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Microsoft's Lost Decade
Kurt Eichenwald has written a lengthy article about Microsoft's slow decline over the past 10 years, cataloging their missteps and showing how consistent, poor decision-making from management crippled the tech titan in several important industries.
"By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish. Fiefdoms had taken root, and a mastery of internal politics emerged as key to career success. In those years Microsoft had stepped up its efforts to cripple competitors, but—because of a series of astonishingly foolish management decisions—the competitors being crippled were often co-workers at Microsoft, instead of other companies. Staffers were rewarded not just for doing well but for making sure that their colleagues failed. As a result, the company was consumed by an endless series of internal knife fights. Potential market-busting businesses—such as e-book and smartphone technology—were killed, derailed, or delayed amid bickering and power plays. That is the portrait of Microsoft depicted in interviews with dozens of current and former executives, as well as in thousands of pages of internal documents and legal records."
We discussed a teaser for this piece earlier in the month — the full article has all the unpleasant details.
Microsoft's server revenue was $4.5b last quarter growing at 14% year over year. Yes sharepoint, SQL Server, Dynamics... are something to write home about.
The Xbox lost $4 billion and came in a distant seccond.
The Xbox 360 has lost $3 billion, after a few quarters in the black the division is now in the red again, and the 360 is currently tied for second.
That's not what any rational person would call success.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles), Nintendo Wii sold more units than both Xbox and Xbox 360. While Xbox 360 outsold Sony Playstation 3 by a few million units, combined sales of all Playstation models are several times higher than sales of both Xbox models. So what makes you say that Microsoft is the number one console manufacturer?
Moreover, unlike sales of smartphones and tablets, sales of game consoles are stagnating already. So it's pointless to argue whether Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony is the No. 1 or coolest console manufacturer.
Gates was already heading for the exit in 99. He had grown tired of dealing with the press and had more money than God so who could blame him?
No the problem has ALWAYS been Ballmer. Gates was an engineer and thought like one, menu heavy, a little geekier, but that's who he was. Ballmer has been and always will be a marketing exec, that is what he went to school for, that is how he operates, and as we have seen time and time again marketing execs may do fine on Madison Ave but they suck balls at tech.
I mean look at what has happened under purely his watch: Zune, kin, killing playforsure for a half baked Zune market, rushing out the X360 with a 2 billion dollar flaw, the bad purchases, sinking insane amounts of money trying to buy search, pushing out Vista with all of us beta testers screaming about show stopping bugs, getting caught up in the embarrassing "Vista capable" fiasco, the man has been an absolute trainwreck to the company. Hell if the rumors are to be believed the only reason Win 7 didn't end up a disaster is he was too caught up in Bing and WinPhone to give a crap and left the guys working on Win 7 alone.
Lets face it folks, the man has literally flushed billions of dollars right down the crapper, frankly if the final total of the Ballmer flush was less than 30 billion I'd be amazed. You can sum up Ballmer reign in 3 steps: 1.-See what is hot, 2.-Buy or build a half baked poorly thought out copy, 3.-Fail miserably. I bet if you would have took those billions and had a monkey throw poo at the stock page and bought stocks based on which ones got the most shit you'd have had a better ROI than Steve Ballmer has had, and that is with him having a company with not one but TWO monopolies! I swear the man makes the Apple Pepsi guy look like a fricking genius and we haven't even gotten to see how bad "Ballmer's Folly" aka Win 8 does yet.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Another similar history lesson: demise of the Westinghouse company