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Steve Ballmer Replaces Don Mattrick As Xbox One Chief
Edsj writes "While Don Mattrick leaves Microsoft to work at Zynga, Steve Ballmer announces that, from now on, he will be directly in charge of the Xbox One division as quoted: 'Don's directs will report to me and will continue to drive the day-to-day business as a team, particularly focused on shipping Xbox One this holiday.'"
A major reorg of MS is imminent, hence Ballmer doesn't want to reveal the real head yet and asked them to report to him for the time being. Tired of Slashdot's misleading and biased headlines and summary.
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Quite the opposite I think.
If you look at what happened with the DRM fiasco, we had Don insulting his customers saying basically that DRM was for their own good but also importantly that it couldn't be removed, then within a couple of days you had it removed including detail of the implications that had on other systems and features which is not a mere couple of days work to evaluate properly.
I suspect what happened is that Sony did their unveil, Don refusing to admit he was wrong (because he hates consumers, and is an arrogant dick, hence why Zynga is perfect for him) carried on parroting the DRM line whilst his reports knew that this was a major problem, bypassed Don because he was a waste of space and went straight to Ballmer to say "Let us remove this or we're done", Ballmer gave permission, they sent to work on it and had a good week to do it whilst Don was still oblivious, or knew full well, but was trying to fight his corner internally. Either way he obviously lost eventually.
Hence why he has now gone, because he was basically undermined by those under him who knew far better than him what the customer wanted and what strategy was required not to completely destroy their product before it was even released.
This is also I suspect why they're not replacing him, because his reports probably knew better what made a good product than he did, hence why they may as well report directly to Ballmer and cut out the idiot in the middle.
Goodbye Don, you wont be missed, EA's most awful DRM regime period, overseeing Microsoft's worst XBox ideas, Zynga, you're an example of everything that's wrong with the games industry. It's nice to see you've finally ended up somewhere that deserves you and that you deserve to be at.
Steven Sinofsky, the moron responsible for Windows 8, left Microsoft a very short while after releasing Windows 8. We have a quite similar scenario here, save for the quit happening a bit earlier, but still after shit hit the fan.
Or maybe Mattrick was a scapegoat and was doing what he was told to do. When he saw what was happening at MS, he looked for a way out. Either way this is another problem that happened on Ballmer's watch.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Cutting out underperforming middle management and flattening the hierarchy is not a new idea in business. It can work well, but it relies on the person at the top being competent, hardworking, and flexible. Suffice to say that the events of the past few years indicate Ballmer might not be up to the job.
I don't think Ballmer is bad in every way, I think there are some teams he seems to have recognised know what they're on about and so he just leaves alone for the most part. Windows Server and SQL Server for example have just continued to get better.
I think Ballmer's flaw is that he has no vision, whilst Steve Jobs knew a good product when he saw one and knew when resources needed to be poured into it, and also knew when a product was a lost cause and knew when to axe it I don't think Ballmer is capable of that.
In other words I think Microsoft's product success (like Kinect) happen in spite of Ballmer, rather than because of the support of him, but it doesn't mean that impressive products can't get through and tried and tested products can't just continue to improve when he just leaves them alone. It's possible he'll just take a hands off approach with the XBox One now.
Or in other words I think Ballmer is a relatively passive leader, he doesn't have the drive to really fire up Microsoft and make it move, but he doesn't have the competence to axe bad ideas either. Microsoft nowadays strikes me as being somewhat in zombie mode with some departments coming up with good ideas and getting them through all by themselves without any help from leadership and other departments coming up with awful ideas (Windows 8 Metro) and pushing them through with no real leadership opposition either.
Still I may be wrong, there are people here who work at Microsoft, maybe they can give their thoughts and explain it even if anonymously.
Completely wrong IMO. Ballmer is a sales person plain and simple. He can sell anything to anybody. I agree he has no vision, and therein lies the problem. He takes ideas from others and tries to add them to Microsoft. Here are examples under Ballmer's watch:
1) Oh oh shiny toy called Java, must have -> .NET .NET under the bus"
2) Oh oh shiny toy called Flash, must have -> Silverlight
3) Oh oh shiny toy called Mobile, must have -> Windows 8
4) Oh oh shiny toy called Objective C, must have -> "refocusing on C++, and throwing
5) Oh oh shiny toy called Search Engine, must have -> Bing
6) Oh oh shiny toy called Online docs, must have -> Office 365
7) Oh oh shiny toy called JavaScript HTML, must have -> WinRT
8) Oh oh shiny toy called cloud computing (AWS), must have -> Azure
I know there are more, but Ballmer sees a shiny toy and like a pin the tail on the donkey game adds it to Microsoft products. Yet the problem is that it is second rate and people just don't use it. Microsoft has become a massive laggard in new ideas and new technologies. Granted they were not that innovative to begin with, but at least back then they did do something interesting things like Office (it used to be individual apps that did not work together), COM/OLE, or even Windows NT, and drivers. Ironically people don't give Microsoft credit for making the driver architecture work. Before Windows, drivers were a bleeding pain in the arse. Sure there were ideas on unifying, but Windows actually made it work effeciently.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"