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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.'"
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.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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?
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.
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. ,OpenOffice.org is free, and Google Docs has a lot of buzz going for it.
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
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
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."
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
SSC
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
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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.
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)
One locks people out.
One locks people in.
Jobs v. Balmer is a very interesting comparison to make. Jobs has been as successful as he has for three reasons, I think.
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.
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
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.
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.
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.