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Ballmer Turns To Geeks For Salvation
jfruhlinger writes "One of the critiques of Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO is that, as someone who came up through sales, he doesn't really get what running an innovative tech company is about. With the company board starting to question his performance — he didn't get his bonus last year because of the Kin debacle, for instance — it appears that Ballmer is planning to install engineers in high places to turn the company around."
"Hello! This is the captain of the Titanic.. do we have any iceberg engineers on-board?"
So what did they have in high places, if not engineers?
Microsoft is dominated by high-end market-consuming business strategists at the top. Bill could do both; Ozzie stepped down because he couldn't replace Bill in that role. There's just no way that there's an internal tech person with the force of will to push the business guys around and all he or she needed was Ballmer's okay to make more impact.
Much less five of these folks. I just don't see it -- in my opinion, Microsoft needs to acknowledge it's becoming IBM, and move on gracefully to another stage in its corporate development.
taking cues from tech savvy people. What a curious concept.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
he didn't get his bonus last year because of the Kin debacle
A CEO performed badly and *didn't* get a bonus? What kinda crazy topsy-turvy world do we live in now?
Miller Lite tastes like water that's somehow managed to rot.
If Ballmer can't revive the company's fortunes in emerging markets such as cloud computing, smartphones and tablets, he soon could be greeting Walmart customers.
Ballmer has the qualifications to be a Walmart greeter? Is he going to jump up and down and say "yeah.. I love this store!" like in the monkey boy video after greeting each customer? :)
It's not like Ballmer doens't have tons of options as he was there from the beginning. Why doesn't he just bail on the cash like Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin? It's a wonder this guy is still around, but if he really wanted to do it right he'd lead by example and put some drive back into the company.
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Not tremendously relevant to the discussion, but what happened to the old borg-gates icon? I don't like the new one.
Redmond doesn't have a Walmart....
I don't simply dislike MS on principle, there's a few good reasons. Shifty market practices, bloated and unnecessary software, security issues everywhere, slow to innovate...I could go on. But believe it or not I'd rather like MS. If getting a few engineers a bit higher up in the system improves things in even the tiniest way then good. Cynically, I don't think it will, but here's hoping.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Come on. The icon is retarded and it was several years ago since Gates was with MS.
Football Odds
so you are saying salespeople SHOULDNT be running every company in the country? yes, i agree.
I hear he's not doing much of anything these days.
He was always proponent of the engineers in high places.
So what's that got to do with managing Microsoft?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I've seen this happen a few times, and it almost always fails. Either the top guys 'just get it', or they 'just get' that they need to equally represent finance, engineering, sales and administration by getting experts to help them. If he hasn't been getting it thus far, he's not going to now (probably), he'll just hire some people and make sure they're seen to be 'adding value', but won't actually achieve very much.
These 'top engineers' are going to come up with SuperWhizzo 1.0. They'll pitch it to him, and he'll either:
1) Accept it because he's got to accept some technical ideas
2) Reject it because he still just doesn't get it
What he won't do is evaluate it on it's merits, and then facilitate it's execution because he's actually on-board with it.
(Contrast this to what you know about how Apple works, for example)
I hear he's not doing much of anything these days.
He was always proponent of the engineers in high places and had a rather large disdain for business type folks.
They should have made it the "Kinn" so then it'd be a four lettered word we were never allowed to say (or think about).
Those commercials still make me shudder...
Tech company CEO decides to put engineers in positions of responsibility.
Brilliant, Holmes, brilliant! Why didn't we think of this before!
Once Microsoft's BoD realizes where the problem truly resides, then and only then will the problem be fixed.
Engineers making decisions?
Because that worked so well for Nokia....
Seriously, Nokia was an engineer driven company, which worked fine when all the issues were about new functionality and such, but when it came to fine polishing and figuring out non-engineering based problems they just stumbled around.
Software engineers suffer from the same basic issue. They tend to be so extremely technology oriented that they get completely lost in all the features that should be included, all the bells and whistles, and seem to regard an interface as something you paste on afterwards (inter-face, something which is the area where the user rubs against the technology), when the interface is the personification of the whole system, as well as the public face of the program and the company itself.
Palm got this for a while, so did RIM, so does Apple (at the moment) and so does that Shuttleworth fellow (Ubuntu). Microsoft has never got this, and giving the engineers more power is not likely to fix the problem. Each specialised class of people is likely to view most problems as being solvable by their particular brand of hammer, and one of Microsoft's problems has been too much engineering/marketing against too little understanding of what the user actually needs to do. Use the engineering hammer to solve this problem and it is likely to get even worse.
Just my 2 cents.
>"it appears that Ballmer planning to install engineers in high places to turn the company around."
Except he won't listen to them. I'm wiling to bet people took risks with their careers to give Ballmer good advice over the years and he ignored them. I find it highly unlikely he's going to start listening now.
This is either for show or so he's got someone else to blame for the next Zune and Windows mobile.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Top engineers don't necessarily know what the market wants. They just know what they think is technically "cool" - not what sells.
None of Apple's stuff is technically new or even the latest and greatest tech, but Jobs et. al. know that people love ease of use, style, and the cachet of being in the "in" crowd. For example, a few years ago, people were wearing Apple earbuds, even when they didn't have an iPod, just to look "hip" and "cool".
DEC was an engineer driven company and look what it got them.
Hiring engineers to design more aerodynamic chairs may improve his throws but it won't really make the software better.
Look at what happened to many tech companies (Intel, HP, Yahoo, etc) when they replaced the tech-founder-CEOs with suits. Growth stopped and the company stagnates. Same with Microsoft.
During high school he attended after-school lectures at HP and was later hired there (alongside Steve Wozniak), then after dropping out of Reed College he worked as a technician at Atari.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I am going to college and getting an IT Management degree with an emphasis in development. I am getting a minor in Marketing, and will go on for a Master's in Business Administration. I will have been in IT between workstation, server, and network admin as well as web development for 20 years or more when I get my degree. I am trying to get myself in a position to be able to interface well with developers and pitch the cool stuff to upper management to get buy in. I should have the business credentials to get management's respect, while having the knowledge of the tech side to be a valuable interface between the two sides. At least, that is my vision, at this point. :-)
Doesn't that take TWO cheeks?
IBM still makes mainframes as well as software consulting. They reinvented themselves and it worked.
I don't see Microsoft ever letting go of Windows and they'll crash holding onto 'em too. Microsoft's got an R&D division that the people selling product never talk to.
It costs to much if they do.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
MS needs to toss its whole marketing team. The two best commercials they've ever done:
1) The rip-off of "I'm a Mac" adds where the guy points at the polar bear (or was it a whale?) and says, "I'm a PC. And I'm trying to save that." There were more "I'm a PC" examples in that commercial and while not original, they got the point across that it's about the effective tools that MS provides and people use.
2) The Windows 7 Phone "Really?" ad. Clever. 'Nuff said.
Most of their speeches and marketing use industry, not public, buzzwords. They're on the "Our users love the Windows 7 Phone because it allows them to consume content quickly" kick right now. I'm sorry, I don't consume content. I check email. I watch movie trailers. I read Slashdot. I'm a person, not the Blob. If MS wants to market to people and not businesses, they need to target their ads. Two different groups, two different commercials.
Eliminate the need for antivirus software and you might have something going for you. The lack of security on Windows and other software that MS peddles, and the need to pay the equivalent of protection money to keep MS software safe ("Pay the antivirus companies, kid, or the computer gets it.") are the chief reasons why I stay away from MS as much as possible. The fact that no one there seems to recognize this problem for what it is and can get it corrected seems to me to be the biggest problems they face.
Putting a few engineers in executive positions is not going to change a corporate culture that thinks stealing search results from Google is "innovation"
'Ballmer turns to geeks to save his own butt' and you turn yours to fart in his general direction?
Initially .net was sort of an answer to Java. It had features that made programming easier. It broke away from activex and that was cool. But then the marketing machine seemed to have guided it from then on. It became a tool to try and get my programming to use more and more MS products. This didn't work for me so I turned to more and more open source. Not out of some philosophy involving openness and free love but simply because the open source products help me solve problems. Then I switched to Mac because at its heart it works with most open source stuff.
So here I am a geek programmer with zero interest in anything MS.
So if MS wants me back then they have to give me tools that I can use to solve problems I have. Not their problem of crappy sales. Then maybe along the way I will use a product or two of theirs.
And he is, except for one thing.
Google has always been about engineering excellence, with market dominance being a welcome side effect. When it works, you get Gmail, when it doesn't work you get Wave.
Microsoft has always been about market dominance through engineering mediocrity and barriers to entry. This has led to the teetering tower of kludge whose pinnacle is Windows 7.
Microsoft CAN'T be engineering-driven the way Google is. Google can change its search engine implementation and strategy continuously and overnight. Microsoft can only change Windows in big increments, with lots of concern for backward compatibility.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Off the top of my head:
I'm sure I've missed/forgotten lots. Ballmer remembers, though. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to do a superlative job managing such diverse businesses under one corporate roof for an extended period of time. GE did well under Jack Welch, but remember most of their businesses are in old line industries, not IT/entertainment which can change radically from year to year.
One could say that Ballmer is making these changes to buy more time before the board kicks him out. But another worry would be that a someone like Carl Icahn could buy into the board and lobby shareholders to split up the company. Frankly, that might not be Microsoft's worst future.
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If I was on the board, I would have screamed for Ballmer's dismissal in September 1999, when he drove the MS share price down by 3.8% in a single day by saying "There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category." Ballmer might be a good business person, but as far as setting the corporate culture, he is an epic fail. The big question is, who should replace him as CEO?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Titanic Sunk Due to Weak Rivets and Bolts not bad engineers. No it's some cost cutter who put the cheap ones in
That's been my experience with 25+ years in a major IT player. What engineers want, is someone that will listen to them. And someone who will grab them under the arms and pull them up and support them when things get ugly, and they get knocked out cold. It's quite simple actually, but it's quite amazing how few managers can do it right. I have seen a few cases exemplary performance. When I was in southern France, doing some firefighting on a project where the shit had hit the fan, and knocked the damn thing over. A couple of the employees there told me that they were coming in on the weekend to work on problems. This was not an order from the management there. Their attitude so impressed me, that I said, "I'll be in with you guys!" The second line manager got wind of the renegade action and showed up in the lab on the weekend. She didn't ask any questions about progress, but just discretely sat at a terminal, and did manager email stuff. And brought pastry snacks for the folks. But you had the feeling that she was there for us, in case we needed anything. One manager did a great job of filtering us from nasty emails about bad management decisions, that would be reversed anyway. Some folks in another department asked us, "Hey, did you see the email about capping our overtime pay?" There was another email a week later, that it was retracted. So our manager had tried to shield us from some unnecessary stress.
On the other hand, my manager left the company. A manager from another department was appointed as his successor. He did nothing for a month, aside from forwarding management and policy notes that he received to us. He didn't even come by to introduce himself. Well, duh! I started the rumor that he didn't exist, but was actually some kind of ELIZA type forwarding engine. Then he invited is to a meeting.
One brilliant engineer colleague of mine had excellent people skills, but declined to be put in the manager career path. He told me, "I don't want to explain to employees all day, why they can't have a bigger monitor."
So, back to the point, Ballmer has a very aggressive ego. I'm not sure if he will be able to take advice from a "mere" engineer. And I'm not sure that good engineers will be able to take his abuse for long.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Or he'd realize that the instant he puts his tech people in positions of corporate power, they will grow pointy hair.
Actually, Microsoft-and-squishy is so bloated that at this point, the only thing that can rescue them from themselves is being broken up into lots of little Microsofties. Or is that Microsoftettes? How long has it been, after all, since MS last had an actual Idea, all by themselves, that they didn't just steal and then use their usual moves of creating FUD, yanking the OS-level code base around to give the FUD some basis as they break competitors' code, and finally leveraging it into their contracted market on a preferential basis until they dominate the market and people gradually forget that it wasn't MS's idea in the first place. Word processors? Spreadsheets? Integrated development environments? Web browsers? Mail clients? Windowing interfaces? Java? Windowing interfaces with multiple desktops (ooo, forgot, they still haven't figured that one out, have they)? All NIH.
Wait, I know! Vista!
I guess they've still got it...
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
They seem to be following in suit of the changes made by Google. http://search.slashdot.org/story/11/01/20/2244202/Eric-Schmidt-Out-Larry-Page-In-As-Google-CEO
All I want from Microsoft right now is Windows Phone 7 to be on Verizon, as soon as possible. While I'm at it, a free version of Visual Studios 2010 wouldn't hurt either.
While I am not a fan boy of Apple and don't run their stuff I must admit they do it right. The combination of innovate ideas, first out of the shoot and an eye to style has always had MS drooling. Now add Google in the mix and Android and just what is left for MS? They run a distant 3rd at best and frankly if they did have tech at the helm its too little too late in my opinion.
Like it or not, computers are becoming appliances, so everything in the future needs to be designed with a UX in mind... which is why Apple places UX and OS designers in the top position, while all the engineers and salespeople work below them.
My favorite Ballmer story is how he fired the executive developing Microsoft's own dedicated tablet software, after it managed to generate a positive buzz, a month before the I-pad came out, because Ballmer didn't think it would make any money. He's the problem, not the guys that decided to buy the tech behind Kinect or the developers who made the rather nice Windows Phone 7.
Getting some heat from your "constituents"? reshuffle some underlings and call it change. Ballmer isn't going anywhere anytime soon...
"Ones and zeros were everywhere. I even think I saw a two!" - Bender
The iceberg was the instigator, the bad fasteners just allowed the iceberg to do a great deal more damage, "unzipping" the hull.
Either by itself probably would not have sunk the ship. Both were required, and so both deserve a share of the responsibility. There was also an idiot that didn't know his "port" from his "starboard", and a bigwig that insisted on "full speed ahead" after the collision. No one single thing sank the titanic, it was more a comedy of errors.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I was a blue badge there for a while. In six years not once did I see a senior exec walking the cubes / offices, asking for input, concerns or suggestions. That feedback loop is very important if management has the humility to consider input and integrate it.. Success generally comes from hard work, good principles, and luck. I'm sorry but as long as senior management is stifled by corporate arrogance, there can be no effective feedback loop.
Why? Does he smell of elderberries?
...the USA might actually survive a few more decades as a single, unified country.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
no, MS needs a CEO with at least SOME vision. Ballmer has no vision, no concept of what could be. Only what is and to try and jump on trains as they go by.
I can get MS moving again. I can see the looming techs MS should already be capitalizing on.
Yes, I could run MS better then Ballmer, and I'm sure there are others.
Shoving an engineer into a meeting is fine, but without vision, direction and the ability to redo until done it won't change a damn thing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's not about who is nominally in charge of a company. That's always been a secondary matter.
It's who commands the respect within the company, and who gets listened to when he's got something to say.
If marketing listens when engineering says "uh, that's actually not a very good idea", then things work out just fine. Oh, btw. - and vice versa.
Problem with many CEOs, most C*Os and almost all management on the VP/director level is that they think they know everything, that business is a power game and that making your things happen is more important than making good things happen (or being unable to see that these are not identical).
I've seen my share of these. My general take is that most low management people are heroes, even if they're assholes at the same time. Lots of top-level management is bright and cares, though most will gladly stab you in the back if it gains them anything. But middle and middle-to-high management is where they dump all the idiots, psychopaths and outright dangerous people. If you find a good person there (and they exist, I know a couple!) by all means hold on to them, they're an endangered species.
So, Balmer, it's not what kind of people you put on what kind of chairs. It's if anyone listens to them, and that takes a lot more than giving them a nicer office.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
No one single thing sank the titanic
Hubris sank the Titanic.
You can't take the sky from me...
If the head guy says: "invite this engineer guy into your strategy meetings"
and continues "so you'll have someone to laugh at." Or maybe to throw chairs at.
That's the way large companies often operate: the business managers and marketers claim all the glory for a successful product, and blame the engineers if a product fails.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Loose women with tightly fitting hoop skirts made God angry.
No one single thing sank the titanic
Hubris sank the Titanic.
No, it was a committee. Just like everything else in life.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Either by itself probably would not have sunk the ship. Both were required, and so both deserve a share of the responsibility.
That's like the drunk blaming the telephone pole for jumping out in front of his car. Both were required for the collision ...
Loose women with tightly fitting hoop skirts made God angry.
Then why didn't he sink the lifeboats containing (mostly) women and children?
There's no place like
Wasn't the Titanic one of the first ships where to turn left you turned the wheel left? Earlier ships you had to turn the wheel right to turn left. One story was that the people at the wheel at the time were new and were not fully aware of the change.
Disclaimer: I'm sales. And I've worked in a few large PC Corps.
I'm not sure putting engineers in charge is a silver bullet. It will be better than office politicians, but basically companies succeed by
- taking care of their customers. engineers are not an evident choice for that, as they may be too invested in pet projects or technologies, and too removed from customers, especially if they never do any on-site work. having for example witnessed developers designing user interfaces, I can attest... those were neither cute nor functional.
- taking care of their company. office politicians are notoriously bad at that, as they'll push their own agendas even if it is detrimental to the company as a whole. I'm not sure engineers are much better placed to handle either the global picture nor the internal conflicts of interests.
- taking care of their own people. I don't see what advantage engineers have here.
From the outside, I see MS as having issues in all of those, the worst being office politics. Apple seems to avoid that thanks to Steve Jobs acting as a dictator as short-circuiting would-be barons.
The one case in which putting engineers in charge is an asset, is if the company is very technology-driven. I'm not sure that's the case for MS any more.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Clearly you have not come across http://www.microsoft.com/microsoftservices/en/us/consulting.aspx before. Or, you know, the several dozen other products they make such as office, sharepoint & dynamics which do pretty well too.
Engineers for v1-v2.9 to get a good foundation.
Then hand it over to marketing types for v3.0-v6.0 to get sales, "cheese" and hype.
Finally, hand it back to the engineers to cut the crap, put the damn interface back to something useful and open source the entire code base.
BTW, I'm a stockholder of MSFT and would be happy if Mr. Balmer retired.
any child could run that company better than Microsoft.
Microsoft is a proprietary, monolithic, ideological throwback from the 80's. A whale in a kiddie pool. Cheerios without milk. Wheaties without Bruce Jenner. It's time for them to admit their business model no longer works. They have enough liquid assets to live in denial for quite a while, but in the end they are just going to become a rusty old muffler dangling off the ass-end of a Le' Car. The business model of sucking your customers in with cheap crack, and then bleeding them dry in maintenance, licensing and upgrade costs isn't what the majority of people are buying anymore.
What's with the gates icon in the first place? He hasn't been working with Microsoft for a year and a half.
"Killed for Code"
I am just struck by the fact that Balmer did not get his bonus. That means bonuses actually mean something at Microsoft, unlike the financial industry.
This is a major cultural issue with tech companies. By structure, the sales/marketing/accounting guys are the ones that migrate up the ladder; unless your CEO is still your founder. You end up with internal power brokering that pushes the less socially-saavy techies into a development black box.
Back in the Dot Com days, I remember articles from brash sales guys almost proud to know little about the technical side of the business as it was some sort of a badge of honor to say "I'm so good I can sell crap and not even know what it is." It takes quite a bit of humility (or shame) for someone in that culture to bring in techies at a highly visible level. Top-level employees should either have their own tech skills or have access to people that do, but it doesn't seem to happen enough. We've seen way too many CEOs playing musical chairs in tech companies and running them into the dirt.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I am no MS fan. I haven't run an MS OS since windows 3.1 but I do hope they get it together. If they don't then Apple will be the only real game for the proprietary OS world and anyone who looks can see where they headed and how well that worked for the people with MS's years of dominance. Apple is building a wall, brick by brick so I really hope MS figures it out and doesn't die anytime soon. If this adds some savvy into their myopic, top-heavy world then bring it on.
After delivering so many turkeys. How about this guy?
While on the surface this sounds like a great idea, I can't help but look back on 15 years of developing software and realize that the people who were the best at with the technical issue were usually the worst at handling the personell and political issues. Just because you good at something doesn't mean you are good at getting other people to do the same thing. It seems that there is a balance point somewhere between business people and tech savy people they need to find.
At the risk of getting lost in the clutter, I'm gonna post a response... If I were a major MS shareholder or board member, I'd be petitioning the board to fire his ass. Apart from Kinect, what innovative product has MS made in the last 5+ years? They need to come up with something that people WANT, not improvements to something that [they think] they NEED. I hate to compare to Apple, but let's face it. Apple really don't produce anything we NEED. But look at the success they have achieved by producing a bunch o' stuff that people WANT. No one WANTs the latest version of Windows or Office.
If by one trick pony, you mean "having the most widely used OS (Windows), Office Suite (Office), Next-Gen Console (Xbox) which includes the fastest selling gadget in history (Kinect), and up-and-coming smartphone platform (WP7)" then yes, they are definitely a one trick pony.
Basically, you're saying what I've said for a while now. Microsoft is a "Windows" company. That is their product. Everything they do is based around "Windows". But even here they fail, because they aren't just a "Windows" company, they are a "Microsoft Windows" company.
Take a look at Android, is there any Microsoft software available for Android? Exchange/Outlook ? Office? Sharepoint? Anything?
Why would a Tech company with entrenched tech products ignore MILLIONS of devices simply because its "not invented here"? And everything I've said also applies to Apple iPhones as well.
The point is, people are not getting a look at Linux through Droid, and seeing first hand that you don't need "Windows" to be useful. And when you compound that the Windows 7 Phone edition looks sucky compared to the others, it tarnishes Windows 7.
Heck, if I were Google, I'd start marketing Android Desktop OS (base it off Chromium OS) to OEMs and see how it goes. People know the Android name now, use it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
i predict this making things worse for MS. design and innovation will be bogged down by the old hats. in my experience things get done with crazy ideas, kind of like architecture on construction sites. ...bring on the flames
...and then acts surprised when they crucify him. :)
It'd be terribly amusing-- albeit not terribly productive --if all his years of, well...being Ballmer...finally caught up with him. :3
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Microsoft has Engineers?! Real Engineers who can be held liable for defects, bugs, misstatements, errors, data loss, etc?
Oh, wait, "software engineers", otherwise glorified programmers.
Revenue shortfall 3.0 will be fixed in the next service pack.
Yeah, they've failed so bad.... wow. Never seen such a failure in my life...
Let me guess, you're one of those people who think that 90% of all Windows PCs sold in the last decade have been immediatly taken home and Ubuntu installed. Right?
No one single thing sank the titanic
Hubris sank the Titanic.
I thought it was the iron...
Ismay: [incredulously] But this ship can't sink!
Thomas Andrews: She's made of iron, sir! I assure you, she can... and she will!! It is a mathematical certainty.
;-) Gotta admit that had me cracking up when I watched that scene... ummm... not that I watched the movie... or anything...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
There's a difference. Knowing what I know about how programmers work, this may just hasten MS demise. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Ballmer is planning to install engineers
I was expecting developers.
I use and continue to use the best tool for the job, be it Mac, Linux or Windows. I'm happy with just about anything that doesn't get in my way.
Why? Does that surprise you?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
If you're incompetent, just hire a bunch of new people that are too dumb to realize it. Problem solved!
or else!
Ballmer has been asking that question a lot recently, and the answers have resulted in several senior managers leaving the company so that they can't replace him.
Last time they did that, I was still fumbling around IBM's horrible search site for documentation. Meanwhile, across town, some stupid machine was playing Jeopardy.
What's Microsoft's going to do? Play Card Sharks while I have to cycle my print spooler again? If they really want to be innovative, maybe they'll take on Supermarket Sweep.
Would have gotten their shirts wet. He does not approve.
Start saving money now and plan on moving into a completely different market.
Open Source has you beat on every product.
Windows Linux particularly Linux Mint 10.
IE Firefox AND Chrome for that matter
Office Libre AND Google Docs
If there weren't entrenched apps built on windows like Dentrix for dentists, MS would have lost it's hegemony some time ago. With apps moving to the cloud: The writing is on the wall. You guys need to switch strategies altogether. YOU CANNOT compete against FOSS long term. Millions of coders are always better than thousands, eventually.
Are you guys making money on the Xbox? That seems to be doing well, despite heavy competition from both Nintendo AND Sony. Maybe get into electric cars or something.
Other than games, software is all going to be FOSS in the next 10 years. It's inevitable.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
He is leading by example.
Unfortunately, he's a barker at a circus side-show.
He's riding this gravy train until it runs out of steam.
Hopefully he'll die* or retire** soon or he'll be ousted like Darl " I'm not dead yet " McBride and the courts will put him out of misery.
* Throwing chairs around can lead to heart attacks.
** But then again, Aeron makes for pretty light chairs.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
James Cameron sunk the Titanic.
Why does Nolan Bushnell come to mind when I read this comment?
Boredom is bliss.
Loose women with tightly fitting hoop skirts made God angry.
Then why didn't he sink the lifeboats containing (mostly) women and children?
The devil's in the details.
Please, stop unilaterally branding other people as "geeks." You may perceive them as members of your self-identified subculture, but many people who work in IT and other technical fields object to this stereotyping. Thanks.
Because of the children
This just in, Smartphones outsell computers for the first time. And almost all of those are NOT Microsoft smart phones. They are replacing computers for many people, and yet Microsoft is not targeting any phone save for the ones labeled with "Microsoft" on them somewhere. Take a look around your office, look for a Windows Mobile phone, see any?
Ignoring an entire market space because it doesn't have "Microsoft" on it is just plain stupid.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jv0mxMUeIcToktm19cnHdHqGEiLg?docId=5a76d0b346bd4162a17079ed98ac44b8
In related news, Apple is slated to become the #1 Company in the world.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/41473211
If you call that "success" for Microsoft, great. I don't.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.