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Forbes Names Microsoft's Steve Ballmer Worst CEO
New submitter _0x783czar writes "Microsoft haters gleefully have latched on to the latest scoop that a Forbes columnist has named Steve Ballmer the worst CEO. It seems that the article has leveled some strong accusations of irresponsible and ineffective business practices; claiming that Microsoft has not progressed over the last 12 years of Ballmer's leadership. (Full disclosure: I'm not a Microsoft fan myself and tend to agree with this piece.)"
Really? Even worse than RIM?
Something I can agree with from Forbes.
Granted, people like Lloyd Blankfein are giving him a run for his money, but yeah, seeing the horrible work on W7 and 8, Ballmer deserves the title.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I can now stand the thought of using Windows and Internet Explorer. Not that I do use IE, mind you... just that I wouldn't Hulk up and fling my captor through 3 or 4 cement brick walls to create an escape route.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Darl McBride is better than Ballmer? So running your company to ridiculous profits quarter-after-quarter is worse than running your company into the ground in losing lawsuits?
You don't need to say full disclosure just because you hold an opinion. That phrase is used if you have a vested interest in something. For instance "Full disclosure: I own Microsoft's competitor's stock" or "Full disclosure: I have an ongoing lawsuit with Steve Ballmer, because he allegedly once threw a chair at me".
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today. Not only has he singlehandedly steered Microsoft out of some of the fastest growing and most lucrative tech markets (mobile music, handsets and tablets) but in the process he has sacrificed the growth and profits of not only his company but âoeecosystemâ companies such as Dell, Hewlett Packard and even Nokia. The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value â" and jobs.
And that is bad how? What I mean by that is that I sympathize with Microsoft share holders but I also regularly thank a long list of deities that Microsoft does not dominate the mobile music, handset, and tablet markets as well as desktop computing.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I've always felt that they've wasted a lot of money trying to expand into new lines of businesses. Money that would have been well spent either giving it back to stockholders as dividends. But even new lines of business that are doing well (not considering the massive investment in them so the ROI may still stink) like Bing and XBox would probably benefit the stockholders as a spinoff.
If it was up to me, I would break the company apart into 3 or 4 companies and allow the non-Windows companies to develop for all sorts of platforms. But what do I know?
That said, who's going to remove him? Bill Gates? Does Paul Allen still hold a significant stake in the company? Who owns what share of the voting stock? And who makes up the board?
I don't see Ballmer leaving anytime soon unless the investors start getting upset. And if 30% of the company (and I'm pulling that number out of thin air) is held by Gates and Ballmer, that doesn't seem likely.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Personally, I hope Ballmer has a very long tenure at Microsoft and that the past twelve years or so are only the beginning of his impact on that company.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
I am a Microsoft fan and I agree with this piece. I dont really know what he adds as CEO as I hate to listen to him speak. I'm embarrassed for him when I watch him give speeches.
I think he is the best thing ever for the company, and they need to keep him on for the next 50 years. Windows Phone is flying off the shelves and outselling iPhone and Android phones combined!
As a FOSS guy, I think Microsoft is doing a stellar job and needs to continue under this mans direction.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Don't know why, I just do.
I can't believe Stephen Elop of Nokia is not on that list. During his stint as the CEO of the former world leader in mobile phones, the company has lost 70% of its market valuation – mostly down to Elop's borderline insane strategic choices. Maybe the list is only for US companies?
Forbes Names Slashdot's Anonymous Coward Worst First Poster.
...at lest he is well known for CHAIRity!
I don't want to see chief chair thrower go, really. Run that moloch into the ground and free up some space for innovation, I say. Give the man a medal when he succeeds. Call it a service to humanity.
Well, he was the first business manager for the company. I guess Forbes is saying that he didn't learn much about the business in his 32 years there. Funny enough, this isn't a bunch of Linux/Apply fanbois throwing this out there... It's Forbes.
I do take issue them using the share value being used as his barometer. Yes, MS was $60 a share in 2000. Every share of anything that was remotely tech related was horrendously overinflated in 2000. The fact that the share is still worth $30 is impressive despite the other detriments listed in this article. It's a nitpick, and otherwise, I think the article is fair.
This is good news. The world doesn't need a more effective Microsoft.
However a poster above makes a good point about Stephen Elop of Nokia deserving this title.
Dot-com flameout, 9/11, housing and banking collapse in the US, combined with market saturation in the PC space and getting trounced by Apple on the high end ... I'm not sure what he could have done. Contrast Gates, who rode the Windows95 wave to fame and bailed at the right time. Maybe Ballmer's winning move was not to play.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Actually Microsoft haters should view this as bad news, because it might lead to Ballmer being replaced by someone competent. What Microsoft needs is someone who turns the company away from the anti-compete, monopoly stances; this is what most of the haters are really against. Of course, Microsoft has the Windows albatross around their neck, and it has lock-in built into it. How long would it take for Microsoft to make Windows a good choice to compete in an open market? Could they survive embracing ODF in Office, releasing their licenses on OS/2, dropping Direct for open hardware interface standards, porting their application software to Linux ...?
I wonder what Ballmer will pull out from his collection of ludicrous facial expressions to respond to this comment?
What a load of garbage. Forbes is all about share price. That's a moronic litmus test of a CEO. Share price has no direct connection, and often not even an indirect connection to a CEO's abilities.
I don't respond to AC's.
Now, I don't like Steve Ballmer, but to say that he is an incompetent CEO is absurd. Under his watch, company revenues and profits have increased VERY significantly and that's what the CEO is responcible for. I can sympathize with the shareholder gripes that MSFT stock price hasn't really gone anywhere over the past decade, but that's because the starting point (10-12 years ago) was a completely ridiculous overvaluation of the tech boom. I can easily name several other major companies whose stock has gone nowhere for a long time despite company earnings growing consistently and their future looking as bright as ever.
10 years ago Windows was cesspool of malware on unmanaged PCs (home users) - yes there's always room to improve here, but Windows 7/8 is markedly more hardened to attack than XP RTM was, MSFT profits came from 100% Windows & Office, Windows Servers were a joke, and the XBox was laughed at like Windows Phone is by some today.
I'm happy with the direction MSFT is going; Windows Servers especially now are serious contenders in the enterprise (and bring in serious cash now), Office is moving in many directions at once (Office 365, iOS, Metro), the online services are growing too (Bing, albeit slowly, SkyDrive - making Google look out of date), and the XBox has come into its' own. Not everything's perfect of course; WP7 has the most room here, but the reviews of people using it are generally very positive and the Nokia effect has yet to be fully realised. Not to mention Windows 8 will unify 1 OS across many many device-types & form-factors (although again, to what extent this will be successful is as yet unclear - the direction is a good one IMO). There're some real assets in MSFT, despite what you might hear on slashdot.
Anyway, I know this is a unpopular opinion here and I fully expect to be patronised with snarky replies because of it, but honestly I think Ballmer has done some good things for MSFT. Not perfect, and he'll never have the cult-like status Jobs or even Gates did but people underestimate him IMO. That's just my 2cents.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Ballmer is the opposite of charismatic, and a lot of people find him annoying to look at or listen to.
But on the other hand, the worst criticism that can be leveled him is that Microsoft is making merely boat-loads of money instead of uber-boat-loads of money. Is that fair? I dunno. That's above my pay grade.
Fnsacwfp!
There's no way Ballmer is the worst CEO, but he's not a good one either. The question is, who would you put in his place when most of the existing management team are just as culpable for the misteps of the last 10 years as Ballmer is?
Can any one man manage a company with 600 million customers? The sheer size and magnitude of that company makes it impossible to manage or run. The number of layers of management makes it very difficult to see vested interests, empire builders, incompetents... Apparently Microsoft has this compensation model where some people make it to "partner" level. They get a cut in the revenue stream of the products they manage. If this is true, it would lead to perverse incentives. Failure that big is rarely one man's fault.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Ballmer's concept of business is stuck in the Windows XP days, when competitors feared Microsoft's entry into a market. Back in those days, Microsoft could get away with releasing half-baked products, and competitors would run off, knowing that MS's resources would demolish them. Microsoft's mindset was to prevent competitors from entering markets.
The problem now is that it's not 2001 and Microsoft is no longer in a monopoly position. Instead of leveraging their Office and OS market share, they have to enter new markets and win new customers. And they're really struggling at doing this. To win from the ground up Microsoft products would need to have compelling advantage over their competitors, whether it be price, features, or relationship with customers.
How Microsoft went about Windows Phone 7 is an example of their old, "monopoly" playbook failing to work in a new market. Microsoft saw that a market existed, and went to enter the market using the old approach: build a 'good enough' product and hope that competitors give up in fear. The results (which Microsoft refuse to publish out of embarrassment) speak for themselves. Microsoft didn't compete on price - their phones were at mid-level prices, their features were lacking compared to the competition, and any relationship with customers (e.g. enterprise customers using Exchange and Active Directory, etc) failed to materialise because MS didn't implement critical security 'lock down' features on the phone. Microsoft technical staff have the know-how to do these things - but they just don't seem to happen. Is it the management structures? the reward mechanisms? or the corporate strategy? internal politics? .. certainly it's a combination of factors. Thigns are systemically wrong with the whole organisation.
In short, Microsoft is failing at a strategic level. No-one is excited about Microsoft products anymore. No-one thinks their products will be better value or cheaper than the competitors. No-one feels that Microsoft is listening especially closely to anyone except themselves. Microsoft's actions are decidedly tactical, rather than strategic: a new user interface here, some more features there. But without a strategic - CEO - level change, I can't see their situation improving. Having diversified so much, Microsoft will not collapse overnight, but it will continue to slide into irrelevance.
Surely "Full disclosure: I'm a Slashdot subscriber" would have covered it.
Doesn't your comment speak volumes? You don't disagree he's a bad CEO, it's just about arguing whether he's the worst CEO on the list of CEO's who should have been fired by now.
Well since he's driving up prices at a time when he's losing market share, he's sort of speeding up their own end, so it's going to become pretty undeniable soon enough.
Haters gonna hate. Ignore them, you're doing fine.
Nope, I'm going to have to say Forbes is off base here. There are too many other CEOs driving their companies or our economy into the ground. Even if you stipulate that they must still be employed so that you can fire them, Ballmer might be in the top 10, but I don't think he'd make the top 5 much less number 1.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
https://www.facebook.com/stevenballmer/posts/364080266982087
games journalism blog
16 years ago, the mere mention of Gates or Ballmer would be enough to get me foaming at the mouth.
Today?
Gates is on track to wipe out polio. And Ballmer? What's to hate? Anti-competitive practices? Apple's a far bigger concern.
What else?
Pollution? Political corruption? Financial malfeasance? Mistreatment of employees? Microsoft does none of this.
And to boot, their product line continues to improve. Can't get the hate going anymore.
If Forbes is using STOCK PRICE as a barometer of how good the CEO is, well, then every company on the S&P500 is the worst CEO of all time.
For the last decade, the S&P500 has remained essentially flat, while CEO compensation has gone up 500% -- Companies may be getting more profitable, but that value is going right into someone's pocket, it's not going to share value, it's not going to re-investment, and it's not going to jobs.
Forbes is drinking the kool-aid, and is missing the big picture. In fact, this article is probably fluff to distract us from the *REAL* story, that the market itself is failing.
Take Friday's big relevation that a certain big bank lost $2 billion is a bad trade. Do any of you actually believe that hogwash? We're talking about a company big enough to manipulate the market in their favor, every time. We're talking a bank, an organization that can't lose money because of the way the entire game is rigged -- only an idiot could lose money at a bank.
No, that money's not lost, it's in someone's pocket.We're just being told it's lost so no one goes looking for it because we're the ones who were robbed.
Steal $100 and go to jail. Steal a billion and cover it up properly, and you retire in Bolivia.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Look Ballmer is a douche, no doubt. But worst CEO, compared to the putzes who ran almost every bank, Chrystler, and GM into bankruptcy? Compared to Scott Thompson? Jerry Yang?
He may be a dick, but I don't see MS going bankrupt or asking for government bailouts.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
When you don't have to compete, just run dictatorship, anyone bad enough can do it.
The author criticizes Balmer for the stock not getting back to it's high of $60/share. You can dismiss this article just based on that criticism. Microsoft's stock price skyrocketed to that during the 2000 tech craze and was seriously overvalued at that point. Balmer had nothing to do with the stock price tanking at that point. Reality did.
Stock price is also an incomplete measure of a company's performance. The article fails to mention that Microsoft has steadily paid out dividends or made a special distribution of $3/share in the fall of 2004. That kind of activity isn't reflected in stock price.
I'll be fine with criticizing Microsoft for underperforming. Sure, they haven't found ways to capitalize on their monopoly power in the OS market. The sensationalistic opinions here don't mean much though.
"...products so lacking in any enhanced value that they left customers scrambling to find ways to avoid upgrades"
Whether it's Ballmer's fault or not, this is one of the most damning failures of Microsoft as a company. With the possible exception of invisible stability/security fixes, nothing that Microsoft has added to Windows or Office in the past 10 years makes me want to upgrade, and the hassles of adapting to the arbitrary changes make me want to stay put. Even Adobe, which also struggles with mature, feature-complete products such as Photoshop and Illustrator, has managed to introduce some new features here and there that make me wish I could afford to upgrade those. But Windows 7 and Office 2010 just remind me that Windows XP and Office 2003 already work pretty well for me.
Microsoft has become an aging rock band, whose biggest hits are all behind them, and whose longtime fans would kinda rather hear the old stuff in concert, rather than songs from the latest album.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
From that point of view Microsoft will always be badly run because it is quite hard to distort its share price owing to the very public visibility of its products. Google, Apple and other companies whose value is hard to work out are wonderful because traders can profit going down as well as up.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
However, we now see share prices swing on relatively small trading volumes. Therefore, it is possible to show a big paper gain or loss based on a small amount of market manipulation; the actual total reported value of shares in the market shows a net gain or fall, though it can only be tested when they are actually sold.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
While Steve certainly isn't helping, it wasn't his fault to begin with.
Ol' Billy boy absolutely destroyed what Windows could have been.
Instead of them doing things first, everyone else did and they played catch-up because they tried to use their size to crush everyone else who tried to innovate.
Instead of creating a marketplace for developers, they shunned them.
Instead of helping the efforts with the web, they forced their own extensions to it and used their size to essentially force everyone to work with IE or nothing.
Then they went and backstabbed the entire industry with Vista Capable nonsense, including even their best buds Intel.
The only friends Microsoft have now are companies they have bought.
Think how different the world would have been if Microsoft had turned their download store in to a fully fledged application store for developers.
If they made things easy to work with.
If they took the good parts of Linux, the fact that any piece can be switched in and out at each layer of the OS and typically work quite happily together, and done that with Windows.
No. None of that. We'll be having none of that customization. None at all. You will have crap shiny GPU-using themes or crappy themes. You will be having an obtuse menu system we call Ribbon that is the cross between a desktop and tablet interface on a desktop OS. Enjoy your wasted space.
Toolbars? PAH, who uses them? Everyone you say? Still, don't you just like Ribbon? We invented that you know. (I'm seriously not even kidding about this part, their own blog has this quite literally in numbers and they still made this crap, completely ignoring all the numbers)
You'll have our interface. You will have our menu systems. You will have our terrible security system that isn't even secure at all and just likes to bug you until you turn it off. (and was broken before it was even released)
Microsoft have been dying a slow, painful death for the past 15 years.
They could have been such a good thing for the world. Instead, they destroyed everything they could have been and instead became this horrible slime monster that smells of sewers, going around towns devouring entire buildings.
No wonder Bill left. Even he couldn't control it.
...was my idea, according to Microsoft. Steve Ballmer is definitely the worst CEO ever, giving away ideas like that.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
FTFS "Microsoft haters gleefully have latched on to the latest scoop"
Microsoft investors have known for a decade.
It's only the "true believers" that haven't seen it.
--
BMO
Remember Dell? Dell stock languishes in the low teens. It hasn't been the same since he hired the carpet baggers.
So every time the stocks split, the CEO's performance goes down the tubes? Stock price has to be one of the worst indicators of success. The number is almost entirely arbitrary by itself.
Microsoft has missed many chances to excel in a coming post-PC era, and yet Microsoft has played catch up for at least a decade. Ballmer should have stepped down years ago to recognize the need for a fresh and perhaps younger CEO that is down with current trends in social networks and mobile platforms.
But he ain't the worst CEO. Nortel's CEO comes to mind as one of the worst people (not just CEO), he destroyed a company with deceptive business practices and screwed over tens of thousands of employees and pretty much walked away unscathed and is still one of the richest people in Canada.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Think about what type of programmers go to work for Microsoft and it should become immediately clear why they don't make good products.
The people who go to work for Microsoft care about money above all else. They're not going to work on something technically superior or interesting. They're going there to collect a paycheck from a gigantic machine and hope to be able to move into a big enough house with their wife and kids. The end result is irrelevant.
It turns out the Ballmer Peak isn't real, but the Ballmer Droop is.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Everybody hates it, it's absolutely not cool, it has lost its mojo but... it's powerful and it's there, waiting for its comeback.
Others more cool and sexy show up and vanish everyday, but Microsoft is sitting on its coffers and waiting.
If they are going by stock price, why is Leo Apotheker not on top?
When he announced HP would drop their PC division HP lost 20% in stock-value the next day
When the rumor started that he would be fired, the HP stock recovered 6% of its former value
Microsoft's share price hasn't remained constant. The article points out he's lost 2/3rd of its value with MS rarely in the $30s.
It's sort of a slow motion train wreck, IMHO Metro will fail, Ballmer will present desktop licenses of Windows 8 as Metro sales and pretend its a success. It appears to me he's a saleman, and the biggest sales job he's doing, is himself to Microsoft shareholders so they don't fire him.
....forbes
I was a POM for 6 of the Ballmer years.
It was like being in the bowels of the Politburo.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
http://ospreyflyer.blogspot.com/p/microsoft-financial-performance.html
Microsoft still prints money at an insane rate. They are one of the most profitable public companies in the world year after year and Balmer gets no respect as if he is just coasting on what was there before. It doesn't work that way in tech. You can't coast. Vista was a problem but Windows 7 is a massive success. Windows phone struggles but XBox does well. Windows Server and Office are still cash cows. They are moving up in the virtualization market. People want growth levels out of MS that are just not possible given their size and dominance.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/performers/companies/profits/
#4 just below Apple and they did it with much less revenue.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/full_list/
It used to be that being massive profitiable and having better margins meant something.
-- soldack
myself and tend to agree with this piece.)" And we should be impressed or surprise.... why? lol
Are you kidding me? Ballmer is the worst? Have these people never been on an airline?!?!?!
Just look at the current bete-noir -- Jaime Dimon of JPMorgan/Chase who was too puffed up with himself to see the London Whale lose 2B$. And he's not even taking the fall ...
Look, I despise MSFT just as much as the next /.r , but fair-is-fair: Ballmer is not _quite_that_ bad; the whole MSFT business model is terrible, just like the RIAA -- you can milk the back-catalog forever, but it will not give you anything resembling growth.
Ballmer is getting a bad rap mostly in comparison to Steve Jobs (RIP) who revitalized an Apple suffering the same rot with new (for them) and attractive products.
That, or Forbes editors cannot pull a filler back-story when real news makes it laughable. Slow@$$es
The only place I can think of where MS has become successful where it initially had no market presence has been the Xbox gaming console, and even there MS leveraged their experience with desktop PC technology and in some ways co-opt existing developers who developed for the PC platform, as well as subsidizing the platform for years before they began to make any money.
In every other case MS has been merely building on existing platforms while failing to create any new areas of market dominance -- Windows OS, Exchange, SQL, MS Office.
Phones? WinMo had some traction when ActiveSync became established, then was in some ways abandoned, leaving the market to BlackBerry and ultimately Apple and Android. Windows Phone doesn't look like it will be more than a niche player. Bing? Fail. Zune? Fail. Etc.Etc.
I wonder if the real reason for this is actually the success of their core products -- anyone who's actually talented, especially at the management level, wants the easy money of the core products and also resists any innovative products in other areas that might threaten them.
I sometimes wonder if MS might have actually been more successful if HAD been broken up by the DOJ and forced to actually innovate vs. just collecting rent from their monopoly positions.
Either of them are/is scum.
The irony here is that the Microsoft Adam Hartung of Forbes wants back is nothing like the Microsoft that Salshdotters would like to see. The truth is that Microsoft is more friendly towards open source and more open in general than it has ever been. They are much more willing to enter into strategic partnerships now days instead of using their might to crush small companies. The love the kinder, gentler Microsoft and I wouldn't want to see it go back to 1995.
I grew up on Slashdot. I remember sitting in my freshman dorm room over a decade ago, cackling in agreement with all the MICRO$OFT hate. Yearning for the Linux desktop. I was a part of that culture. I believed in it. We were real nerds, and we understood real technology, and we were going to win eventually.
Well I have some news for you guys. Microsoft is not the piece of shit company it once was. The article is spot on with its analysis of Ballmer's failure to lead MS into the forefront of relatively new markets, yes. But I cannot comprehend all of the continued and abundant dislike for this company among nerds (and even more staggering is the compulsive fawning over Apple, a company that is for all intents and purposes exactly what MS was in the hay day of their uncoolness). Just about every mainstream product MS has released in the past 3-4 years has been incredible. Namely though, Windows 7, Windows phone, and all of their developer tools are just absolutely top notch pieces of software.
If you're a real nerd and you're really paying attention and you're really using your brain and you're really thinking for yourself, you might see that they deserve a lot more credit than what they are getting here. Of course I can't speak for Ballmer. I don't think his leadership necessarily has any bearing on the quality of the company's work within their existing markets.
Disclaimer: Not an MS shill, just a modern-day sympathizer.
But Microsoft just posted a very profitable quarter. According to their "investor relations" page, their profit margins increased in servers & tools, their business division and their Windows & Live divisions.
Worst CEO? Not by a long shot.
Incredibly out of touch? Sure, but he's not the only one in the business.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Get real! Balmer at the helm, and MS has wormed its way so deeply into the military-industrial complex that they could turn a profit for the next million years even if no one ever bought another retail Dell/Asus/Acer/HP/etc at Wal-Mart, another XBox, etc. All this "cyber command" stuff uses Windows, the military branches use Windows, and so on. Balmer has brilliantly positioned MS, as far as I am concerned, in a co-dependency way. The military-industrial complex and its armies of consultants (NG and all them) need Windows to have something to do, and Windows needs them to buy servers, client access licenses, and so on. The next generation of computing is going to be smack dab in the middle of a taxpayer-funded boondoggle of "cyber" stuff, and MS is right there ready to cash in. If Apple and Google win the desktop and Internet space, MS can divest itself of Bing, XBox, Zune, WinRT, and all that other junk and STILL BE PROFITABLE into the indefinite future. Balmer has them positioned perfectly.
Stephen Elop should win this! Just look at NOK market share or NOK stock price (-8% since yesterday).
"Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today."
Who's the fucking dolt who wrote this article?
People seem to forget that 10 years ago Microsoft was beset by several challenges; there were the investigations into monopolistic practices in addition to the bad press they were enduring. That negative perception fed directly into the rise of Apple. Certainly Microsoft's decline wasn't the sole factor in Apple's success, but if definitely helped feed it. Apple was smart enough to strike out in their own direction instead of simply responding to whatever Microsoft was doing at the time. No company will ever be successful by merely being reactive.
Microsoft may have gotten too complacent with their success. Microsoft has done a lot of very compelling R&D over the years, I'd argue far more innovative than anything Apple has done, but Apple is able to take existing technology and refine it into a compelling user experience. They think things through more fully than anyone else out there. But a fundamental difference between the two is that MS is a software company first and foremost; they're dependent on others to produce the hardware. That's always going to be a big limitation. But regardless of how good Microsoft's products may actually be, they now are always fighting an uphill battle to win the hearts and minds of consumers.
Through the 90s Microsoft operated in a very different environment than we have today. If it wasn't Microsoft acquiring a monopolistic position it likely would have been someone else. And the fact is that consumers wanted a unified user experience and Microsoft gave them that. They really laid the groundwork for everyone else. Of course, in the process they drew everyone's ire.
In the interim, Microsoft has grown into a stable, conservative corporation. They could have flared out and died like so many others, but they're still reasonably successful. I don't see how anyone could fault them for that. There was a concerted push to unseat them from their position of dominance. Now that it has come to fruition, and MS has survived the process quite well, so-called experts are faulting them for that. Ballmer probably deserves a lot of credit for not turning Microsoft into a Yahoo.
It's incredible that Apple has managed to retain the perception of being a cool company somehow still maintaining an anti-establishment appeal. It goes to show how important good product design can be.
Wow they're using maven internally at Microsoft?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I bet he makes sure he gets a good bonus regardless of performance. When are we going to only reward sucess?
Banking is probably the biggest criminal as sucess is 'estimated' and so bonus's are paid out for potentually bogus profilts (loan interest that just won't ever materialise). Make more loans, more profilt! But as we know this all falls down when the lenders become irresponsible and don't have a vested interest in actually staying with the company.
Shame on Europe for having a 'debt' economy... we should not allow people to be enslaved on the irresponsible spending of goverment. It is the money lenders that are equally responsible. The whole money lending across Europe is not transparent enough and this leads to us not knowing who the irresponsible parties are. Greece only got into the mess it's in because it wasn't ready to join Europe and didn't have a competitive economy, but they paid a lot of cash to financial institutions to falsify the figures and allow them access to cheap money. I wonder where it all went.
Ballmer's problem was that he was too focused on developers... While I kid, as a developer for X360 (and *shudder* Ps3) and also Windows, I can vouch for the strides Microsoft has made in their development platforms/environments in the last 10 years. Hell, for C# and the FREE Visual C# IDE alone, I'd like to hug the man.
Prisoner of Microsoft.
not
Project Object Model. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
At least he is still alive, which is more than Apple can say...
There is a largely-held perception that Apple's success is due to slick advertising. Where Apple has excelled is in product management as a function of marketing. They have powerfully identified the feature set and price points people will pay for their products. They have accurately forecast demand so that they can leverage volume purchasing of components to keep the price at those acceptable points while building in a healthy profit margin. They are firing on all cylinders, and even a few cylinders nobody thought existed.
Meanwhile, Ballmer has ignored the trends and innovations of other companies until success in the marketplace forces him to mount a too-late response (Zune, Windows Store, Windows Phone 7, et. al.). Consider this 2007 interview where Ballmer mocked the iPhone's prospects. For him to do that means that he was ignoring competitive intelligence studies that he should have been taking seriously. Even then, his marketing department should have been focus-grouping on the iPhone to determine what the demand was and projecting out where it could go. Had he read what the competitive intelligence studies would have told him, his response would have been to acknowledge the vacuum in existing smartphone technology and hint about forthcoming Microsoft innovations to come in that space.
In years to come, the wikipedia definition for the word "hubris" will contain a link to that video clip.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
But I'd argue that I believe it's not really accurate. It sounds like exactly what the pro-bailout folks want you to believe....
For starters, when you speak of Ford as the "uninvolved party" and the good guy? That's not quite reality. Ford's CEO petitioned Congress in 2008 to authorize a credit line of up to $9 billion for Ford in case the economy got worse and the company needed it. Ford also received $5.9 billion in government loans in 2009 to retool its manufacturing plants to produce more fuel-efficient cars, and the company lobbied for and benefited from the cash-for-clunkers program. Ford was also entwined in the situation because almost 25 percent of Ford’s top dealers also owned GM and Chrysler franchises.
All of the "Big 3" were to blame for mismanagement and a "we're too big to fail" attitude. Ford was just lucky to be in a little bit better place, financially, at the time everything really came apart at the seams.
Meanwhile? We're in a situation today where an "American car" is often American in name-plate only. "Foreign cars" are often assembled 100% right here in the U.S.A. as well. Hyundai's plant in Alabama is one of the only non-union auto plants in the nation, and is doing incredibly well. They hire a lot of people who only had low-paying jobs in the restaurant industry and the like, before starting there. They receive training for an actual career job and pay that's at least 80% or so of what their unionized counterparts receive ... and Hyundai claims they get employees with more positive attitudes and more willingness to do the job well. Sounds like win-win to me.
Meanwhile, what has GM done with those bailout funds lately? I see Cadillac is going to build their new hybrid electric vehicle and their flagship XTS over in new assembly plants in China. Is that what you were hoping those tax dollars would be spent on?
What got them is that the crash happened before they could sell of the property for a handy profit.
Ergo, you're not thinking too clearly.
Even if GM itself shuttered and all its factories stopped cold, other car factories would pick up the slack and most of those ex-GM workers would get jobs in the expanding factories.
It wouldn't have worked like that at all. The problem with liquidating GM wasn't actually GM itself. If it was just GM it might have been better to let the company go. The problem is that there is a HUGE supply base that depends on GM. There are 3-4 workers in the supply chain for every worker for the assemblers like GM. And the supply chain among auto makers is heavily interdependent. A GM bankruptcy would have been literally catastrophic Around 40% supply only the Ford, GM and Chrysler. Even the ones that are more diversified still have Detroit as major customers. Only 10% or so supply just the foreign car makers. An auto plant can be shut down by a single part not being delivered on time and there would have been bankruptcies galore. Toyota even admitted at the time that a GM liquidation would have been very bad for them too because of the interconnected supply chain. A GM liquidation would have bankrupted Ford (possibly permanently) and put a world of hurt on everyone else. Alan Mullaly (Ford's CEO) said that a GM liquidation would be felt by Ford within days if not hours.
The other thing you aren't considering is labor mobility. Most of the workers would not be hired by other company for the most part. There simply isn't that much labor mobility in the short term. This would have been especially true if GM was liquidated. You can't really expect people to sell their houses in the recent housing market even if there happened to be jobs available, which there wouldn't be. That sort of liquidation of a major manufacturer takes years to decades to recover from.
That's not to mention other issues like the US taxpayer picking up the tab for GM pensions, loss of tax revenue, loss of other companies that depend on viable communities created by factories (like restaurants, etc). The fallout wasn't just a few tens of thousands of workers. The fallout would have been something like another Great Depression.
Be careful with Forbes magazine. I've noted that they tend to have trollish articles of late. The headline generates controversy, but the meat is often nonsense. I didn't RTFA, but I've stopped reading Forbes ever since I read some article about how Apple was going to die, which basically read like some anti-Apple fanboy with no real substance.
I met him many years ago, he was actually quite a nice guy. I do agree he's not a great CEO, MS' biggest problem is it's just too huge and bureaucratic and he hasn't ever addressed the problem, at least not effectively. On the other hand, his support of developers really has had payoffs for the company. I'd say he's done some things well, just not enough.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Has the XBox really broken even? After all of the parlor games and accounting tricks?
Writing off 2 billion in repairs in 2009 for what will happen in 2010-2012 and only call it a loss for 2009. How can it be a "profit" it you make 500 million but paid out 600 million in repairs that year. It is like saying we turned a profit this year because of "revenue" in the sense of a loan we gave our self 2 years ago.
For years every Xbox was sold at a loss, then every XBox360 was sold at a loss. Then there were the repairs for defective XBox and XBox 360's. Multiple repairs. With development costs, advertising, etc, we are at somewhere between 8 to 10 billion in losses.
Plus all the other losses from that division. Such as Zune, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, etc. You are heading toward 20 billion. At this point, how many years will the Xbox 360 have to be profitable before they actually break even?
Then we can talk BING! Windows Live and MSN. which all loose money as well.
vi +
Now to me, 25 billion is less than 73 billion, and 7.35 billion is less than 23.34 billion... so I would think if a company did that, their share price would be higher, right?
Not necessarily. Depends on the perceived future prospects of the company. Current cash flow is important but a company's value is based on FUTURE free cash flow. Investors clearly think that Microsoft's future prospects are not so rosy and have priced the stock accordingly. Microsoft has two major cash cows (Office and Windows) and the future prospects for both are unclear. There is a major move to mobile devices where Microsoft has struggled to compete. The future for gaming consoles is fuzzy at best. The company doesn't pay an amazing dividend. As a result, Microsoft doesn't look like all that great an investment looking forward.
Yet, that's exactly the position Microsoft finds itself in. Is this Microsoft's fault, or the investors who don't know basic math?
Yes I'm sure all those institutional investors have no idea how to calculate Net Present Value. The stock market is normally pretty smart. If you think you are more clever than everyone else, why are you wasting time here instead of making a killing on MSFT?
inconceivable
When Ballmer took over Microsoft was dominant in a few markets, all of which were about to decrease in importance. Simply put there was no way to expand either the Office or Windows product line. When the deck is stacked against you like that, simply *not* losing is actually doing quite well.
After all, if you consult what slashdotters were saying about Microsoft products a decade ago, having postponed the inevitable fall of Windows and Office for at least a decade was nothing short of miraculous.
Microsoft is widely misunderstood.
People think Microsoft is a software company that is routinely evil. That's not true. Microsoft's main product is evil. Microsoft merely uses software as a way of delivering its product.
That's my opinion, but I'm not the only one who thinks that way.
Wow. Could you be a little bit less informed? You could try, but it would be a real challenge...
Fact #1: Nintendo consoles are not sold at a loss (except for last year's 3DS price drop). Nintendo has reaped far more profit than Microsoft's and Sony's game divisions every single year except 2011. Not only did Nintendo sell the most consoles (at a profit), they are also the undisputed masters of selling software (only one non-Nintendo console game has ever sold 20 million, and Nintendo has done it 16 times).
Fact #2: Your chart is dated November 2006. Everything it says about Wii vs PS3 vs 360 are completely and utterly fabricated predictions. In 2006, no one was predicting the phenomenal success that the Wii would enjoy.
Fact #3: PS3 actually does quite well in Japan, but yes the 360 only has 7% of the install base versus Wii's 54%. Currently the PS3 is outselling Wii by a good margin in Japan.
Fact #4: Worldwide, PS3 is easily the top seller so far this year among home consoles (but Xbox did extremely well last Xmas thanks to the Kinect fad).
vgchartz.com is not a bad source for this type of data (although it is much less useful than it used to be).
Name other CEOs you think aren't doing well.
The Adobe Systems CEO, for example.
We investigated Framemaker for putting together books. Framemaker is so badly documented it is amazing.
We also found many flaws in Adobe InDesign.
Anyone know what is the best software for generating Tables of Contents and Indexes for book formatting?
Also this is the year of the Linux desktop! Open source for all, Al Gore totally won the vote in Florida, and did you hear about this thing called Wi-fi???? It's going to be EVERYWHERE one day, I swear man!
I wouldn't use anything else but Office, I believe Xbox offers the best balanced experience and Windows 7 was a definite step forward from Vista.
^-- And I wrote this on a Mac.
There is one flaw with the stock price, it's that instead of allowing the stock price to go up, Microsoft ends up directly pays the shareholders.
Many tech stocks peaked around 2000. Microsoft stock has done well compared to some of its rivals.
But the auto corp's managements made bad decisions and I believe a large number of them lost their jobs. Wall street banksters made criminal decisions that damaged most of the world's economy and they all still have their jobs--and their bonuses. >:(
Nobody has mentioned it yet, but a couple more $1,000,000,000 purchases for the likes of Instagram would/should put any CEO into the top 10.
>Windows is cesspool of malware on unmanaged PCs (home users) - yes there's always room to improve here, but Windows 7/8 is slightly
> more hardened to attack than XP RTM was, MSFT profits come from 100% Windows & Office, Windows Servers are a joke, and the XBox is laughed at >like Windows Phone is by everyone today
I fixed it for you. Seriously, who /doesn't/ think Windows Phone is a joke?
It were for "feature phones".
And they were only "failing" in the USA, where it's REALLY hard for a European company to keep custom.
Nokia only started failing when Elop started making them a Windows Phone manufacturer. Since Elop was Microsoftian and a USian, the Microsoft mobile OS was a go-er. But the USA is a small market. But to the blinkers of a USian, it is the only important part of the world.
That is what his shareholders want.
MS's leadership was questioned in MS's forums some time ago:
Does MS need new leadership to fix problems w/Win7---Oct 1, 2011 (
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/does-ms-need-new-leadership-to-fix-problems-wwin7/0b7c745b-da66-4b76-a83b-f74a6c22fefd)
.
We may have all hated Bill Gates, but he had a vision (not that everyone liked it). Currently they have no visionary leadership. Ballmer's expertise was executive/corporate operations, but he didn't have the Bill Gates' "style" (however one might perceive that, Borg, nerd, or whatever -- he had a distinctive style/personality, just like Jobs had a distinctive style/personality). I just don't see Ballmer as being inspirational to people. That doesn't mean he's not good at doing what he does -- he's just not a charismatic figure[head]...
I don't see him as being a leader, but an executor (someone often vital to a leader to get things done, but not meant to take the place of the leader).
http://tinypic.com/r/k99ctw/6
Here is a man who's rage problems are so great and leadership problems suck so much he resembles a movie villian. Teslee from tank girl to be exact. Every last anarchist's hideous stereotypical depiction of "capitalist" leadership.
http://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/09/ballmer_throws_a_chair_at_fing_google.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aQ6W2nFlN8
In my last days at Microsoft, Ballmer was not reachable and very despondent. Bill was always available. Ballmer, I used to call him Steve but that is overrated, Ballmer was not reachable or approachable from the employees, the real leaders (engineers, support, manufacturing, replication) that made their dog food W*RK. Frankly, Ballmer did not deserve to be CEO - he is a marketing guy, not an innovative engineer nor pioneer. Bill dropped out and won. Ballmer came along for the ride. Lewis and Clark would have left him at the start of their journey because he would have had the entire wagon train killed by Indians because he would be jumping up and down on the wagons screaming, we are coming, we are coming...
Next time post the link to the FIRST page, not the LAST page.
Cheers.
Jeruvy
Making money off other people's work is outrageous.
The attempted purchase of Yahoo.
If Yahoo agreed MS would have given up most of its cash on hand and gone into debt for this purchase. Less than a year before the economy tanked. MS had to unload 5000 people. If Ballmer had his way it would have been 50000.
Yahoo runs on Linux and its employees by and large hate MS. MS would have inherited software it had no clue how to manage and hardly anyone from Yahoo would have stuck around to help them.
This is potential move by itself shows Ballmer for the idiot that he is.
and Google put out a "smart" wristwatch, MS would start making microwaves and wrist watches. For no other reason than that is what Apple and Google are doing.
Of course MS microwaves would leak a ton of radiation causing cancer in entire neighborhoods and watches that aren't even right twice a day.
They don't have some grand strategy other than follow others, even if they don't understand why they are doing it.
That is why MS has been a failure(or at best break-even) in everything where they weren't able to cheat and steal their way into dominance.
MS has not had any real success when they were forced to play on an even field.
MS is a joke.