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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."
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.
Not tremendously relevant to the discussion, but what happened to the old borg-gates icon? I don't like the new one.
Unlike Ballmer, Jobs is visionary. He has an aesthetic sense, really wants to be innovative, and has the drive to be.
Ballmer is just a pencil pushing, number crunching marketing drone who doesn't have a creative or innovative bone in his body. Because of this, nothing he does will get MS out of its slump. The MS board can only hope that Ray Ozzie is interested in the CEO job.
One hopes for an animated GIF of a fat, sweaty, bald, dancing, chair-throwing monkey.
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.