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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.'"
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 ?
I find it amazing that he's lasted this long. The man has a bit of a history as a public relations problem.
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.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
They could always ask Steve Jobs if he would be CEO of Microsoft. It worked out great for Apple...
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
One has a primary focus of SOFTWARE and secondary focus on GADGETS
One has a primary focus of GADGETS and secondary focus on SOFTWARE
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
Mr Darl McBride to the white courtesy phone.
/A surreal moment
AT&ROFLMAO
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.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
He's got the "right stuff".
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-26/leadership-tips-from-tony-hayward-or-not-.html
And experience in negatively impacting an entire ecosystem. Perfect! (Also perfect that this article posted 14 minutes before the Slashdot article. ;-)
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'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.
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 ;).
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
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.
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.