2007 is exactly the kind of innovating that people have been asking for, and you just panned it.

No, I panned the way it was released. If you have a product with genuine merit, yet people don't even want to try it and just assume it will be worse than what you made before because it is different, then you have a basic marketing problem.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Gilmoure]

Maybe do what Apple's done, spinning off some divisions (Apple Works/Filemaker) and giving them their own head for a bit, to see what comes of it?

What if MS broke apart in to corporate and home divisions or server, desktop, and mobile/game?

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm not sure point (c) was such a bad idea; much to my surprise, the XBox eventually became successful.

That depends on your definition of "successful". If you are looking to build market share/mind share, then sure, the 360 has done well. If, however, you are a corporate investor looking for a product line to make more money than it costs, then even though the 360 has reached quarterly profitability, I think it's still a net loss so far, isn't it? If so, that is a very poor performance after several years running the XBox project with the kind of war chest and brand name that Microsoft brought to the game from the start.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Mongoose Disciple]

I'm not arguing that the XBox has been profitable overall (because I don't think it has), but, I think its accounting is hard to honestly reduce to a vacuum. For example, the existence of the XBox and it being what it is have surely resulted in games being available on Windows machines that otherwise wouldn't be, which helps perpetuate the niche of (Windows) gaming PCs. That's not worth a billion dollars, but it's worth something.

I mean, even if the PS3 was a money pit for Sony (I have no idea if this is true), I think we could count it as a success for Sony simply on the basis of being instrumental in winning the next-gen-DVD format war.

Sometimes big enough companies involved in enough different markets can win even by losing because their products don't exist in silos separate from each other.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

They could go into weapons development, and the car industry is pretty ripe right now. I'm sure they can do better than anything on the market today.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Locke2005]

You are correct, the ROI on XBox to date has not been impressive. However, when you are sitting on $50 billion in cash, it arguably makes sense to lose some money now to establish a product that will bring better returns in the future. Simply put, they had a bunch of money from their core business which was now shrinking, so diversifying was really their only choice. Entering new markets was the only way they could continue to grow the company. However, some may feel the company is already too big! Personally, I feel that breaking Microsoft up into separate OS, application, and consumer electronics companies would bring a higher rate of return to investors, much like the break up of AT&T did.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case, however, the Vista project seems to have been a combination of poor expectation management...

You're right. What they should have said is "Give us lots of money for something that's slower and shittier than what you already have". I'm sure that would have fixed all the problems with Vista.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[fred fleenblat]

>> sometimes even their own currency internally

which is an interesting point, if only because the more typical forms of internal corporate currency, barter and favors, are not taxed.

there is a network effect: a larger company has more services in-house and more opportunity to trade or barter them in furtherance of corporate goals. a smaller company has to rely on outside vendors and contractors, at which point the transaction is out in the open to be taxed. i suspect this untaxed internal corporate barter may have a bigger economic impact than economy of scale or access to capital.

it would be an interesting experiment to see if corporate largess and management inertia would survive being taxed at the same real rate as small businesses.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Blakey Rat]

We might just have to agree to disagree about Office 2007. The only place I see it being panned by people before they use it is Slashdot, and Slashdot hates everything Microsoft does, so that's hardly a gauge of anything.

I don't know what you mean by "sensible stylesheet tool", but Word already has excellent styling tools. Before Office 2007, they were pretty buried and hard to find and use. Now they're in the forefront, and much easier to use. Things like this aren't *technically* a new feature in Office, but *practically* they are-- the Office team took a feature they already had and made it usable. So I call that a win.

It's kind of hard to criticize Office for not coming up with new compelling features when you can't think of any, either. Hah. You just rattled off a list of features Office already has, while adding some weasel words like "sensible" or "more powerful" or "compelling."

Re:To be replaced by...?

[ebh]

Mike Markkula.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[shutdown -p now]

Look, I'm trying hard to think of MS products that aren't widely ridiculed.

Most developer tools, and also SQL Server, to name a few.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[KiloByte]

Vista wasn't bad on hardware built to support it

I see you haven't used Vista then. You can't blame hardware for its downsides, even on decent gear it's worse than ME.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Blakey Rat]

Yes, I have. And I disagree with you.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Kaenneth]

This is my standard 'Vista Sucks' response (thought you touched on many of the points.

Bad: 3.0, 95, ME, Vista,
OK: 3.1, 98, XP, Seven,
Great 3.11, 98 OSR, XP SP2, Seven SP?

The reason is that a name change indicates a change in the API/Driver models, and it takes a while for the Hardware and Applications to catch up.

An OS is basically the layer between Hardware and Applications, everything else is just sugar. In the cases of wfw 3.11, 98, XP, and Seven PC and app makers managed to make mostly compliant products, and the OS itself has matured to fix errors and omissions in the specs.

I knew that Vista was gonna 'flop', and people would hate it, just like the previous versions that wern't yet supported by on-the-market PC's and software, but it's a chicken-and-egg situation, MS had to put it out there with full force and (apperant) confidance, otherwise (more) people would still be using XP, running as adminstrator, without good IPv6 support, without good power-save mode support, 64 bit support, etc. etc.

If whatever 8 is ends up with major API changes, it'll 'fail' as well, but maybe 8 will just be a refined Vista->Seven-> line... Odds are, if it's called 'Eight' it'll do well, but if they come up with a new major name scheme (#.# -> Year -> Double-Letter -> single word -> ????) it'll likely be a strategic failure... I don't see any major new hardware comeing down the pipes (16-32-64 bits, GPU dominance, the Internet...) except for mass cores, and 3D displays.

I saw people on Ars Technica in a massive discussion about 'IA128' referred to in some leaked MS slideshow, and everyone was off on 'lol 128 bit addressing, how dumb' but noone mentioned Intel's prototype 128 core CPU... old techs can get stuck in a mindset, the HZ race and the Bit-width race are nearing their end, (like the philosophers arrow, major 'breakthroughs' will likly produce single digit percentage gains)

The next major revision of Windows, based on my crystal ball will provide better support for massive numbers of cores, perhaps also giving up on the 'S' in SMP, not only treating GPU 'shaders' and CPU 'cores' as different breeds of the same beast, but allowing threads to be sheduled on pools of different core types, say a system 32 cores with floating point optimizations, 32 vector operation optimized cores, 64 general integer operation cores (perhaps with brach-prediction optimization, for 'control' threads), and GPU 'shader' cores on an add-in board, with fast streaming operation, but slow access to main memory... It'll also have native UI for 3D displays (requiring GPU's with a 64 bit memory model, LOL), and better integration with mobile data networks (3/4G whatever, I don't keep up with cellular stuff)

And it'll suck, the thread sheduling will be inefficent, and most PC's will still only have a handful of cores, 3D displays won't be standardized, and will give people headaches, and Mobile data will be too expensive, when downloading patches at a per-kilobyte rate...

But, the version after that, when everyone and their dog has a kilo-core machine, and app developers properly tag/seperate their threads for effective scheduling, 3D actually works well and dosn't make people barf, and people pony up for unlimited mobile data, and the OS (9?10?) is refined, it'll be great.

Wow, I went much futher than my usual, and I'm now late for work.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[bluej100]

I'm no Microsoft fan--I use Ubuntu when possible and have an iPhone--but I love my 360. My Wii gathers dust; I won't buy another Nintendo product, despite growing up on the systems.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Gilmoure]

The intent was to get the Xbox into the living room as an entertainment center.

How come no one's made a game device that doesn't look like it belongs on Star Trek or PeeWee's Playhouse? Would it be that difficult to make a console that looks like a Sony AV component? If they really do want to make inroads to the living room, stop making stuff that looks out of place in my av cabinet. Apple too; their iTV/Mac Mini's are all minimalist and look like they belong on 2001 space station.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

First, virtualized apps, each application has its own OS and that OS can be a version of Windows XP if it needs to be (sandboxed as much as possible of course, though they would probably keep a team of developers to create patches for it).

Then they work on Singularity until it is stable and mature enough to be an OS to run strictly managed code at the time when multiple parallel processors can make even a managed code OS run fine on standard computer equipment. Everything will be XAML (Silverlight) and WCF and Entity Framework including, finally, the file system.

Maybe this will be Windows 10?

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Will.Woodhull]

MS is still making a hell load of money, it just that they aren't growing. No reason to tear apart the company.

Um, no.

From the beginning, Microsoft's success was based on rapidly identifying emerging markets of technically naive consumers and ruthlessly exploiting their naivety by pruning out anything that would slow their market penetration. Such as quality control (beyond what was necessary for a good showroom appearance) or solid engineering (hence all the problems with malware). The developers dance was all about getting everyone on the bandwagon before anyone knew enough to critically assess the sorry state of that wagon's mechanicals, or the lack of roadway that was in front of it.

Microsoft has now coasted past the top of its trajectory because-- surprise, surprise-- their old markets have all matured. Everyone interested in buying new software either knows a bit about what they are doing or knows somebody knowledgeable to go to. Microsoft has been desperately looking for other naive markets to expand into (gaming, phones, etc) but now it is just too easy for potential customers to google product comparisons.

Possibly Microsoft has a proper enough angle and enough momentum to achieve some kind of orbit, if it is guided by someone who knows how to do that kind of rescue. Otherwise its ballistic descent will be at least as spectacular as its meteoric rise. Do mind that you stay clear of ground zero-- that thing may not burn up completely on its downward journey.

Myself, I don't think that a potty-mouthed monkey dancer has the necessary experience to nudge that mother of a ship into a stable orbit. But I'm not on Microsoft's Board of Directors, or even a stockholder, so my opinion doesn't matter.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[RobertM1968]

Except for a few factors... (1) Nintendo already paid off their initial investment (as Microsoft has not), (2) Microsoft has either killed (or is trying desperately to kill) cross platform games (see recent news on that subject on Engadget and elsewhere) and I am sure other places.

Simple fact is, others (Nintendo being one) have figured out how to do it - Microsoft has not yet reached that point, and is gaining nothing of that much value. While *we* may have gained something of value (assuming the PS3 was instrumental to whatever extent in deciding the format wars), Microsoft *lost* in that respect and "bet on the wrong horse"

Re:To be replaced by...?

[PCM2]

It also seems likely to accelerate infighting. What manager is going to support another manager's efforts when his own job is on the line in the short term? Each division is going to spend half its energy trying to cut the other divisions' throats.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[whoever57]

Every corporation of a decent size has divisions that do not, and have never, contributed directly to the bottom line.

Absolutely, but those divisions are either failed divisions, or some kind or research division. Xbox is neither. It was intended as a product division, and should have either made a profit (which it probably has not) or, gained a central position for MS in the home (which it has not).

Or would you like to claim that the Xbox has helped sales of Windows and Office? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.

The simple fact is that while attempting to refute my argument, you have failed to provide one whit of evidence that the Xbox has helped (directly or indirectly) MS's bottom line. Perhaps the Xbox helped sales of the Kin?

Re:To be replaced by...?

[PCM2]

I agree. I'd like to see them drop the pointless web search and advertising focus. Yes, this means giving Google a practical monopoly. But:

1) Microsoft has spent BILLIONS on this, and is barely any better-off than they were before, and

2) Microsoft is simply no good at it. But that's ok, you can be no good at things! Just accept it and move on.

I believe one aim of Microsoft's online focus is simply to dilute the market. If Microsoft does what Google does (offer online services and advertising networks) but Google doesn't do what Microsoft does (sell applications for desktop PCs) then Microsoft is the one with a differentiating advantage. Microsoft doesn't need to do a better job than Google at the online stuff. It just needs to be seen as offering equivalent products/services; then its salespeople can go to work. Even if Microsoft doesn't win the contracts, customers are still confused and likely to move more slowly. Meanwhile, Microsoft keeps selling Windows and Office, gambling that Google will eventually make serious missteps.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[MichaelSmith]

My take is that their main products: windows, office and the associated development tools have been done. There is no need for further development. This happens to all products in the end. They reach maturity and the profits to be made from innovation dry up. Pretty much since XP proved itself Microsoft have been looking for ways to sell new versions but a lot of the "improvements" looked like a case of breaking it so we can fix it again and keep getting paid.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Strudelkugel]

Replacing Ballmer isn't going to change any of that. A new CEO might excite the board and top investors a little, perhaps shuffle some HR/management policies around a little. But in the end, the same issues that are inherent in being a company of that size are still going to be there.

That's really note true. Look at what Alan Mullaly has done at Ford.

CEOs can make a enormous difference. That's why they get paid so much. Unfortunately, most aren't worth it. But people like Mulally and Jobs are. If Microsoft got a CEO of their caliber, it would be something to see.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

If you really think Word has excellent styling tools, we will definitely have to agree to disagree. Compared to the sort of thing used in serious publishing software, or even to what you can do with CSS on the Web or tools like LaTeX, Word's stylesheets are basic at best. They used to be bug-ridden and almost impossible to configure as well, but even removing the bugs and improving the usability doesn't fix the limited character-paragraph-bigger-stuff model at the heart of the system. It's not as if those other tools are ideal, as any experienced web designer or two minutes on comp.text.tex will tell you, but their capabilities are still far beyond what Word's stylesheets and templates can do.

Likewise, take Word's collaboration features. You could do a lot to help formal document review by supporting the kinds of features that software developers take for granted in typical source control and code review systems: named versions, diff tools, annotating changes and so on. Word provides some basic features in these areas, but again nothing like as powerful as you find if you look for ideas outside of the small world of other word processing software.

As for panning Office 2007, as I noted before, I was criticising the release process, not the product itself. However, our experiences are very different if you think Slashdot is the only place people criticise it. Plenty of regular, non-geek people I know have expressed varying degrees of scepticism about the new Office UI before they've even tried it, even though those people I know who have tried it do seem to be more in favour than against after a few days getting used to it.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[zuperduperman]

Not sure what you mean by "farsighted". When I look at what MS has done over the last 10 years, it almost seems like they have tried to be too far ahead of the curve. For example, Windows CE and tablet computers. Both correctly picked as major strategic plays and both executed by Microsoft - and failed. Why did they fail? You can have various different takes on it, but my take is that they largely went too early. Eg, I played with various PDAs and the simple fact is that the hardware was too mediocre to be useful. Not enough capacity to fit music, not enough CPU to play video, not enough battery life to go all day. Stylus instead of touch screen. 240x320 resolution. It all just added up to a 'meh' experience.

Had MS held WinCE / WinMo back in development until, say, 2005 - perhaps they could have launched something spectacular and really taken the market with it. Similar with tablet pcs - I had an XP tablet and it was good - but just not quite good enough. Stylus sucks, too heavy, 3 hours battery life (optimistically). Once again, hardware not really ready.

Apple played both of these cards later but much better. I suspect the products have been in development inside Apple for a long time - but they knew to hold them back until it really made a good user experience.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Alex Belits]

I beg to differ. If you compare them in the areas where they compete -- causing damage to US economy and directing development of US culture, politics and technology toward pointless, counterproductive tinkering -- Microsoft is far ahead of Taliban, al-Qaeda, whole country of Iran, and all organizations that are, or perceived, to be anti-American taken together.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I'd like to see them drop the pointless web search and advertising focus. Yes, this means giving Google a practical monopoly. But:

1) Microsoft has spent BILLIONS on this, and is barely any better-off than they were before, and

2) Microsoft is simply no good at it. But that's ok, you can be no good at things! Just accept it and move on.

The thing is, Bing and Google are really just fronts.

Think about this for instance:

What better way to get heuristics? Hmmm...having people decide whether the things they search for are relevant, etc. Like looking for a picture of something, and then feeding that search data into another system which also looks at the pictures arrived at and chosen by the user. Smells like bigger things to me...A.I. for example. Search is just a by product if you will.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

My Wii gathers dust

Then dust it off. It's not like the Wii doesn't have a great game library.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Zelgadiss]

An alternative is to enter potent new markets.

Unfortunately for MS, Ballmer for the most part has little to no foresight, and MS only make attempts at new markets after their early bird competitors have firmly entrenched themselves.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Zelgadiss]

From the beginning, Microsoft's success was based on rapidly identifying emerging markets of technically naive consumers and ruthlessly exploiting their naivety by pruning out anything that would slow their market penetration. Such as quality control (beyond what was necessary for a good showroom appearance) or solid engineering (hence all the problems with malware). The developers dance was all about getting everyone on the bandwagon before anyone knew enough to critically assess the sorry state of that wagon's mechanicals, or the lack of roadway that was in front of it.

IMO I felt that Gates while not a creative visionary, he at least had enough vision to spot emerging markets and properly position MS to enter it - most of the time anyway.

Since he left ... we have the MS we have today.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole "My wii gathers dust" meme has always been sort of confusing to me. Why would you buy a console with the deliberate intention of not playing it? And if you didn't buy it with the deliberate intention of not playing it, then why aren't you playing it? If it's because the Wii has no games that appeal to you, then see question 1. The Wii certainly has plenty of games that appeal to people who would normally buy a Nintendo console.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Aydsman]

Take Vista/7 OS for example. Is there a reason to have both 32 and 64 bit versions of all six (think there are that many) SKUs???

If MS had vision, it would have simply made Windows 7, all versions, complete 64 bit, and forgot about backwards compatibility when it didn't make sense; no 32 bit version. It would have solved all sorts of problems going forward. 32 bit is going away in the next year or two anyways. AND the only reason 32 bit exists is for "backwards compatibility".

One of Microsoft's greatest strengths is "backwards compatibility" and they go to great pains to achieve it. If the road to Vista hadn't been so long & the result avoided by so many then 7 probably would have been 64-bit only.

Windows Server 2008 R2 (which is the server version of Win7) does not have a 32-bit version. So I think it's a good bet you'll get your 64-bit wish with Windows 8

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Blakey Rat]

Troll? Seriously?

Re:To be replaced by...?

[doktor-hladnjak]

All Microsoft had to do was implement a store in addition to the previously-open nature of Windows Mobile, clean up the GUI a bit (the GUI was always the weak point of PocketPC/Windows Mobile/Windows Phone) and they would have a serious contender. Instead, they took the most attractive features of Windows Mobile and threw it away, and turned it into yet another would-be iPhone contender: too much too little too late.

What you describe is exactly Windows Phone (formerly known as Windows Mobile) 6.5 and it has not done well in the market. Its main features were a massive cleanup (as opposed to complete redesign in the case of 7) of the UI to make it more "finger friendly", Windows Marketplace for Mobile (i.e., an app store) and My Phone for backup/restore/find my phone. The lackluster sales of 6.5 have really shown that Microsoft had little choice but to undertake the massive backwards incompatible rewrite that is WP7.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft doesn't need more developers,"

After having worked here for a while, I have to disagree. The talent here isn't what it used to be and what I've seen in other smaller but much sharper companies.
A lot of old folk sitting on their ass waging political battles.

They need better developers with a passion, not just a thirst for the pay that they receive.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[yuhong]

It often gets to the point where they got into trouble with anti-trust law for their illegal tactics. And it dates back to the Gates era.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[yuhong]

Yep, it was originally 98 that was the last release of 9x, but when a consumer edition of 2000 was not going to be produced, they instead decided to produce Me.

Re:To be replaced by...?

[Locutus]

except they have been through the legal system for anti-trust at least three times and every time they get out of it without more than a slap on the back of the hand. They know darn well that when they must go all out to protect Windows, the effects of a legal case against them a decade later is easier to handle than the immediate threat to Windows and almost 75% of their revenue. Without Windows, Microsoft is a sour taste in the history books.

LoB

Developers!

[dawilcox]

Developers! Developers! Developers! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE

An idea

[Antony T Curtis]

They could always ask Steve Jobs if he would be CEO of Microsoft. It worked out great for Apple...

Re:An idea

[Anonymous Coward]

No they should ask John Sculley, and then let him fire Ballmer.

Re:An idea

[MouseR]

Balmer at MS also worked out well for Apple. And Linux. I say we keep him there.

Re:An idea

[nickdwaters]

Dammit. I was going to post that.

Re:An idea

[JamesP]

I'm guessing SJ is not doing that, not for all the money in the world.

Or maybe they're saving up to do exactly that!

Re:An idea

[vbraga]

Or Jean-Louis Gassée.

BeOS lives! ;)

Re:An idea

[Anonymous Coward]

They could always ask Steve Jobs if he would be CEO of Microsoft. It worked out great for Apple second time around.

Re:An idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Great Idea, maybe they could make the Kin sync with iTunes and finally sell more than 503 in 2 months

chair

[Anonymous Coward]

Just throw a chair at him. He will leave.

Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Rogerborg]

Sure, they still own the desktop, and the Office markets by default and by leveraging their monopoly (I'm sure legally now), but everything else they've touched has been at best break-even, and at worst a colossal money sink.

Zune and Kin were a laughing stock, they're having to give away Windows ME (or whatever they're calling it these days) phones, they're paying people to use Bing, IE is losing market share, XBox has finally broken even just in time to start sinking more money into developing the next version. Hotmail is a has been, Silverlight is a wannabe, and C# / .NET is just about tying developers into Windows, not about attracting anyone who's currently using Java anywhere else.

I really can't think of any new revenue sources that have come along in the Ballmer era. If all he's doing is treading water, then they might as well pay peanuts to a chimp - it'll shriek and gibber and fling chairs just as well as Uncle Fester.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Zune and Kin were a laughing stock

The Zune's only a laughing stock to people that have never used it. Try actually using it for a few days, especially with Zune Pass, and you too will wonder why the iPod is so popular.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Anonymous Coward]

and C# / .NET is just about tying developers into Windows, not about attracting anyone who's currently using Java anywhere else.

Eh, I really don't want C# to attract retards who can't see how better it is than Java when developing for Windows. Thanks.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Thinboy00]

Zune is ancient; Ballmer inherited it, right?

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[allometry]

I get it. Trolling Microsoft is instant karma bucks on /. But seriously, you're talking out of your ass if you believe "C# / .NET" is just about tying developers into Windows. It's about getting shit done for your client!

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[colinrichardday]

Hotmail is a has been

I am a hotmail user, you insensitive clod!

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Anonymous Coward]

but everything else they've touched has been at best break-even, and at worst a colossal money sink.

Which is why every division in the company (Save Internet Services... read "Bing", which has grown market share every month this year, no small feat) is turning a profit, right?

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[timholman]

I really can't think of any new revenue sources that have come along in the Ballmer era. If all he's doing is treading water, then they might as well pay peanuts to a chimp - it'll shriek and gibber and fling chairs just as well as Uncle Fester.

And as a bonus, the chimp would fling its feces at competitors and members of the press, at no extra charge!

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[bravecanadian]

Zune and Kin were a laughing stock, they're having to give away Windows ME (or whatever they're calling it these days) phones, they're paying people to use Bing, IE is losing market share, XBox has finally broken even just in time to start sinking more money into developing the next version. Hotmail is a has been, Silverlight is a wannabe, and C# / .NET is just about tying developers into Windows, not about attracting anyone who's currently using Java anywhere else.

I really can't think of any new revenue sources that have come along in the Ballmer era. If all he's doing is treading water, then they might as well pay peanuts to a chimp - it'll shriek and gibber and fling chairs just as well as Uncle Fester.

Zune and Kin were warmups for their new mobile launchs.

Xbox has finally broken even and has gone from nothing to the best console for revenue. And because of all those Xbox live subscription now they just need to sit back and keep doing what they are doing and make a pile of money off it. As far as the new generation of console.. Nintendo and Sony have to sink the same sort of resources into new ones as well so I'm not sure how that figures as a disadvantage to Microsoft.

If there have been no new revenue sources during Ballmers era then how do you explain Microsoft's revenue doubling in the last 8 years? I can tell you one product that has developed into a billion dollar business off the top of my head: Sharepoint.

I know everyone here is anti Microsoft but the fact is they are still a very viable company and they have the resources to get things wrong 5 times until they get the formula right and then they just keep going.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Anonymous Coward]

C# / .NET is just about tying developers into Windows

I'll try to remember that while I'm enjoying Steam games on my Mac that were quickly ported thanks to .NET and Mono.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Viol8]

You can "get shit done" in C++ too you know. Plus you don't have to worry about which version of .SHIT your client needs to install before it'll work.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Mongoose Disciple]

You can "get shit done" in C++ too you know.

Sure can, and sometimes you should. But that doesn't mean it's the best tool for every task.

Plus you don't have to worry about which version of .SHIT your client needs to install before it'll work.

I assume you're trolling, but that's a much more trivial problem to address as a developer than, say, memory leaks in C++. (Which is itself a fixable problem -- but still a less trivial one.)

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to own a first-gen Zune. It was a beautiful device, in and of itself it was far superior to the iPods of the time, but having to boot into a Windows VM or partition to sync songs to it kinda killed it for me.

Also, I don't care what anybody says - the original Zune looked great in brown w/ green trim. To those who disagree, try actually holding one and looking at it in actual three dimensions

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[allometry]

Pick the best tool for the job and leave your zealotry at the door.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Sir_Lewk]

The Zune's only a laughing stock to people that have never used it....

...which is just about everybody.

Hell, it's failure to properly market itself and gain market share is part of the reason it's a laughing stock!

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[FreonTrip]

Look, every new programming language / productivity suite / IT product is ostensibly about "getting shit done for your client." But if you don't see the connection in Microsoft providing a useful tool that's bound to its own operating systems, then it's a case of not seeing the forest for all those damned trees. If it helps people to move away from that wascally Java, then even better, in Microsoft's eyes.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[GNUThomson]

then they might as well pay peanuts to a chimp
I'm afraid they already do.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Hotmail is a has been

I am a hotmail user, you insensitive clod!

I'll take the liberty of sending you a GMail invite.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Just Some Guy]

The Zune's only a laughing stock to people that have never used it

...or to everyone walking past the Zune display to get to the iPods and Sansas. I don't think anyone's ever said that the Zune is a bad device, but it was almost criminally mismanaged into being a laughing stock. When iPods come in pink, blue, green, silver, etc., the first Zunes came in black, white, and turd brown. What jackass thought "it's gotta be brown! The kids will love it!"

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Anonymous Coward]

How about doing it right the first time without incurring billions in losses?

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[zach_the_lizard]

Whether that's true or not, it's a laughing stock because no one used to. No one bought it either.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[colinrichardday]

Thanks, but I also have a gmail address.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Archangel Michael]

There is NOTHING fun in having to install THREE (simultaneous) versions of .NET on a client to finally find the .NET framework that the .NET application needs to work.

Try explaining that to grandma who knows NOTHING about computers.

On the other hand, I don't mind MS giving me extra income.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[StikyPad]

All tools are bound to the OS, in that they *all* require OS-specific interfaces, even if those interfaces have already been abstracted for a variety of OSes. You don't see Apple writing implementations of the Cocoa API for Windows. Qt went years without officially supporting Windows, and before that, the Windows port of the GPL'd portions of Qt was slipshod at best.

Singling out Microsoft's .NET framework is absurd, and with available source code and the Mono Project implementation of .NET for Linux and OS X, almost irrelevant. There's a lot of things MS does poorly; .NET is a notable exception.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[kikito]

He didn't say it was a worse language. Just that it is not good enough to attract anyone just because of its goodness.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Mongoose Disciple]

If the developer knows what they're doing, you don't have to.

There isn't a programming language or platform in the world that's proof against shitty developers.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[allometry]

Thank you for saying this, because I was getting ready to.

It's ridiculous to list all these things Microsoft is supposedly conspiring to do, to keep users hamstrung in developing applications. In case you haven't noticed, there are tons of programming languages and applications that you can use, instead of Microsoft's flavors. But, you have to acknowledge there are a lot of developers out there who enjoy programming under .NET and find that it does things a lot better than Java, PHP and Perl. I'm one of those developers...

Sure, .NET and C# aren't the best tool for every job, but when it comes to desktop programming, I enjoy all the tools Microsoft gives me through visual studio. I'm not a fan of UI design with Swing and Java. I'm not going to try to wire together PHP and GTK and I'm sure as hell not going to try and get Perl and GTK to work together and why should I? VS does this for me and does it well!

This goes to say that Microsoft can take their tools and go fuck themselves when it comes to database programming on the web. As far as I'm concerned, the best tool I've ever used is CakePHP! I'm not as fast with Ruby and PHP is already setup on just about every web server my clients use.

Leave your zealotry at the door. If you believe that you can solve a problem for your client with X language, then make sure you're justified and not just spewing out bullshit.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Anonymous Coward]

First, you say

Sure, they still own the desktop

Then you say

and C# / .NET is just about tying developers into Windows

Sounds like a winning combination if you're a developer.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Zune and Kin were warmups for their new mobile launchs.

Xbox has finally broken even and has gone from nothing to the best console for revenue. And because of all those Xbox live subscription now they just need to sit back and keep doing what they are doing and make a pile of money off it. As far as the new generation of console.. Nintendo and Sony have to sink the same sort of resources into new ones as well so I'm not sure how that figures as a disadvantage to Microsoft.

The difference between Zune/Kin and Xbox is that people actually bought an Xbox.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[shutdown -p now]

Try explaining that to grandma who knows NOTHING about computers.

Why does your grandma needs to run (much less install) line-of-business applications, which are the bread and butter of .NET?

In any case, if you run a .NET app and it won't find the version it needs, it'll tell you which one it is.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[shutdown -p now]

Hotmail is a has been

FYI, there are 1.5 times as many Hotmail users than there are Yahoo! mail users, and 2.5 times as many as GMail users.

It would be interesting to see the rates of new registrations also, but even if those look really bad for Hotmail, it's clearly not a "has been" yet - it's gonna take some more time.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Anonymous Coward]

My sister has a Zune. From my point of view, the Zune software that runs on her system is a disaster. She just gave up on it and had me help her. Bear in mind that I don't want to spend five hours learning how to use the software, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. Normally though, you expect that when you add a sound file to a playlist and redrag that playlist to the device that the new song will end up on the device and listed in that playlist on the device. Not so. Not even if you delete the playlist and the music from the device and try adding it again. Got some pretty wierd behaviour trying to do that. So, now, when she needs to add something to the playlist, I delete the playlist from the device, delete it from the zune software, then create a new playlist with a slightly different name, then drag it to the device.

Re:Fair point: he's been a big fat howling failure

[Anonymous Coward]

The Zune software is no worse than iTunes.

OK....

[tverbeek]

If asked, I'm willing to serve.

It's not just Ballmer

[Tibor the Hun]

You're right, it's not just Ballmer, the whole company is a behemoth, and overall can't move the needle fast enough.
But if they were to split the search, xbox, and phone and concentrate on just OS and Office, they'd have a chance for some rapid movement.
But what do I know.
I do know that Ballmer should stop taking marketing and PR advice from Spongebob, and run his ass around a block a few times.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[Thinboy00]

There's a problem there:
OS: What's to concentrate on? They've got like 90%+ of the market.
Office:It's way to late, given that OOo doesn't require re-training and Office 2007 (or whichever) does.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[Thinboy00]

s/way to/way too/

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[Mongoose Disciple]

Office:It's way to late, given that OOo doesn't require re-training and Office 2007 (or whichever) does.

No wonder nobody bought Office 2007/2010... wait, that's not what happened at all.

Microsoft's produced enough legitimate gaffes and failures to laugh at in the last ten years -- you don't need to try to will a new one into being through extreme wishful thinking.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[Eponymous Coward]

Do you really think OpenOffice from Oracle has a brighter future than Office from Microsoft?

How much training do you think people actually get for running office apps? Perhaps 10 years ago people would get training, but not so much anymore.

Have you ever received formal training for running Office or any other productivity app?

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[TheLink]

OpenOffice sucks, it's ok for the price I guess, but it sucks. The mods may mod me flamebait but it has bugs that would not have passed proper QA.

Example: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=56449

There are others I've had that I can't really remember in detail - I think I had some problems with Impress - when I ended certain bullet text entries with certain characters, weird stuff would happen - mades me wonder how screwed up the underlying code is.

Other options: http://wapedia.mobi/en/Office_suite?p=1

I've tried the eval version of Kingsoft Office and it does look quite like MS Office. I think they just need to make an Outlook compatible that works with Exchange and they would either be a great success or sued to oblivion by Microsoft ;).

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[zach_the_lizard]

My university mandated that sort of thing if you couldn't pass an exam showing that you could use Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to some degree of competence. I didn't need it, but a handful of people I knew did to get past the Excel portion of the test.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[thesandtiger]

They have 90% of the market now, but it won't stay that way. They should be figuring out an exit plan from the current business model and slowly move out of it as their dominance slowly gets eroded anyway. Basically a plan B is needed, and it really doesn't seem like they have one.

It would be interesting if they went the OS X route and went with the *nix (whatever) underpinnings and their stuff atop that. They'd get over a lot of core issues with the OS that people complain about, improve compatibility (which they may hate now, but they'll want it in the future as people become more OS agnostic).

The thing they have to offer - the thing they've done right with Windows - is gaming. An OS X-like operating system with whatever libraries I needed to play whatever games? That doesn't need to be installed only on one manufacturer's hardware?

Like I said, they won't be dominant forever and they need to embrace the new realities of their market rather than continually trying to force the market to be what it was in the 80's and 90's.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[westlake]

Office:It's way to late, given that OOo doesn't require re-training and Office 2007 (or whichever) does.

Microsoft sells MS Office as part of an integrated office system that scales to a business of any size.

Microsoft's dominance in this sector can not be wished away. Microsoft's share of the enterprise market alone is, as the NY Times blog I quoted earlier reminds us, is as big as Oracle's itself.

MS Office for the PC and the Mac top the software sales charts for the PC and the Mac at Amazon.com - and there is not a single game in the top 100 list.

In the mass market, Grand Theft Auto is worth less than pocket change - the sweepings under your couch - when compared to the MS Office franchise.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[drsmithy]

It would be interesting if they went the OS X route and went with the *nix (whatever) underpinnings and their stuff atop that. They'd get over a lot of core issues with the OS that people complain about, improve compatibility (which they may hate now, but they'll want it in the future as people become more OS agnostic).

There's nothing wrong with the "core" of Windows. Making Yet Another UNIX Clone (though that doesn't really describe OSX, at least not the way it's commonly used) would be *at best* a step sideways, and more likely a step backwards.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[Anonymous Coward]

but but all the tech writers said ribbon would require massive retraining!

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's offered every quarter or so, with an uptick in classes offered whenever a new version is deployed.

But hey, it's generally voluntary.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[Blakey Rat]

Office:It's way to late, given that OOo doesn't require re-training and Office 2007 (or whichever) does.

And yet, despite OpenOffice's freeness, Office 2007 is still selling like hotcakes. If you figure out why that is, you may understand the zen of Microsoft. (Note: same thing applies to Linux compared to Windows.)

Sure, Office 2007 "requires retraining" (assuming you work at a business that does any office app training at all-- I sure don't), but that's not enough to even begin to turn around Microsoft's dominance in that space. There are entire industries run on Excel and (to a lesser extent) PowerPoint. Entire industries.

Also, to be snarky, OpenOffice might not require retraining, but it's also buggy enough to require a significant amount of time to find work-arounds.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[Mr_Silver]

There's a problem there:
OS: What's to concentrate on? They've got like 90%+ of the market.
Office:It's way to late, given that OOo doesn't require re-training and Office 2007 (or whichever) does.

My previous company rolled out Office 2007 to all users over a period of a week. Little to no notice and no training. People complained about it for about a week and now they're perfectly happy using it. Most don't want to go back.

My parents moved to Office 2007 about a month ago. Apart from not being able to find the print button (I'd forgotten to tell them that the orb was clickable) they're doing just fine at the age of 65. Total training time, 5 minutes.

I have no doubts that (in some cases) training would be required and that the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I can't help feeling that we might be blowing this whole "it'll cost a fortune in time and effort to retrain people!" out of proportion a little.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[guruevi]

They're losing market share quickly though. On campusses across the world students are chosing Apple machines with Mac OS X over comparable or even cheaper Windows models. Any geek worth it's salt is either dual-booting or exclusively Linux. They lost the tablets, they lost the next generation of netbooks and unless Windows 7 on Phones is a lot better than either version 5, 6 or Kin they are going to lose the phone market as well. It's not necessarily market share but the way the market is going. Sure, they're entrenched in companies worldwide which gives them the market share but they're slowly, and in some niches quickly, losing the market mind (we wish we could convert to something else except for this...) as well as the market share.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[Gilmoure]

The NetBSD devil does sorta' look like a smiling Balmer. You might have something here.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[toadlife]

Any geek worth it's salt is either dual-booting or exclusively Linux

I disagree. Any geek worth his salt should be competent in Linux/UNIX, but not necessarily prefer it as a desktop OS. I'm very familiar and comfortable with UNIX and Linux; it's welcomed in my server room any time, but I find it to be an absolutely horrible desktop operating system. If I wanted a friendly desktop version of UNIX, I would just buy a Mac and be done with it.

On campusses across the world students are chosing Apple machines with Mac OS X over comparable or even cheaper Windows models

But has the number that are choosing it growing over time?

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[thesandtiger]

The problem with the "core" of Windows is that it's not based on open standards and in a world where MSFT is no longer going to be the de facto standard, they will wind up being pushed off to irrelevancy.

It would be much, much better for them as a business, long term, to basically break the whole "Windows" concept up into a bunch of widgets that people can pick, ala carte, to add to whatever OS they choose to run. For example, MSFT did a great job getting game developers on board with Direct X, and as such, gaming is a compelling reason for many people to have Windows on a machine. But it's becoming less and less compelling as other alternatives become more refined and polished - and in 5 or 10 years I can easily imagine that alternatives for gaming (things like Cedega or other projects) will become much, much, MUCH more polished and viable, to the point where it won't be worth maintaining a seperate OS or machine just for gaming for many people.

Like I said, it's an exit strategy for when the competition eventually and inevitably catches up to them. Better to have a plan than to be caught flat footed, and from everything I've seen, Ballmer has less vision than Mr. Magoo.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[westlake]

They're losing market share quickly though.

In your dreams, kid:

Top Operating System Share Trend, Top Operating System Share Trend

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[drsmithy]

The problem with the "core" of Windows is that it's not based on open standards [...]

Like what ?

It would be much, much better for them as a business, long term, to basically break the whole "Windows" concept up into a bunch of widgets that people can pick, ala carte, to add to whatever OS they choose to run. For example, MSFT did a great job getting game developers on board with Direct X, and as such, gaming is a compelling reason for many people to have Windows on a machine. But it's becoming less and less compelling as other alternatives become more refined and polished - and in 5 or 10 years I can easily imagine that alternatives for gaming (things like Cedega or other projects) will become much, much, MUCH more polished and viable, to the point where it won't be worth maintaining a seperate OS or machine just for gaming for many people.

Huh ? Why would "many people" be maintaining a _separate_ Windows machines just for games ? Why wouldn't they just be doing everything with that Windows machine ?

Like I said, it's an exit strategy for when the competition eventually and inevitably catches up to them.

Catches up with them in regards to what ? Projects like WINE are never going to be able to deliver equivalent application compatibility to Windows in a useful timeframe.

Re:It's not just Ballmer

[Thinboy00]

You seem to have misunderestimated the power of human stupidity.

Re:Incoming fucktard SquarePixel/sopssa trolling .

[Anonymous Coward]

Trolls trolling trolls.

Steve Jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to watch geeks' heads explode all over the world.

Re:Steve Jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

As if Steve Jobs will live another 5 years .. right.

Will he be replaced? No.

[SmallFurryCreature]

Stock is a LOUSY indication of a CEO's performance. Even the article itself makes this clear, earnings went up together with profits, yet stock price went down.

The stock market is about emotion and it seems to be run by 12yr old boys. "OMG the MS did notzers hve 9 trillion winnezers, SELLORS!" This is after all the stock market that gave billions in value to web companies that gave things away for free and refused to buy stocks in decades old companies with reliable safe markets.

Ballmer, as much as I despise the guy, is the CEO MS has to have. Yes, MS COULD try to be an Apple, but it can't. No Zune team, the problem ain't Ballmer, the problem is YOU! The MS staff, those 100.000 people who couldn't come up with an original thought if it bid them on the ass because you are to busy watching the stock market.

Just as a dog reflects its owner, a CEO reflects his company. MS is the boring spreadsheet maker. It can't do an iPod or indeed a PS3. Little Big Planet could NEVER have been a MS project. Simply doesn't fit. Why do you think MS bought up so many game companies and then sold them again? They try to buy the color they lack only to find everything turning gray in their hands. They got the midas touch, expect that everything turns to lead. And lead sells very well indeed. But it ain't sexy.

MS can't ever be sexy, it is not its role in life. IBM isn't sexy either and it does very well because of it. If you want sexy, you go to Sun... and yes that Sun has been bought up says a LOT about how well sexy works. If you want a boring reliable server, you go IBM.

And if you want to outfit 10000 workplaces with an OS/productivity solution, you go MS.

The Zune and Windows Mobile are side excercises, they may someday result in a profit on their own but the cash cows remain Windows and Office and nothing has changed under Ballmers leadership. It is just that in the stock market, improving your earnings and profits results in a lower stock price because you didn't give all your money away and hope to make it up in bulk.

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[Asic Eng]

No Zune team, the problem ain't Ballmer, the problem is YOU! The MS staff, those 100.000 people who couldn't come up with an original thought if it bid them on the ass because you are to busy watching the stock market.

Well, if a single programmer doesn't succeed, then it might well be his own fault. If a whole development team fails to achieve results, you might want to look at the managment structure - wrong hiring strategy, unrealistic goals, poor planning, are likely candidates. If the whole company has a bad culture - then you need to look at the people who are running the company. You don't get thousands of people conspiring to do a bad job, if their performance is bad in then there has to be a reason.

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Little Big Planet could NEVER have been a MS project.

I certainly hope not. Microsoft has produced a turd or two, but at least they haven't made anything THAT bad.

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[Steauengeglase]

Stock is a LOUSY indication of a CEO's performance.

Yeah, but it is the only one that matters. I can't speak for hedge fund managers, but the average people I know who have bought MS stock complain that it "isn't going anywhere". A company could make billions and shareholders won't care unless they made at least 200% of whatever they put into it with a year. Dividends? Who cares about those anymore, the only thing that matters is that I get to retire a few years earlier than scheduled. Boom or bust baby.

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[Dare nMc]

earnings went up together with profits, yet stock price went down.

And that's not enough to justify investors (even if it were correct, because it's not.) Investors are looking for return on investment, they same as you would expect with a compounded interest rate. If you invested $10,000 ten years ago and locked in at 8%, and took no money out, you wouldn't still be making $800 a year now. You would have over $20,000 now, and be making $1600 a year. Since in 10 years Microsofts profits haven't doubled, and they haven't bought back as much stock as they have given out (2% dividend rate doesn't cut it either), they are indeed shrinking in value while making a profit, this from a lack of a growing return. Basically they are mis-manageing their capital, and not getting enough return to justify a premium on the stock.
no growth + minimal payout = no investment.

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Just as a dog reflects its owner, a CEO reflects his company.

The correct relationship to the dog/owner relationship would be, a companies employees reflects their CEO.

Values/habits pass from the leader to their followers..

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[Blakey Rat]

Just as a dog reflects its owner, a CEO reflects his company. MS is the boring spreadsheet maker. It can't do an iPod or indeed a PS3. Little Big Planet could NEVER have been a MS project.

Wait, what?

First of all, Microsoft can do a PS3. Arguably, it can out-do a PS3. Demonstrably, it can at least create an extremely strong competitor for the PS3.

Secondly, Microsoft isn't the type of company that can make Little Big Planet, but Sony *is!?* Sony's a bigger, slower moving, behemoth than Microsoft is.

And like Microsoft, the only way they can put out titles like Little Big Planet is by acquiring developers qualified to do it. (Which is why Microsoft bought Bungie and Rare for the Xbox division; they knew they didn't have the in-house talent for it.)

And hey, guess what? Little Big Planet wasn't developed by Sony, only published by them. So you can't cite Little Big Planet as a Sony example without citing, for example, Viva Pinata or Gears of War in the Microsoft column. Because Microsoft's relationship with Epic Games (developers of Gears of War) is identical to Sony's relationship with Media Molecule (developers of Little Big Planet.)

All you've shown is your own ignorance of how the games industry works.

If you want sexy, you go to Sun... and yes that Sun has been bought up says a LOT about how well sexy works. If you want a boring reliable server, you go IBM.

Sun? Seriously?

Look, if you think Sun's shitty products are "sexy", you're really beyond hope. There's nothing more I can say about that.

I actually agree with your post, but your examples are really goofy.

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

MS is the boring spreadsheet maker.

And it is a spreadsheet application that doesn't even can be used for calculations, unless you tolerate lots of miscalculations. Most of the bad algorithms from 1987 is still used in Excel and they have added new ones, some cause less frequent errors nowadays because of the use of larger floating point numbers, but on the other hand: larger floats enables larger miscalculations when they appear.

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[bravecanadian]

earnings went up together with profits, yet stock price went down.

If you invested $10,000 ten years ago and locked in at 8%,.

Who was giving you a locked in 8% ten years ago?

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[DragonWriter]

Stock is a LOUSY indication of a CEO's performance.

Often -- and in this case -- its not. The CEO works for the stockholders, and his job is to maximize their realization of their shared interest, which in the case of most publicly traded companies, is limited to maximization of their own financial returns in the form of stock appreciation + dividends (and, mostly, its preferred these days that the form be "stock appreciation" rather than dividends.)

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[Z8]

Your post got modded very highly, but there's no reason why things have to work that way. Does the U.S. have the culture it does because of Obama? Large groups of people who interactive regularly, including many companies, eventually acquire a culture which cannot be traced directly back to a single individual. It's just an emergent property of large groups of people.

Also, the GP's point wasn't that Microsoft is a bad company. S/he said that MS's culture is compatible with staid business applications, not creativity and style. A good CEO knows the corporate culture at a company and chooses goals accordingly.

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[shutdown -p now]

Your post got modded very highly, but there's no reason why things have to work that way. Does the U.S. have the culture it does because of Obama?

Obama doesn't have the power to single-handedly grant and relieve U.S. citizenship to any random person, though...

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[Dare nMc]

Who was giving you a locked in 8% ten years ago?

corperations, B rated bonds were going for 8.4% AAA rated 7.62%, federal bonds rate for 20 year bonds was at 6.23%
so you didn't have to go to risky to get locked in around that range.

Re:Will he be replaced? No.

[Z8]

Good point, but that power is pretty hard to use. Most managers are more than happy to go with the "devil they know", probably because it would take a year+ to get the new person up to speed. If you replace a lot of (important) people at once, your whole company is put in chaos and enters a doomsday spiral (not to mention the morale problems). So unless your company is facing imminent demise, you're pretty much stuck with the people you have.

My guess is that it was similar in the age of monarchies. King Henry VIII may have been able to "single-handedly grant and relieve citizenship" as you put it, but he still could never change the culture of England to match France (I think William the Conquerer tried that).

Apple vs. Microsoft No Longer Relevant

[Slash.Poop]

One has a primary focus of SOFTWARE and secondary focus on GADGETS
One has a primary focus of GADGETS and secondary focus on SOFTWARE

Re:Apple vs. Microsoft No Longer Relevant

[Dunbal]

Nah - it's just that Steve Ballmer needs to wear a black turtleneck

Re:Apple vs. Microsoft No Longer Relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't agree with this at all. Apple does sell gadgets, but their software is just as polished and exists to add tremendous value to the gadgets they sell. Final Cut Studio brought quality film production to the digital age, and iMovie makes it easy enough for my mom to make a great looking DVD. Garageband has been a fairly big hit, as has iPhoto/Aperture.

Apple focuses on both, MS doesn't seem to focus on either. The big reason for this is the management at MS has created a horrible environment for developing products, and as the head of all management Ballmer deserves blame for this.

Re:Apple vs. Microsoft No Longer Relevant

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Nah. One has primary focus on customer
satisfaction. The other must have primary focus elsewhere.

Sorry for being a bit snide. If it helps, this message was typed on an Android phone.

Anyhow, Ballmer had been falling behind on the arguably most important new market: The smartphone market. Windows Mobile 7 better be great, otherwise Microsoft may be in real trouble on the medium term.

Re:Apple vs. Microsoft No Longer Relevant

[fred fleenblat]

One has a primary focus of MAKING MONEY and a secondary focus on OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY SUITES.
One has a primary focus of MAKING MONEY and a secondary focus on TELEPHONES.

Re:Apple vs. Microsoft No Longer Relevant

[janwedekind]

One locks people out.
One locks people in.

Re:Apple vs. Microsoft No Longer Relevant

[StikyPad]

This.

Paging Mr McBride

[Linker3000]

Mr Darl McBride to the white courtesy phone.


/A surreal moment

Re:Paging Mr McBride

[McNihil]

No Darl that is the red phone. The white phone is right beside it.

Loosely from "Airplane!"

...in favor of someone better suited...

[starglider29a]

Tony Hayward is available!

He's got the "right stuff".
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-26/leadership-tips-from-tony-hayward-or-not-.html

• Deny and minimize problems
• Emphasize your own power and importance.
• Make the story all about you
• Never apologize, and don't even pretend to learn from your mistakes.
• Hang onto your job even when it's clear you should go

And experience in negatively impacting an entire ecosystem. Perfect! (Also perfect that this article posted 14 minutes before the Slashdot article. ;-)

Re:...in favor of someone better suited...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like Obama

Re:...in favor of someone better suited...

[Locke2005]

Sure, but can Tony dance around on stage with huge sweat marks on his shirt while shouting "Developers! Developers!" over and over again? How far can Tony throw a chair?

Re:...in favor of someone better suited...

[natehoy]

I'm thinking BP and MS just need to swap CEOs one-for-one.

Hayward is already receiving a significant pension PLUS a golden parachute, and I'm sure Ballmer would be as well.

Both companies could save a lot of money by simply giving their current CEO a guaranteed cushy job with another company instead.

How about they promote him

[DoofusOfDeath]

to chaiman?

Re:How about they promote him

[Tibor the Hun]

Dude....
I can not believe the amount of FAIL you packed in just two words.
That is a masterpiece.

Re:How about they promote him

[sharkey]

So he'll spend his days making tea then?

Re:How about they promote him

[HungWeiLo]

You mean Ballmer will be shipped off to the Bangalore office to personally make sure all the chai cups are filled at all times?

A crazy man..

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that one of the differences Steve B could do would be to change his personality. He seems to have huge swings of emotion. Extremely angry or happy. (Running around yelling 'Developers', throwing chairs, etc help show this, among other things) If I worked for Microsoft (fortunately I don't, but I know a lot who do), I would feel embarrassed because of him. As for lack of vision, I agree. This is a person who basically says other stuff is crap, unless Microsoft has made it. He acts as if he is the smartest person in the world, but comes across as one of the dumbest. If Microsoft had a good leader, I think they could make some pretty good stuff.

Re:Incoming fucktard SquarePixel/sopssa trolling .

[somaTh]

It was silly of me to assume that trolls would be on topic. Or that they make sense.

Steve Ballmer to be replaced with goatse guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Kirk Johnson's official homepage and fanclub confirms it: http://admin.imagefap.com/profile.php?user=KirkJ&type=1

Are you serious?

[bravecanadian]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Despite what everyone on slashdot and idiot day traders say:

MSFT Revenue 2002: $28B Profit: $5B

MSFT Revenue 2010: $62B Profit: $18.7B

Yeah.. he's doing a horrible job. And obviously Microsoft can't do anything right and is only declining.

Seriously, how can anyone even begin to say that?

Re:Are you serious?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, let's put this in perspective (as in, from the perspective of the people that you're complaining about):

1999 Trading stock price high: over 180, just before being declared a monopoly

2010 Trading stock price high: no where near 180; perhaps 35, with a bicycle pump and some extra headwind

People in the stock market biz do some dumb-ass things, and one of them is decoupling the profitability of the company from the trading price of its shares. Being CEO of a publicly traded company is more than just making your profit margins; it's also placating irate shareholders, you know, those people that actually dumped dollars into the company hoping to get a dividend (or even more of their infamous "two-for-one" stock splits)...frankly, from a stock market perspective, the company has been stagnant for a decade, with or without Ballmer's supposed mismanagement.

But if you're going to delve into numbers, please explain to me why all other divisions are loosing money, and why the OS/Office divisions are basically supporting the funding of those areas? I think the answer isn't Ballmer's leadership; rather, it's the enormous bloat of the company. The real answer for MS is to focus hard on their cash cows; and then, only after those cows are a-pump'n money into their coffers, only then should they have turned around and pushed out money-losers like Xbox and Kin.

Re:Are you serious?

[bravecanadian]

Any serious investor knows that it is hard to grow a multi-billion dollar company at the same rate as a small and growing company.

Why do you think that Microsoft has been paying a dividend the last several years?

They are a mature company now and we aren't going to see the massive growth rates anymore simply because they are a BIG company.

This is the same reason Warren Buffett warned his investors that most likely Berkshire will beat the "average" growth of the stockmarket but that their big growing days (as a %) are more than likely over because of their sheer size.

Re:Are you serious?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Seriously, how can anyone even begin to say that?

Welcome to Slashdot! You must be new here.

Re:Are you serious?

[GeckoAddict]

1999 Trading stock price high: over 180, just before being declared a monopoly

2010 Trading stock price high: no where near 180; perhaps 35, with a bicycle pump and some extra headwind

Um.... the stock split twice in that time period, so your comparison is worth nothing. It might not be worth a lot more, but let's face it, MS isn't a growth stock. What they should do, is either Grow (new products, acquisitions, which they're trying), or return value to shareholders (increase dividend).

Re:Are you serious?

[jimboindeutchland]

from TFA:

After all, many of Ballmer's minions have their wealth tied up in Microsoft stock options and it is quite disconcerting for them to look at a 10-year chart that shows the company's share price of $48.93 when Ballmer took over in January 2000 now down to $25.12. (for the math-challenged, that's a nearly 50 percent loss in value over the last decade).

If you'd invested some money in MS shares 10 years ago you'd be able to sell them for half the amount today. If I was a shareholder I'd be furious. Generally you'd expect to make some (even minor) capital gain on a stock like MS over that period.

Re:Are you serious?

[phillymjs]

Microsoft is so entrenched with Windows and Office that you could shave down a gorilla and put it in charge for a while and they'd be fine, money wise. (Some would say Ballmer is proof of that.)

But seriously, on his watch Microsoft has had some of it's biggest failures, like Vista and Kin. He laughed off the iPhone and then his company's product got trounced by it. He dismissed the iPad and similarly got caught with his pants down when it became a multi-million seller. He has mismanaged so badly that he's driven off some of their best talent.

He has no vision-- all he does is react to what his competitors do (and not always in a timely manner, as we saw with the iPhone). A CEO is supposed to be a leader, not take his cues from what the competition is doing.

~Philly

Re:Are you serious?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Despite what everyone on slashdot and idiot day traders say:

MSFT Revenue 2002: $28B Profit: $5B

MSFT Revenue 2010: $62B Profit: $18.7B

Yeah.. he's doing a horrible job. And obviously Microsoft can't do anything right and is only declining.

Seriously, how can anyone even begin to say that?

You're an idiot!

Re:Are you serious?

[bravecanadian]

They are too busy collecting dividends to be furious.

And the market is speculatively undervaluing them.. it happens because the market is not rational.

Re:Are you serious?

[vbraga]

There was two splits in this time frame if I recall correctly.

Re:Are you serious?

[StikyPad]

Clearly they're hoping that saying it enough will make it true.

Re:Are you serious?

[Anonymous Coward]

What use are dollars if they turn zimbabwean?

Re:Are you serious?

[quo_vadis]

Not quite. MSFT did a 2:1 split in 2002, so each share was effectively diluted by 50%. If you invested in a 100 shares of MSFT in 2000, your valuation is almost the same now as it was then (well up by ~2%). The problem is that accounting for inflation, and given the performance of NASDAQ over the decade, your money would have been better invested elsewhere.

Re:Are you serious?

[Chris_Mir]

The market grew faster then their growth!

Re:Are you serious?

[thoth]

They're saying it on how much of the computer world has passed Microsoft up lately. Yes, profits went up from $5B to $18.7B. But how much of that could a monkey running the company on autopilot achieved, given a starting portfolio of Windows and Office?

Re:Are you serious?

[quacking duck]

Stock splits are accounted for in any respectable system that generates stock graphs and such. Otherwise it would be impossible to produce meaningful comparisons, like this.

Re:Are you serious?

[fractalus]

Shareholders don't invest money into MS to get no return on their investment; they want to see growth in the stock price and/or dividends, because that's what matters to them. If the stock price stays flat even while profits soar, investors are right to ask where the hell the return on their investment is.

Yes. It's just a question of when.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is still a profitable company. It's not like he's driven it into the ground. If shareholders are happy with collecting dividends rather than seeing share growth, then Ballmer could be around for a while. Apple and Microsoft are at two different points in their growth curves and comparing the two is a bit misleading. Now, the question of whether Microsoft could have done what Apple did and added the growth that Apple's seen is an interesting one. If they could have (and I think the xbox360 shows that they could have), then the question of why they didn't is interesting. And I think Ballmer is a big answer to that question. Thus, I expect him to go sooner than later but it is only indirectly related to Apple's market cap.

R. Lee Ermey for MS CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the only guy that could out-Ballmer Ballmer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFNeBRc7W7s

"...here you are all equally worthless! And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps! Do you maggots understand that?"

.

And then?

[lennier1]

How will they decide the successor? A chair throwing contest???

I don't like....

[Torodung]

I don't like the slant of the last part of your post.

--
Toro

Windows has to be replaced not/with Microsoft'sCEO

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Having seen Windows 8 plans which pretty much looks like a continuation and layering on top of the old Windows cruft I strongly believe it's Windows platform that's needed to be replaced and, call me crazy, rewritten from the scratch. Of course, old Windows applications must be made functional via built-in virtualization (like it was done in MacOS). There's no reason for Windows to consume 650MB of RAM (with superfetch disabled) and 6GB (swap and hibernation files excluded) of HDD space - any other application (except games and hardcore software like CAD/3D virtualization/etc) would be called a bloatware having such an insane gluttony.

However RAM and HDD requirements are not what's really important (with todays standard >=2GB RAM and >= 250GB HDDs) - Windows allows to mess up with itself (registry, broken system files/boot loader, run-as-admin, etc.) and that's unacceptable.

But in the end it looks like a new CEO is required to bring this plan into life.

a more interesting armchair

[nimbius]

question would be not "will we replace ballmer?" but "will replacing ballmer rally do anything?"

It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been obvious to me that he shouldn't be CEO since about 11 years ago when he made the comment There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category." Although he was telling the truth, the #1 job of a CEO is to prop up the stock price, not drive it down. The officers of a company have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to preserve market value; Steve failed.

The Beauty Contest

[westlake]

Microsoft's fourth quarter profits were $4.52 billion dollars, up 48% from the same period last year.

This, in most circles, would be considered good news.

Lost from view is what arguably is Microsoft's very best story -- its transformation into a powerhouse supplier of the specialized software that meets the complex needs of large corporations, what the trade calls selling to "the enterprise."

Microsoft's enterprise software business alone is approaching the size of Oracle. But despite that astounding growth, Microsoft must accept that, fair or not, victories on the enterprise side draw about as much attention as being the No. 1 wholesale seller of plumbing supplies. Microsoft won't receive the adoring attention that its chief rival draws with products like the iPad. Even With All Its Profits, Microsoft Has a Popularity Problem

Not until Win 8 comes out

[melted]

I've spent almost a decade working there, and here's how it's gonna play out, mark my words:
1. Sinofsky will release Windows 8 to much fanfare
2. Sinofsky will pop the question as to whether he should be the CEO. He's currently the heir to the throne.
3. If that question is asked positively (90% chance), Ballmer moves on "to spend more time with the family". If negatively—Sinofsky moves on to work "on other endeavors".

Until Win 8 comes out, I don't know how badbly Ballmer needs to screw up to hasten the process. He and Gates have the Board under their collective thumb, and BillG isn't going to fire him. Let's face it, in spite of all the stock related issues, Microsoft has been doing quite well financially and he did substantially (perhaps too substantially) grow the company.

Profitable, but not making a profit

[mveloso]

Note that the unit is profitable, but will never (at the current rate) make up the amount of cumulative losses it has sustained. Just because it's profitable for a quarter or two doesn't mean it'll ever make money.

Bring Gates Back

[helix2301]

I think that Microsoft needs to bring back Bill Gates. Gates is a true hardcore geek that is into technology. When Gates was the CEO the company has never seen better revenue and guidance. The recent turn of events proves that Microsoft needs better guidance. Ballmer is a sales drone Gates is a geek and a brilliant business man. If Microsoft wants revenue like back in there pinnacle they need Gates at the helm.

Sounds sensible

[Cloud K]

Ballmer has all the charm and likability of a genital wart, not really someone you want as the figurehead of the company. For all the faults Borg Gates had, he still had a personality beyond "ape" and even had a modicum of respect (from some) as a geek. One who bought/copied/stole everything, but still...

I have a feeling Steve Jobs may find himself going through this soon as well. Even as an Apple fanboy I'm starting to see him as an embarrassment. The way he talks to customers is atrocious, as is his handling of the iphone4 issues. He deserves credit for revolutionizing Apple in the late 90s and early 00s, but nowadays I think a lot of the credit for the good things to come from there would go to others like Jony Ive.

M$ should breakup

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft will only be able to grow fast again by being small. They need to spin off the app, OS, Xbox and business apps into wholly owned subsidiaries that are free to move as they need to. Right now everything in Microsoft is slaved to Windows and the monopoly mentality - only enter a market with the goal of completely owning i.

Then each one can go after their respective markets without being tied to each other.

Balmer is an idiot

[nilbog]

My two year old could run Microsoft better than Balmer, and I don't even have a two year old.

The one difference between Microsoft

[joeflies]

and the other companies on your list is that Microsoft has that Windows money to keep the doors open while they took horrendous losses on XBOX in order to enter that market. Or as you look at their other product lines, whatever busineses they feel like at the time, many of which don't make money now, or even in the forseeable future. They stay in any number of businesses that lose money because they have other revenue streams to prop the company up. It's not a function of delivering a better product than Sega, NeoGeo, or 3D0. It's that monopoloy money that allows them to enter markets they never were in before.

Ballmer is a follower, not a leader

[cheros]

Ballmer is a show monkey and a bully, but has so far not displayed any notable talent whatsoever. He does not lead, because for leading you need a vision and the drive to make it happen, and that takes a modicum of intelligence. Ballmer is the perfect no2 because he simply does what you tell him to do, but he has failed to display *any* capability to be number 1.

I reckon Gates may come back a la Jobs, thinking he can do the same. He may even try a roll neck jumper himself, but he won't manage. Not because he's not as much a control freak, but he has a different style that doesn't work right now. Apple pulled off a coup because it did something new, Gates hasn't got the right leadership model to unleash the brains the company bought in to stop them from competing, he's better at, umm, "borrowing" ideas..

MS isn't dead, that will take years. But I wouldn't buy shares in them right now.

Dell was an innovator

[ISoldat53]

They went from First stage to Fourth in one go.

Management by screaming

[ISoldat53]

The current state of MS is a direct result of management by screaming. I'm surprised it has lasted this long.

Re: Comparison with Apple

[mhollis]

OK, i'll bite (or is it byte -- naah, that's just a really good magazine I used to read that was killed).

I was working with Microsoft back in 1995 doing PR for them. Happened to go to a meeting that, maybe I should not have attended. Bunch of microserfs in attendance looking at a new product. Gates enters the room and everyone gets really excited and really quiet.

Gates asks about part of the user interface. Microserf answers. Gates proceeds to rip into him like the wrath of ghod (which he may have been to the microserfs). Calls him a total idiot, tells him his UI won't work because nobody will get it. Then turns to the rest of the room -- which cowers as one (actually, I almost flinched and I had nothing to do with the project). Then Gates brings up another aspect of the application and one guy stands up with a quavering voice and takes responsibility (blame). Gates tells him that most of what he has seen makes pretty good sense, then rips into him about part of the thing he took credit for.

I figured half the room was going to be let go and escorted off the Microsoft campus by armed guards at gunpoint (and no, you cannot empty your desks!). Gates then tells everyone that they have to be afraid, that the other software companies were going to catch up, that Microsoft was going to die horribly if they didn't get it together and think. Gates then whines about sloppy coding habits, tells them to get back to work and he'd better see a better application and soon.

Folks, Steve Ballmer is a manager-type. If he ever wrote a single line of code, it was in MSBasic as a new hire so that he could show Gates that it can be used to calculate sums and count beans. He doesn't understand, and has never understood, the people who design software. He cannot pick apart their work. And he cannot, as Gates used to, exhort them to produce better because he can do better.

I've not worked for Apple or done any projects within that company. But it's my understanding that Jobs is the same as Gates was. He has worked on design, which is a primary focus of Apple. He can rip into people who don't innovate. Jobs is not a bean counter, he's a visionary. Love him or hate him, Jobs requires something more of his people than a bean counter would and I would argue that Jobs can require that because of what he knows, which goes way beyond handling a company's balance sheet.

Where Gates lost his way was when the Internet became a phenomenon. "It's a gold-rush mentality," he said, "And the only people who are going to make money off the Internet are people who make tools for things on the Internet."

By that, I suppose he meant FrontPage and IIS servers. FP has been completely eclipsed by Dreamweaver and there are even free tools that create better websites. I do have one website on an IIS server. I uploaded an .M4V video file and it didn't work on the server. Administrator had to enable those types of files (I'll take normal Linux/Apache any day). And don't get me started on what I have to do to support Microsoft's non-W3C-compliant Internet Exploiter browser! I think they failed in that mission and that was back under Gates.

My argument is that Microsoft's decline is more due to lack of technical leadership than anything else. Ballmer was important to the company as its first manager but a tech company needs a tech guru sitting in the CEO seat, not someone who could run a division of Proctor and Gamble.

The triumphant return of Bill Gates

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Isn't it obvious? The only reason Bill Gates left in the first place was so that he could make a triumphant return just like Steve Jobs did. There isn't anything Microsoft won't steal from Apple. :)

LOL! Total Fucking Idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's created new ideas that every other console maker has ripped-off,"

Achievements are a shitty ripoff of Sony's Skill Point system from PS2 era Insomniac games.

The creepy Nintendo Mii ripoff.

The poorly implemented Sony EyeToy motion control ripoff.

The only thing idiots running the Xbox fiasco created all by themselves is the 55 percent failure rate on shit Xbox 360 hardware.

Don't ever run your mouth off 'teh Microsoft innovation' in the console market you fucking faggot.

Its not Ballmer, its everybody else at Microsoft..

[LibertineR]

Microsoft is not the same company it was 18 years ago, when I started there.

Back then, if your code was shit, you heard about it. Not just from your lead, but from everyone up the chain. You got one, maybe two fuckups before you went on plan. If you were one to glance at the clock and be out the door at 5pm, you were not long for the company.

Back then, if you performed, you had a chance of becoming wealthy. Today? Well, good luck bitches.

When the options were flying, you didn't mind getting your ass chewed on a semi-regular basis, and you didn't mind living in your office for weeks on end, if it meant your project shipped on time. The stuff I heard back then, directed at me, at women, at minorities, or whoever the fuck you were, would welcome lawsuits today. Back then, nobody cared, we were shipping, and buying homes for cash.

What's the stock done for a decade? Nothing. A decent wage, and even great benefits are not enough to get smart people to work like slaves; ruin marriages, with some threatening suicide in the parking lots. For that, you need the promise of wealth.

And that time is OVER in Redmond. Some will still do well, but there is never going to be that sense that one day, you and the guy across the hall are going to be drag-racing your new Porsche's on the 520, if we can just get this fucking product out the door.

My first day in Redmond as an employee, I parked my Camry next to Bob McDowell's yellow Ferrari, and said to myself, "that's me one day, if I work my ass off, fuck having a life for now".

That day is long gone, and it aint coming back to Redmond.

Ballmer was the perfect guy to motivate back then, even though he was more focused on sales at the time. Today, he cant even say what he wants to say in public. He has to call Steve Jobs a visionary, rather than the spear up his ass, he really feels he is.

If anyone back then had told Ballmer that one day Apple would be worth more than Microsoft, he would have probably strongly suggested that you go work there, and get the fuck off the campus.

Ballmer is the right guy, its just the wrong day. Different people, different motivations, different skills, and thinner skins.

I'm a MS product user...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and I have no problem with their products. However, I've always wondered, what the hell does Ballmer do? He seems to have no real ability for anything except being the corporate equivalent of a high level hanger-on. He seems to have rode the coattails of Bill Gates, and then all the other employees who did real work. Would you hire him for anything? What MS project has there been that you say "now that shit would have NEVER flown without Ballmer at the helm". Fat, bald, annoying voice, he's not even fit as a mouthpiece. How does a dumpy, annoying person with no ability get to be CEO? He doesn't even seem to have any workplace backstabbing ability. So how the hell does such a twit even become CEO? Does he have compromising pictures of Gates? Or he must either have a really big cock, or can suck a mean dick (take your pick). At least Steve Jobs seems to have some ideas, as well as PR skill, despite his arrogance. Ballmer has nothing tangible or intangible that I can see of. He's not even an interesting boor.

The mind boggles.

The proof is in the pudding

[Locke2005]

The announcement of Carly Fiorina leaving sent HP's stock shooting up. What would the announcement of Steve Ballmer leaving do to Microsoft stock? Whenever the announcement of the Board giving an officer their walking papers is met with a stock jump, it's a pretty good indication that the board has made the correct choice.

What people don't get is...

[wfolta]

Microsoft, since day one, has been all about share: market share, mind share, destroying competitors (and allies), having a stake in every market and every market segment in case it begins to grow and become a meaningful share, ... SHARE, SHARE, SHARE! (In fact, I remember seeing MS Powerpoint presentations where the entire presentation was on their mind share. I thought they invented the concept.)

Apple, since day one, has been all about making an incredible user experience.

You may disagree with what Apple holds as its exemplar "incredible user experience", but it does clearly have ideas that involve elegance, beauty, quality, simplicity, etc. And it believes that if it can make those products -- and keep competitors (and allies) from muddying the waters -- it will be profitable. Microsoft has innovated where they've focused: using the power of controlling the OS, bundling products into a suite, using cash cows to wear enemies down, etc.

I'll be called an Apple Fanboi, but I think Ballmer's just the guy left standing when the music stopped. MS has never been innovative technology-wise, and has never had a vision for a user experience. As the old play review says, "What was original was not good, and what was good was not original". And now with a resurgent Apple doing obviously innovative things, with other competitors (Google, etc) nipping at their heels, MS is revealed so clearly for what it is that even the "I'm a PC" crowd has had to find a scapegoat, and, well, Ballmer's it. Occasionally, some innovative ideas break out at MS (perhaps even Windows 7 Mobile), but the culture kills them. Not Ballmer, but the culture. Ballmer's just the leader who is trying to figure out the modern context in which this culture might once again dominate SHARE.

Re:Windows has to be replaced not/with Microsoft's

[Chimel31]

A new Windows rewritten from scratch would really help a whole new class of efficient and reliable embedded and consumer systems, maybe an OS that would make multiplatform programming easier too (developing apps simultaneously for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.)

But that would be a tremendous job, you'd basically need to rewrite from scratch all the applications and especially the developers' tools. Even then devs would need a lot of training about the changes and new features offered by the new OS, how to port their existing apps, etc. All software companies would need to adapt too. Not too sure we'll find many supporters for this cause.

Re:Its not Ballmer, its everybody else at Microsof

[Mongoose Disciple]

I wish I could mod that post up -- it's an interesting take on the topic and covers ground that no one else in this thread did.

What will Ballmer do after Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

What will Steve Ballmer do after Microsoft?

As a CEO, he was litigatious, against Linux in any way possible, and doesn't mind fighting the world to prove he is right.

I guess he could work for SCO. I hear they are looking for a new CEO...

Re:Go read... Augustine

[martin-boundary]

I prefer to read Buck Rogers, ex vice prez at IBM.

.NET is doing great

[thermal_7]

Microsoft is now doing a great job with .NET which ties computers to their platforms. They have released the new ASP.NET MVC framework which finally provides a way to use the nice underbelly of .NET without using ASP.NET, which is an abomination.

Then there are things like WPF and VS 2010 which are great positive steps.

So peg this as a positive one.

But, MS just posted a record quarter

[walterbyrd]

Microsoft's revenue total of $16.04 billion surpassed the $15.27 billion predicted by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters and arrived on 22 percent sales growth.

In addition, Microsoft posted a 48 percent rise in net income to $4.52 billion, or 51 cents a share, from the $3.05 billion, or 34 cents a share in the comparable period last year. Analysts had expected earnings of 46 cents a share.

For the full year, Microsoft reported a 29 percent rise in net income to $18.76 billion and a 7 percent rise in revenue to $62.48 billion.

All told, Microsoft's sales achieved a company record and reflected a healthy technology industry that has benefited from a recent increase in corporate spending.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/technology/23soft.html?src=busln

Xbox 360, the de-facto standard???

[redstar427]

... in North America Xbox360 is the de-facto standard console for traditional gamers ...

I must live in a different "North America". At least where I live, in a city in California, usa, I don't know anyone with an Xbox. Some gamers I know have a PC, some have a ps3, and some have a Wii. None have an Xbox.

Re:Incoming fucktard SquarePixel/sopssa trolling .

[Anonymous Coward]

How pathetic. Reading through the posting history of both SquarePixel and sopssa I was expecting, maybe another twitter, but instead I see what appear to be pretty normal comments.

What happened? Did he pwn you in some argument and shatter your pathetically fragile ego?

Re:Its not Ballmer, its everybody else at Microsof

[Anonymous Coward]

Fascinating point of view. I'm a recent hire at Microsoft (hence the AC posting), and this sounds more or less spot-on. Don't get me wrong, I like my job just fine, but there's no real passion from anyone on my team. It might be because I work on the cash cow with the least exciting future prospects (Office), but the company feels a whole lot more like a boring 9-to-5 job than working at an innovative and exciting company.

George in Seinfeld

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George did everything
the complete opposite of his instincts. Give it a try Ballmer...

Re:Its not Ballmer, its everybody else at Microsof

[grouchomarxist]

That says a lot. I know a good number of Apple employees and although a lot of them have become rich, their primary motivation isn't money. From what I've heard the working environment at Apple can get tense, but not that horrible. People are under a lot of pressure, but generally the drive is to create great products.

Re:Its not Ballmer, its everybody else at Microsof

[quacking duck]

What's the stock done for a decade? Nothing. A decent wage, and even great benefits are not enough to get smart people to work like slaves; ruin marriages, with some threatening suicide in the parking lots. For that, you need the promise of wealth.

As a long-term investment it would've been better if it had done nothing. According to Google Finance it's currently down over 25% from 10 years ago, though of course there have been ups and downs over the years. Meanwhile, inflation has gone up about 27%, according to the US Department of Labour's calculator. Dividends might be the only reason to keep holding on to Microsoft stock right now.

Re:Its not Ballmer, its everybody else at Microsof

[LibertineR]

Well, congrads for getting in, as it is a BIG help in looking for future work, or with VCs when you decide to strike out on your own. LEARN EVERYTHING YOU CAN, then at your first opportunity to be creative, RUN. There are still some brilliant people there, and not just the coders. I learned more lessons from some of the marketing people than from coders towards the success of my own ventures. Avail yourself of the internal classes, especially PUBLIC SPEAKING. Nothing you do in life will be more beneficial to you long term, than the ability to speak in front of people on a topic of interest.

Oh wait, you didn't ask for advice, did you? Okay, then just this; don't fuck a girl-microsoftie. She will move in, and she WONT LEAVE.

Microsoft's problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

is that they've viewed themselves as an "platform" or OS company. They never seem to have realized what business they are in! Most people do not buy a computer because of what operating system it runs, but because of what applications it runs. Microsoft's big success was Office, not Windows, Windows is just a vehicle to deliver Office to customers. If they had any brains, they'd stop trying to milk Windows via feature upgrades, work hardest on making it bulletproof instead of constantly undermining the stability of it with new features, and port Office and IE and every other app they have to the Linux desktop. They should stick with what they're good at, office applications. They could help to make Linux on the desktop, and then be top dog when it gets there, and it would be better integrated with Windows than anything else. They're in a position to decide who the top Linux distribution is going to be if they want, Ubuntu or SUSE or Red Hat or whatever, by leading people to it with Office. Instead, while they are rearranging the Windows deck chairs, the Linux tortoise continues to plod towards the desktop gaining a little day by day, and MS will eventually lose more and more market share, and will finally decide to do a port, probably just as its too late for them. Someone will eventually carve out the commercial application market for Linux, there will be applications that people are willing to pay for on Linux, and if it isn't from Microsoft, then someone else will have it...

I like Steve Ballmer....

[dogzdik]

He and the shitware THAT company produces, gave me the benefit of years of hacking my own systems to make them work or work around the faults and gross stupidity in them, so much so that I am never ever going to buy anything Microsoft ever again, and my IQ raising is now devoted soley to Linux....

.

Speaking of which I am now using XP for a while and I am having to get around that fucking stupid "feature" that pops a screen up, while an operation is occouring, and it cannot be minimised... which just does not happen in Linux....

.

and I am looking for the grand idea of having multiple desktops in XP... which comes native in Linux...

.

So thanks Ballmer - you and your fuckhole stooges gave me every reason I needed to move off your crapware and Linux gave me every reason to stay.

Re: Blocking the competition?

[Lonewolf666]

Interesting analysis. Personally I think that strategy will fail, because it only works in a limited context:
If most customers already have a Microsoft product they are used to, extending that product with the same features as the new competitor can indeed kill the new contender. That is what happened to OS/2 and Netscape.

It also needs to happen early after the new product category shows up, or the competition will be too entrenched to get rid of. Examples for this are:
-Java: While .Net has indeed taken a lot of market share, Java is not dead and will probably stay around for a long time
-Oracle: Still considered the #1 product for high end installations, MS SQL Server failed to push it out.
-XBox: At the expense of several billion $, the XBox brand is now on equal footing with the PS3 and Wii. But Microsoft is still far from controlling that market.

In case of Android and similar systems, I think Microsoft will be too late as well. They seem to have no convincing lightweight operating system for small mobile devices right now. Current netbooks are barely capable of running Windows 7 well, but for anything smaller it eats too many ressources. The GUI design eats too much screen real estate as well. Let alone the limitation to x86 processors.

IMHO Microsoft should stop to spend spend spend to block Android& Co. and focus on its strengths on the desktop. One Exception:
Another go at the mobile OS market might be a good idea if the new product works as a meaningful extension of the Windows desktop "ecosystem". But Microsoft sucks at breaking into new markets without a connection to their existing products.

Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean shouting "Developers, developers, developers!" won't work here!?

MeeGo

[LWATCDR]

Sorry I blew it. It is MeeGo that has been picked by a lot of car companies for their new infotainment systems.
Of course MeeGo was Moblin at one point.

Re: Blocking the competition?

[Locutus]

Microsoft still considers it a win if they prevent a complete ownership of a sector/threat such as with the XBox and to some extent Java. A complete loss of the market sector is the worst case and they've never allowed that so far. They've ended markets such as with pen computing in the late '80s and early '90s and that was fine because desktop Windows went unthreatened. The loss of the smartphone segment would be very bad and what would be far worst would be the complete loss in the tablet market. As with the XBox, .NET and others, Microsoft is willing to spend billions annually just to contain the leaders and Ballmer has already said he's willing to do this with Windows Phone 7 and probably included the tablet segment too. Those billions are considered the cost of 'doing business' just like those special marketing funds are used to keep Linux off corporate migration plans. IMO

LoB