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Bungled Mobile Bet Will Be Ballmer's Swan Song
snydeq writes "'If Windows 8 and the Surface tablet flop, you'll see a shareholder revolt that will send Steve Ballmer packing by this time next year,' writes InfoWorld's Bill Snyder. 'First it was the netbook, then it was the Ultrabook. Microsoft, Intel, and the PC makers keep looking for a way to convince buyers they don't need an iPad or Android tablet. Neither initiative gained much traction, so Microsoft bet big on Windows 8 and the Surface. ... Maybe we're wrong, and buyers will decide that the new OS and the Microsoft's first serious venture into hardware are what they want. It would be a huge boost for the industry if it happens, but I'm not optimistic. ... There's been a string of bad quarters, and the stock has been frozen for nine years. At some point — I think we're getting really close — investors are going to demand a shakeup. When they do, it's going to be good-bye, Ballmer."
It came with Windows 7 Starter though I've never actually used it. I upgraded the 1GB factory RAM to 2 GB. It runs Kubuntu like a dream, I replaced the factory HDD with an SSD and I have it booting Chromium from power button to login prompt in 26 seconds.
Why I really like it?
It fits in a small backpack. It's no problem carrying it when I bike, unlike a larger laptop, it's got awesome battery life and I've had two major bike crashes where I got pretty descent injuries (chainline failures at bad times, both of them) with the thing in my backpack and it's still working perfectly today. Best initial $250 I ever spent on a computer and the upgrades I put in were totally worth it.
I don't use it for much more than web browsing, it's not a work horse, but it does web browsing like a champ, and I have done some very minor Gimp edits and some other things on it too.
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The other thing is that I sort of sympathize with Ballmer. Sure, Windows 8 and Surface have flaws. Even when Microsoft does something right like the Kinect, we're upset that those open drivers aren't released on day one. And being a lowly software developer with zero stock in Microsoft (okay, I don't really track my 401k funds down to the stock), I sort of have to ask shareholders a big question: If you want to oust Ballmer over Windows 8 and Surface tablet, why didn't you simply sell all your shares and even short the stock when they debuted? I mean, hindsight is 20/20 and shareholders get to play this game where they read the SEC reports on these things, then they get to sit there watching and then if these products fail they basically go on a litigation witch hunt on whoever made these decisions. But if Windows 8 and the Surface tablet are huge hits? Well, you'll never hear a peep from those shareholders. They likely either quietly cash out or demand more growth (thus delaying pending litigation).
I can understand shareholders suing over actual gross negligence or actual shady accounting and misreporting to the SEC. But it should be the SEC who decides which company to sue over that. Look, if you've got shares in Microsoft and it's painfully obvious that Windows 8 and the Surface Tablet are gonna flop then what in the hell are you doing holding onto those shares? Microsoft should decide internally if it's Ballmer's time to go, not some shareholder with their eye on the prize and little knowledge of technology. I don't like to defend Ballmer and he very well may have conceived these things himself and pushed them through development and production -- but wouldn't the people on the inside know that it's time for him to step down after that?
I'm pretty sure what happened here was Ballmer said, "What's the best thing we got? Okay, we're going with that." If it was Steve Jobs style micromanaging that forced these products through and the board of directors has no clout against Ballmer then the shareholders might have a place here. I just don't see that right now.
Also I feel like there's a lot of potential explanations for this guy's complaints:
But the really telling number was in the Windows Division, with revenue of $3.24 billion, down a frightening 33 percent from the same period last year.
So Microsoft releases the first stable version of Windows 7 on February 22 of 2011 and a year later you're calling a 1/3 drop in Windows sales "frightening"? Perhaps they were just coming down from everyone's move to Windows 7? I mean you (hopefully) only need to buy that once for your machine.
This author claims to be "putting his neck on the line" with this prediction but all I see are a lot of questions that want you to believe what he's saying will happen without him ever actually saying that Microsoft's mobile will flop and Steve Ballmer will then be ousted. To back that up he goes on with further questions surrounding earnings reports. God I've wasted too much time on this post already considering how insipid the original article is.
My work here is dung.
Another gamble ups the anti.
not the other way around.
when he eventually goes, it will be the best thing ever to happen to the computer industry.
They could have sold a few million of those things, everyone was raving about it, and then they killed it stone dead. Even though it had a MS badge on it, I was willing to give it a go.
I have a feeling that Steve Balmer is out of touch, or maybe I am, I don't know.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
"Ante" means before; "anti" means against. To "up the ante" is to raise the stakes in poker. I take it you were trying to make a pun on "anti", but I'm having trouble piecing it together.
Netbooks were started by ASUS and their peers as an 'appliance' laptop- They were Linux based and only cost a few hundred bucks. Microsoft didn't try to get into it until it was posing as a threat to Windows!
I don't think Windows 8 is the big flop anti-Microsoft folks are hoping it will be. It's different. But so was Windows 95 when the Start Menu was introduced. My Surface RT and I will be here if you need us.
Being a Linux/BSD guy, I gave Windows a try. Recently installed Windows 2012 Server.
It can't even show the nice folder view with picture previews. Just look at kde, this works out of the box.
No meaningful shell.
No easy out of the box way to compile software. Need to install DevStudio monstrosity or cygwin, linux environment.
Friends keep complaining that Windows keeps freezing while copying large files over the network.
Ubuntu IMO is way more usable as it is today. But of course Windows is well entrenched with generations seeing nothing but Windows, ever.
Given all these issues with Windows and how Android/iPhone are dominant on mobile market, I would say "No way, Jose!". Possible, but completely improbable.
As we all heard on a near-daily basis during the recent Presidential election, "you can't beat somebody with nobody". There just isn't a lot of senior executive talent out there who would give board members the confidence that they could run Microsoft. It would have to be a CEO, not a techie, but that CEO would have to have deep understanding and appreciation (!) of several very different technical markets, and of Microsoft's offerings in these areas. Just getting a senior manager from Oracle or Google probably wouldn't make a lot of sense. I think it would be probably an SVP within Microsoft (but can they run the whole ship?), or perhaps an ex-Softie like Paul Maritz.
I don't need any sort of tablet or pad, thank you very much. While everyone with low-mileage brains sits around playing 'Angry Birds In The Fourth Dimension' or whatever game is popular now, I am writing books.
But as far as Windows vs OSX vs Linux vs Unix vs iOS vs ?, I have no interest in that. Just so long as it has a text editor I am fine.
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At this point, I doubt if Microsoft's Board of Directors (who are chartered with looking out for shareholder interests) are any less to blame than Mr. Ballmer.
Maybe the shareholders should demand significant fresh blood in Microsoft's Board of Directors, since the BoD has allowed to continue, even fostered, the Ballmer problem far longer than they should have.
And several companies have since discontinued production of netbooks. So now what's recommended for people who want to run PC applications that aren't very demanding of CPU speed on a device that fits in a messenger bag? Or are there so few people in that situation that they're an edge case not worth serving?
The risk if they fail isn't actually that high. A lot of companies and institutions have just finished/started phasing out XP for 7. So I don't think MS planned to sell a lot of licenses to those. The real clever thing is the fusion of laptop and notebook that is yet to come(Windows RT will propably be a distant third; people are propably already locked in Google Play and iTunes) and that is a smart move.
The next gen laptop will resemle the Transformer line of Asus. iPad 3 owners look up whenever I unpack my Prime. Imagining this with a 13" screen and an I7 actually makes me happy in the pants.
I wonder how long those go on one charge. The Prime lasts for a day(if you include a humon sleep cycle and the keyboard/battery thing).
Funfact: hoking up a tablet to an LCD projector and controlling the presentation with a PS3 DualShock controller does turn a couple of heads. Especially when "accidently" activating Sonic in the down-time. Everybody likes Sonic.
I think an OS that is also controllable on a touch screen is a smart move. But I won't use that particular feature on my desktop. My arms aren't that long and watching Star Trek does require very little interaction. And there always are the perils of Cat Interference.
20 minutes into the future
out with the Ballmer, in with the "interim CEO" bill gates? would be interesting to see what he does with the company now that he's become more of a philanthropist. Worked for Apple, and we know how MS loves to ... innovate.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Interesting product, but like the Zune it will not connect with enough consumers, corporate or otherwise. That, plus W8 is awful. MS should have spent resources making 7 viable instead of scrapping everything for the "tiles." Ugh.
www.chihuahuarescue.com- Help to end dog abuse, abandonment and cruelty
I sure there are a whole host of reasons why Ballmer should go, but they are not covered in this irrelevant Apple vs Microsoft pissing contest. Here is the thing Google is winning mobile, yet is mentioned nowhere in the article. Apple are losing there grip on mobile as we speak...the numbers quoted in the article sound impressive, but there market share is shrinking 23.1% to 14.9% for smartphones...and the iPad only occupies 50.4% of the tablet market. Its in trouble, and in context of this article its share price is dropping because of its poor results, ironically the same results quoted in the article. Microsoft do need a compelling mobile offering, but nothing in the article says anything about what is happening in the current Mobile market place.
Do you mean the Kin? The product that was launched with a huge advertising push and was killed weeks later? If I were to define "bungle" that would be up there.
Of course the Kin was killed to make way for winphone7.. Which has only managed to crack a few percent in the market. Sure sounds like a bungle to me!
Why don't we count windows mobile too? At one point it was the number one smartphone platform! Pretty much the only game in town. I had an HTC wizard and I loved it (rebanded cingular one actually). Microsoft let that platform stagnate and die. The original iphone replaced my wizard.
So here we are on the cusp of winphone8/winrt/surface. I don't have a whole lot of optimism.
The fact is Ballmer is a sales guy, plain and simple and there have so many things that Microsoft has done wrong it's hard to list them all and I have to wonder if he's just the wrong person to be running things.
For example, starting with Office 2007 came the dreaded "tool ribbon" which to this day 9 out of 10 end users hate with a passion. For example one of my neighbors is a well regarded author with at least six books that have gotten some kind of award and she is fairly active in the community of authors; she's still using office 2003 and will not switch to a newer version because she just can't tolerate the tool ribbon and she says most authors whom she knows feel the same way. Remember back in the day, when Quattro Pro had selectable user interface and all those Lotus 1-2-3 users could switch without any effort? How about something like that (for Office and Windows) rather than MS jamming their idea of what the UI should be down the end users throats!
Another glaring example, starting with Window's Vista we the technician's lost the ability to do a repair of the operating system. In many cases where something went seriously wrong with XP (virus damage etc) you could almost count on a repair install to get the system working again but not with Vista or Windows 7 where the only choice you have is to backup your data and do a complete re-installation; what a waste of time.
And I've heard (maybe this is just a rumor) that the next version of Windows server is not going to have a GUI interface and will be completely command line driven; what sysadmin wants to sit there typing command after command into a Dos prompt.
These are just the things that came to mind, if I actually sat here for a while I'm sure I could think of a bunch more.
- Norm
So Microsoft releases the first stable version of Windows 7 on February 22 of 2011 and a year later you're calling a 1/3 drop in Windows sales "frightening"? Perhaps they were just coming down from everyone's move to Windows 7? I mean you (hopefully) only need to buy that once for your machine.
When revenue in just about all divisions drop to near 2006 levels, you've got a problem.
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsoft-income-by-segment-2012-10
Uh, we're also at the same levels were were in March of 2010 and March of 2011. Mind explaining why he wasn't ousted then? Or why you skipped those dates and went all the way back to 2006 before the recession? Yeah, everyone was riding high before the recession ... we know ...
What does Microsoft have to do with netbooks or ultrabooks? Netbooks were Intel's initiative to create a secondary computer for consumption only that would be too weak to run Windows (Vista at the time). The fact that almost all of them ended up running Windows was bonus for Microsoft, and Intel's loss. Tablets (iPad and Android) are intended for the same purpose. Ultrabooks are Intel's initiative to reduce their dependency on Apple for the high-end laptop market. Neither of these was started by Microsoft, although Microsoft has clearly benefitted from both. So I don't know where he's coming from with this.
He's on better ground with the claim that if Windows 8 and Surface fail Balmer will be in trouble. At least these are both clearly Microsoft's doing. But how could Window 8 fail? It's pretty much guaranteed at least Vista levels of success, which is to say a marketing failure but a sales success. And considering that most enterprises are currently moving to Windows 7 and Windows 8 won't be in their normal upgrade cycle a lack of enterprise sales won't be considered failure by itself. It's pretty much impossible for Balmer to get serious pain from a single release of Windows. Surface is easier to measure failure on. Microsoft has clearly invested lots of money in designing and producing it, so if there are very few sales there will be a substantial loss. Still, the sales projections aren't huge, so it seems likely that they will be met. Surface has limited distribution, likely due to limited production. If sales are really bad then production will slow down and distribution will increase, which would help to minimize losses. And I'm ignoring the fact that reviews for both have been generally positive. Outside of places like Slashdot the reception has been mixed, but more positive than negative. Which makes complete failure seem unlikely. Unless people stop buying PCs and buy iPads instead Balmer seems pretty secure in his position for now.
The Windows 8 touchscreen laptops are cool - check one out hands-on if you haven't - but are way overpriced (like Ultrabooks), making it a no-brainer for most to turn to the cheaper tablets. Add touchscreens to those $229-$399 Win 8 laptops, and people will IMHO think twice about going with a less-functional tablet! Selling crippled hardware is what did in the Netbooks - hopefully MS won't repeat this mistake with Win8.
And most people I know are itching to ditch their iPads for a Surface device.
Since Microsoft is making money hand over fist it would be surprising if they got rid of Ballmer. When companies are making near record profits that's usually when you want to keep the CEO, not toss him. I think it's just plain silly that every time MS releases a new product armchair managers claim it is a huge gamble and, if it doesn't work, heads will roll. Yet it never happens. MS is huge and their experiments with tablets and Windows 8 are small drops in the bucket.
Steve Balmer is the Rahm Emanuel of High Tech: He has no respect for the people who put him and his company where they are.
His customers have long since noticed. They are forced to use MS products because there are no other practical choices in the marketplace, and Balmer disrespects them even while he takes their money. This has now become a serious problem for Microsoft -- as a company it enjoys no good will from its customers. Without customer good will, MS products don't get the attention and consideration they might deserve, from customers, who have been forced to use MS Windows and MS Office and pay unrealistic prices for the dubious privilege.
Balmer also has no respect for his employees. He plays projects, managers and products off against each other until his best employees leave. This creates stress, consumes time, costs money and consistently produces compromised, mediocre products that are often outdated on their FCS date. MS talent drain has always been unmanageable, even when employment conditions favored MS.
Without happy customers, without happy employees, and without the sense to correct these two negative business issues, MS is pretty much doomed.
specifically said that the iPad was introduced to fill a void between the smart phone and the laptop, and that the iPad was created because "the problem is, netbooks aren't better than anything": http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OBhYxj2SvRI#!
They were laptops with some touch-screen capability. Completely different beast.
Windows 8 is very nice. The only problem is how underdeveloped and closed, the currently developed apps are, including microsofts own. Windows 8 Apps need to be full featured and well thought out. Right now, the app store isnt even good.
There is work to do still, but the OS is incredibly good. All that is needed is for Microsoft to comit to good idea it has, and work on the apps and app store to show people how good it can be.
Right now, its not even a competitor to Apple. The apps are bad mostly, the store is a joke compared to itunes very well organized store. The store itself lacks features.
Microsoft has R&D'd great ideas over the years and never got behind them fully. I hope this isnt just another microsoft zune. This is a great idea, with a great OS behind it. IF MS lets this slip away into boring like the media player, zune, etc... well MS will find itself with a new leader, as it should.
It's clear that MS has great programmers and tech... they just need the direction of say a Steve Jobs....
You win a prize. One week of free access to Google. And Slashdot. Don't bother to thank me.
FTFY
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
[Points to empty chair and addresses Ballmer] "When somebody doesn't do the job, you've got to let them go... hey, hey what are you doing with my chair monkey boy?"
No Soviet Russia to see here, please move along.
However, when I read TFA, Snyder is trying to argue that Netbooks and Ultra Books are MS's and Intel's response to iPads and Android tablets. His premise is clearly absurd, as netbooks were selling by the millions before the first iPad was ever manufactured, and Ultra Books are a response to Macbook Air - not to tablets. MS might end up screwing up big-time with Surface, but it won't have anything to do with Snyder's curious re-working of the history of the netbook.
ASUS and their peers copied the idea about 10 years after the first netbook and started a new boom of cheap latop-like mobile computers.
Netbooks were started by ASUS and their peers as an 'appliance' laptop- They were Linux based and only cost a few hundred bucks. Microsoft didn't try to get into it until it was posing as a threat to Windows!
Let me fix that for you:
Netbooks were started by PSION as an 'appliance' laptop- They were EPOC based and only cost a few hundred bucks AND had 40 hrs of battery uptime. Microsoft did get into it with the last Edition WindowsCE, because PSION thought it would be a great Idea to get in bed with MS. PSION standing in the mobile market folded shortly thereafter, just as Nokia is folding now.
A shame actually, the original Netbook [wikipedia.org] was a very good machine with some features we can only dream about even today, 13 years later (like a really awesome keyboard despite the really small size)
EPOC went on to become the awesome Symbian Mobile OS which Nokia dropped after getting in bed with MS. ... What a coincidence.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Don't count on it. There's a reason Microsoft chose NASDAQ and stayed off NYSE many years ago. Differing requirements for shareholder rights as a condition of listing was one of them. Insider control is very strong at MSFT.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Microsoft's first serious venture into hardware"
Unless you count all those Xboxes, maybe?
"First it was the netbook, then it was the Ultrabook. Microsoft, Intel, and the PC makers keep looking for a way to convince buyers they don't need an iPad or Android tablet."
Netbooks became big because ultraportables were stupid expensive and all the affordable consumer laptops were garbage boxes with huge form factors. In 2008. Pretty sure it was not invented as an excuse by Microsoft to keep you away from tablets, especially because MS had to keep licensing XP against its will because it was the only Windows that would run on the device.
People who don't know computer history should not be paid to write computer-related articles.
Posting from my new surface RT. Very nice so far. Windows8 takes a bit of getting used to- ie there is a learning curve, but after that its very nice. Yes I have apple devices. Yes I have Linux boxen in my basement. I still like the surface.
Where's the bad performance? Anyone looked at the stock market? The tech sector OVERALL is at -22% since 2003 (9 years ago). MS is BEATING THE INDUSTRY, lol. Sure, APPLE is way up, but if you discount that one stock MS is actually pretty much the best performer around. I mean I'm sure you can find smaller plays that are of course MUCH MUCH better, or Apple, but I hardly think that the shareholders at MS have any big reason to complain currently. They MAY feel uneasy about the strategic direction of the company, but the notion that stock performance is going to get Balmer tossed is probably not even close to realistic. Truthfully stock holders don't generally think a lot about strategic considerations either, sadly. If they did a LOT of CEOs would be out of jobs...
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Ballmer is near invincible, so long as the MSFT stock continues to not-decline.I don't think anyone has the guts to actually show him the door when the stock isn't plummeting. Sure, maybe the stock will plummet if Surface flops, but somehow I doubt it.
You know, the thing that I never understood about the Laptop market is why companies didn't pour the money into the production value. My wife owns a Macbook Pro, and I flat out refuse to buy a Mac product for a variety of reasons. Her question to me? Then what out there is as nice as my Macbook? Problem is... not much. Razor has a decent laptop, but it's only 17" - she only wants 13 or 15". Is it really that hard to build a unibody laptop with decent specs (midrange graphics, anyone?), reasonable battery life, and a good screen? With the PC market I can find one or two of those things, but never all of them together, unless it's pricier than the Macbook, or unwieldy in size. The commodity market that got the PC in the door has gone out the window. I'd love to see a fantastic Windows 7 Laptop come in at a reasonable ($1500-2000) price range that doesn't feel like it's going to fall apart after a month of use.
I upgraded my HP TouchSmart tm2 to Windows 8 Pro the day it became available. Big disappointment. I would not downgrade only because I have several other computers running Windows 7 Home Premium but here are my 2 cents (4, actually):
- For any kind of production work you want Win 7, not Win 8. Desktop mode in Win 8 is not only a pain but also seems awkward in then new environment, it's like an itch you can't scratch.
- The new GUI (Metro, or whatever they call it now) is less functional, even in touch mode, than the Wind 7 "legacy" GUI. Tiles are not better than icons and the image scrolling feature they provide is distracting. Booting may be faster now but the UI and the apps are slower than in Win 7.
- The dependency on Microsoft Store for getting and installing Metro apps is embarassing at best.
- All the installed app(lication)s are actually listed as icons and you can see them by swiping up, but they are poorly structured compared to a tree. This is one step backward in terms of functionality, MS.
Don't forget the TRS-80 Model 100 from Radio Shack. :-)
Take XP and clean it up so that it runs fast on as little as 512 meg of ram again. Help companies easily DUMP the IE6 activeX security nightmare you created.
Sell it with reasonable pricing. Release it as a terminal OS that will run on existing P4 or early Dual Lenovo and HP stations. At the same time make active directory fly to a server upgrade that is included that can run on older gear.
For those who would change out existing gear make it cheap as well by making a terminal release for new cheap arm and atom based systems.
Most importantly dump the bling and eye-candy ui design phylosophy! Microsoft you are not Apple you cannot just rely upon the "WOW" factor.
Your business is having a terminal not:
crash because of some software glitch,
get hosed with crapware and virus problems,
take 5 minutes to boot from cold and establish intranet access,
take an IT staff of thousands to administer,
Thinking that businesses will just run out and spend huge amounts of cash on equipment and software is a huge mistake and further to that touch screens just will not cut it in the business desktop world.
Bring the costs of replacing terminals, servers and software down and you will keep your market going and expand it at the same time. Do anything else and you are toast as business will not pay huge amounts for a complete infrastructure change over like they did in about 2005-2006.
Either way expect a drop in revenue, Ballmer is toast for not seeing this and thus steering the company completely in the wrong direction. Businesses are not in a position to fork out huge IT expenditures but they will spend on the right replacements.
STOP WAITING FOR businesses to upgrade by making existing hardware obsolete YOU ARE PISSING OFF EVERYONE!
I've been using my eeepc now for over 2 years and it is my full time work & play machine. It does everything I need - it runs apache and mysql for dev, plays vids with vlc, runs browsers with a silly number of tabs open (and loads of other apps), I plug in a big screen and spread my desktop across the two screens and I connect a small mouse.. it runs ubuntu netbook remix (10.04) and gets a reboot once every couple of months if it's lucky.
I can't see myself needing any other computer these days as long as this one holds out. It's the dogs bollocks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC. "Microsoft Tablet PC is a term coined by Microsoft for tablet computers conforming to a set of specifications announced in 2001 by Microsoft, for a pen-enabled personal computer, conforming to hardware specifications devised by Microsoft and running a licensed copy of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system or a derivative thereof.[1] Hundreds of such tablet personal computers have come onto the market since then.[2]"
What? Why would Win8 doing well be a huge boost for the industry? If it doesn't do well, won't the same dollars go to others in IT? And, since the profit margins are less in many cases, isn't that arguably a more effective use of the funds, in terms of producing value for consumers?
MS has done as well as it has because for every one actual fan of their products, there are 20 consultants/journalists/bloggers/3rd party developers rooting for them to succeed, independent of the actual value of their products.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Windows 8 and Windows mobile/tablet efforts will fail horribly. There is nothing "business" about these things and therefore they can't effectively tie them in with their Windows+AD+Office network of offerings. That's the only strategy that works for Microsoft and they should keep doing it. They are, instead, changing direction, chasing after a market they don't fully understand with things people don't exactly want.
a response to iPads and Android tablets - none of which even existed until tens of millions of netbooks had already been sold.
Microsoft has had a number of blunders over the last several years. In no particular order:
Early Xbox red ring of doom
Zune (and come on, who picked poo brown for one of the color choices?)
Vista
Delays with OS
Delays in phone OS
Netbooks flopped (not the fault of MS, but didn't help their reputation)
UI of Windows 8 (too big a change I feel)
If their products aren't flops, they are badly delayed in too many cases. It continually gives them a reputation of "following the other guys". Frankly, I'm surprised Ballmer is still there. I don't know if he's the "hands on" guy like Jobs over at Apple, but he's the CEO. It's happening on HIS watch. HE'S the guy up front introducing this stuff.
I'm certain Ballmer has more than enough chairs to go around.
How much stock does Ballmer currently have? How about Gates? My impression is that as long as they have enough control, Ballmer stays around. Could they lose that? Maybe, but I'd guess it would take a large number of institutional stockholders to force a change in the Board such that Ballmer would have to step down. And Windows 8 being the next Vista or Zune won't do that - they've been there and done that.
Anything else is meaningless bitching and moaning. (And this from someone who isn't a Windows 8 fan, but does understand just a little of how Chiefs both get and lose their jobs. Hint: It has very little to do with the company or its performance as long as it isn't facing unprofitability.)
RIM? HP? Kodak? Sears? Whose CEO would do better? At least MS is doing something disruptive, attempting to survive, not doing what other companies are doing - driving themselves into the ground and exploding on impact. Love it or hate it, Win8 is a response to a changing marketplace where Apple is making money by doing everything wrong - overpriced hardware instead of race-to-the-bottom commodity gear, and making developing software hard on their platform instead of chanting "developers!" loudly. MS has seen that the more Apple does things "wrong" the more money they get, and the more MS does things "right" the more irrelevant they are. MS has seen HP create and destroy a mobile OS, and knows anyone who doesn't go all-in will fail. MS has seen Apple merge iOS and MacOS into a unity. Okay, so who could handle this situation better than Ballmer? What would that person do? Other than reinvent MS's consumer products for today's market, what other options are there?
Don't forget MS still has a server installed base with SQL Server and Win Server, plus a toolchain with Visual Studio, ASP.NET's MVC framework, and EF. If you're a Java person, you yawn at all this wheel-reinventing stuff; but if you're a CIO getting pitched by SAP to spend huge amounts of money, this MS stuff looks pretty good.
microsoft has never been an innovator, but his running them into the ground is a textbook example of why you don't let marketing run a technology company.
Let's see - windows 8, a non-desktop OS that we are expected to use on desktops. And Surface, a tablet that won't run any existing windows software.
Clearly, he should have been sent packing BEFORE this happened....
Go ahead call me a schill or whatever. But it's true. The Surface is actually good. So good, in fact, that I don't see myself ever going back to any other tablet.
Ballmer is an obvious failure and hasn't been anything else from day 1.
It boggles my mind how he wasn't thrown out in the first year, let alone how he survived until now even.
Why the hell are upper management and board members of tech companies apparently always so clueless?
Because Windows 8 and Surface suck.
Why should it strike me as news? Anyone who still has Microsoft after they issued excel 5 was angling for trouble. Ballmer is the man of the missed opportunities, but the balance sheet model was skewed from the start.
If anyone troubled to check the balance sheet these past years, he'd have noted that MS made big fanfare of stock buybacks: after all, its market position meant it was a big net cash machine, and investments in its sector of adequate size, and no antitrust considerations, are a bit thin on the ground. So where to put the money, if not in the company itself? the troubling bit is they put it in the manager's coffers; the issued shares where options granted to employees, and in many years they covered two thirds of the buybacks. So no net increase in Earning per share, thank you.
If the shareholders had been less index funds or tech fanatics, they would have pestered the company years back and insisted of a special dividend, like 40 bucks per share, with a big chunk of debt injected in the company. from then on, only cash dividends, no buybacks.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Microsoft has limitless piles of cash. The board is used to Ballmer's psychopathic behavior.
They all starting with pretty much the same technology, suppliers, engineering competence. So if Apple can manage to put together a product with all of the elements on your wishlist, and nobody else can... maybe it's not actually obvious what should be done, maybe doing it is actually not that easy, and maybe Apple is actually good at it.
Steve Jobs called it "taste."
I once worked at a Fortune 500 company that seemed to be completely unable to identify good ideas on their merits. Every idea had to be validated, basically by seeing that the competition was already doing it. When their customers would start clamoring for the features and products their competition had, they would suddenly get very busy and whip out something, under pressure and in a rush. Their motto seemed to be "we'll do whatever IBM does, two years later and poorly." There's a lot of that in the computer industry.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
+1
Are his 333 million Microsoft shares. They earn him $300 million a year just in dividends.
Small new devices are 'cool' but that isn't where MS / Ballmer missed the point. They took Microsoft's flagship OS and optimized the whole user interface to work on 'cool' handheld devices where they don't have a serious foothold in the market. I know that they are salivating looking at Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store but they just thumbed their nose at everyone who uses the most entrenched desktop operating system in the world. It is a train wreck as a desktop UI and they are so obscenely blind that they didn't see it or just plain ignored it.
How many people with a tablet and a PC will sit down and use the tablet for word processing or an spreadsheet? This is the biggest opening for a competitor to jump into the desktop OS market I've ever seen. And for the people who think hand held toys like tablets "are a paradigm shift" then explain to me how that correlates with the number of dual or triple display setups that are being rolled out?
(Ask Oracle how the mas shift to thin computing is working for them!)
The boat has been missed. Let's see if they notice.
...he does one more monkey dance for us!
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
It'll work well for people who's entire computing world can fit within a web browser.
In theory, that'd work. In practice, it'd require either A. all applications to be rewritten in JavaScript in order to run locally using HTML5 application cache and local storage, or B. a continuous connection to an application server over a cellular data plan that costs hundreds of USD per year. Or what am I missing?
If I'm shopping for a 10" laptop, how do I try the keyboard and screen on a product sold only through Amazon? Amazon has no showrooms in my home town.
Please god, let Windows 8 and the Surface tablet flop!
I swear I`ll go back to church on Sundays.
This mass ship-jumping away from a company that has produced software that made people feel like their digital servants were inept, incompetent, a pain in the ass to deal with, and sometimes even made them feel the computers were their temperamental masters, rather than their servants, is the result of a long-standing desire to get out from under the Wintel monopoly, which Late-to-the-table-again Microsoft mercifully ignored until it was too late.
Now they realize that they've fucked their shareholders by leaving a huge bonanza of cash sitting on the table for smartphone and tablet manufacturers to grab up, that could have been theirs. Now that Android has blazed a path, (and so many iCult members have gone down another, more locked-down, walled garden path,) we've figured out that we don't NEED Microsoft anymore. Not here. Just like with the Zoom or Zuun or whatever that crappy little MP3 player they had, or with how Internet Explorer was late to the browser game, and how strictly speaking, since Windows followed AFTER the Mac's GUI, Xerox's (never actually shipped, but built many) GUI-based PC/Workstation type machines, etc., they've waited too long to get on board with tablets.
Their only hope is that people will want a tablet that can do everything their PC can do, but there's a couple HUGE problems with that. The M$ Surface is STILL a tablet, having speed and power that will underwhelm when compared to even a netbook, won't be able to hold a candle to a laptop, and will be a joke compared to a full workstation/gaming class desktop/tower PC. Anyone trying to replace a PC outright with the Surface tablet is going to be disappointed at how little memory it has, how slow and underpowered it is, to say nothing about the fresh hell that will be the forced changes in the Windows 8 interface.
Then there are all the people who will hear that the Surface tablet can do all the things a PC can, including running all your old programs, only to find out that you have to have the higher-end version to get that feature, and if you don't, you're stuck with what is basically a clone of an Android tablet or an iFad, but that WON'T run Android or iFad apps. Then they'll get pissed when Misrosoft tells them they have to pony up another 80 dollars (or about) to get the FULL version of 8 for the Surface.
This of course assumes they won't simply say, "sorry, buy a new tablet to get that feature." Many of those people will regret buying the Surface, and realizing they've just dropped a half a g on a door-stop, they'll hurl theirs through a window (no relation!) in frustration, happy at least that unlike a desktop, they can give this digital flop-in-the-making a good HEAVE! out the window unlike a PC that is too heavy or unwieldy.
If I'm right, and I think I am, Microsoft will continue its slow, inevitable slide into irrelevance, bankruptcy, fire-sale to some Taiwanese start-up for pennies on the dollar. How the mighty will have fallen!!! But it won't be entirely the Ball Man's fault. People have simply realized that all those years of Blue Screens of Death, Microsoft forcing everyone, (or at least trying to,) to upgrade Office or Windows or whatever they're trying to foist on the public, at tremendous expense, wiping out competition through FUD campaigns, not being able to compete legitimately with their betters, M$ turned to dirty underhanded bullshit and we just won't take it anymore. Now that we have alternatives, we don't have to depend solely on Microsoft.
This is the backlash of decades of being known to be evil assholes, and figuring they could get away with it, because they're Microsoft, and people have no choice.
Well, we do now. This is why the Surface and Windows 8 Phone (a product with one of the worst names any marketing asshole ever shat in a meeting,) will go the way of the Zune, and Microsoft will slowly wither and die. I, on the other hand, will celebrate, and party like it's 1999.999!
Swan song? More like Ugly Duckling song.
One the is free from the prying eyes of google, Apple, phone carriers, and marketeers. One that I don't have to worry why a note taking app has to have access to the internet, my address book, and my camera.
Not to troll but I like my Surface and my WIndows 8 machine with Start8 is phenomenal, and I want a Lumia 920...look at that camera. Microsoft is doing things right, though some things need more polish...but I know tons of people with iPhones that have apps crash constantly, etc. I think Balmer pushed Microsoft through a tough anti-trust time frame and a resurgence is upon us. Also aren't netbooks and ultrabooks...very good sellers?
I need to cancel my Xbox Music trial subscription. Just like everything else on the Start screen, I never use it.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!