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.)"

Comments

Worse?

[jimmerz28]

Really? Even worse than RIM?

Re:Worse?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the mayor point isn't that he's failed to keep a monopolitic position, but rather that he has failed at all to capitalise on it. Like it or not, the CEO's of the banks who bankrupted the world made bundles of money in the rise, and are now making bundles of money in the fall. They managed to capitalise on a crisis, where Balmer has failed to capitalize on the position of Microsoft. Look at Apple, all it took was a small investment in R&D and suddenly they turned their computer buisness into one of the most sucessful MP3 companies, and then Phone companies. Microsoft tried to throw it's weight after these areas but failed. They even failed to win large in the console market after spending quite a bit of money in an attempt to kill Play-station (But Nintendo won that one).

Really Microsoft has been one huge investment in one field after the other, always waiting for others to be the first movers, and this has left them failing again and again.

Re:Worse?

[Sarten-X]

That's exactly what I get from this, too. Microsoft's stock price - while fairly high - has remained constant for ten years, while many of its competitors have seen enormous growth (even excluding Apple). Ten years ago, Apple was struggling, and Microsoft had the cash reserves and market share to sell any quality product they wanted. That would have been an ideal time to dump money into meaningful R&D (more meaningful than a fancy coffee table) and produce the next product that would end up in every home - but Microsoft, under Ballmer's guidance, didn't. Microsoft hasn't really moved forward at all, releasing only newer versions of the same old products, and only making half-hearted attempts to establish new markets.

That risk is important. Apple risked everything on the iPod, and risked a major stake on the iPhone. As the entire company's future was on the line, the entire company was committed to making the risk work. The software team made good software, and the hardware team made good hardware. At Microsoft, there is so much internal conflict that only minimal progress can get the support of the whole company. As I've heard, project managers will actively attack other projects, so they all look equally bad. That's not the kind of environment that fosters innovation, and when you're already at the top, innovation is the only way to grow.

Re:Worse?

[Lumpy]

Nokia is an intentional destruction. That is different from incompetent leadership. What you see happening at Nokia is a very calculated and though out plan to completely destroy that company.

Re:Worse?

[Sir_Sri]

How had that been working out for the car companies prior to 2008? If you build a new car factory you don't build it in michigan or ontario if you could avoid it. You build it in the south or another country and leave detroit a wreck of a city.

GM's biggest value would have been its patent portfolio, and probably a handful of engineers. Everyone else would have been on the unemployment rolls because if you have to build in the US, you would rather build in the south, if you don't have to build in the US you build in mexico, japan, china, germany etc.

As it was GM did go bankrupt, the government managing it meant it was a relatively orderly transition, workers took huge pay cuts, without hugely long periods of unemployment, and the factories were kept where they were rather than being abandoned so people didn't have to move to try and find jobs etc.

Re:Worse?

[Penguinisto]

BS. Ballmer took over in 2000.. the XBox was released in 2001.

No 1 console worldwide.. 49% marketshare

If that doesn't count, then what would?

Two things:

1) The XBox still has yet to realize ROI - Twelve Years Later, and pulled in no profits at all until 2009 or so. The XBox program may finally reach ROI in 2015, but there's the fact that they'll have to start sinking even more money into R&D for the next gen console before then, so even that date is an iffy proposition. Most tech companies would have called that a miserable failure by now, if they had managed to survive such a massive loss. Nintendo had OTOH made a pure profit off of their line and usually reach ROI for any given console line within a few months of release. Sony is a bit tougher to see because their primary goal was not just selling consoles, but selling Blu-Ray players.

2) Ballmer was officially CEO in 2000, but Gates held the Chairman of the Board slot for quite some time after that - and if you don't think Gates called the shots during that time with Ballmer as a figurehead-in-transition, you're either naive or lying.

Article is delusional

[dnaumov]

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.

Ballmer has a monopoly mentality

[23940823908235908]

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.

It's gotten hard to hate on Microsoft.

[Apuleius]

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.

Re:Where's Elop?

[c]

> I can't believe Stephen Elop of Nokia is not on that list.

TFA "credits" Ballmer for the destruction of Nokia and others in the Microsoft ecosystem. Since Nokia is now a Microsoft subsidiary in all but name, I'm not sure it's much of a stretch.

Re:Ballmer ignored competitive intelligence

[Eponymous Coward]

> Ballmer has ignored the trends and innovations of other companies until success in the marketplace forces him to mount a too-late response

I hope one day Ballmer writes a book and talks about what he was thinking.

To me, it seems like Microsoft tried to predict where Apple was heading with iOS and I think they predicted a merging of their desktop and mobile operating systems. I really think that's how Microsoft ended up developing the dog that is Windows 8 / Windows RT. Their near future strategy seems totally bizarre to me and I can't figure out what it is they think they are going to accomplish.

In my day job, I work on a large Windows desktop application and we every change we've made lately has been to decouple us from Microsoft. I've always advocated choosing the cross-platform solution to a problem even if it is the more difficult path. Up until about a year ago, I've usually lost those arguments.