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.'"

Comments

Well,

[cheddarlump]

There goes the xbox.

Re:Well,

[Xest]

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.

Re:Well,

[plover]

Ballmer post? Guess we'll be needing these:

Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers.

Don't forget: Chair! Chair!

Re:Well,

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Re:Well,

[JDG1980]

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.

Re:Well,

[Xest]

It's hard to imagine Mattrick was a scapegoat given that he implicated himself by defending so rabidly the DRM policies in interviews to the extent of insulting customers. I very much doubt his orders were "Don, go make a dick of yourself in public".

I'm pretty sure he managed that all by himself.

Re:Well,

[TWiTfan]

Or maybe Mattrick was a scapegoat and was doing what he was told to do.

That might be reasonable, if it weren't for the fact that Mattrick was in charge of the Xbox division and answered only to Steve Ballmer (who doesn't have a rep of micromanaging).

No, Mattrick's many mistakes were Mattrick's and no one else's.

Re:Well,

[Xest]

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.

Re:Well,

[RogueyWon]

Yes, this feels like a case of emergency damage limitation. After a period in the mid-point of the current console cycle where things seemed to be going their way, Microsoft have had a fairly poor late cycle (unpopular 3rd-gen dashboard, a drought of major exclusives, overtaken by the PS3 in global installed-base stakes). This all culminated in a very difficult lead-up to E3 and an absolute disaster at E3 itself.

The company went in the wrong direction with always-online DRM and, arguably worse, didn't have a convincing story to tell on why it was going that direction in the first place. Admittedly, they probably got dumped on by some of their industry partners. In particular, EA claiming that they never wanted always-online DRM and denying that they had anything to do with its inclusion in the XBone was reminiscent of a small child frantically wiping cake-crumbs off his mouth while emphatically denying that he raided the fridge to steal the cake. But ultimately, whatever pressure there was on MS from publishers to go the always-online route, Sony recognised that it was a better long term strategy to side with the customers instead. MS's about-turn since E3 is welcome, but it hasn't helped the company's reputation.

And reptuation is probably what this is about. Not so much reputation with the general public, but reputation with shareholders. From its early days as a long-shot cash-hungry investment, the Xbox line has become a big part of MS's business. With the Windows side of the business not doing very much and with the company's attempts to get into the phone and tablet market not going very far, annual reports have shown that Xbox and Office are basically the two big growth areas in Microsoft.

On the day of E3 it looked like MS was about to commit suicide in one of those two areas. Shareholders will not have liked that. And while the general gaming public has welcomed MS's u-turn since then, shareholders will have liked it even less. Why? Because it smacks of confusion and a lack of a strategy. If MS had stood firm, then at least shareholders might have clung to the belief that the board knew what it was doing here and would be proved right in the long run. With a u-turn, it seems that the executive team has been making decisions that it doesn't even believe in itself.

So now, Ballmer (who, rather oddly, still enjoys a lot of shareholder confidence) steps in personally to provide reassurance that the company recognises it has a problem and is getting a strategy in place to fix it.

If the games industry in particular (and the tech sector in particular) had smarter and more in-touch shareholders, then a lot of executive teams would be getting very uncomfortable. However, there seems to be little chance of that happening any time soon.

Re:Well,

[SerpentMage]

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
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 .NET under the bus"
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.

Re:Well,

[NFN_NLN]

It's hard to imagine Mattrick was a scapegoat given that he implicated himself by defending so rabidly the DRM policies in interviews to the extent of insulting customers. I very much doubt his orders were "Don, go make a dick of yourself in public".

I think we can all agree we've coined the new term: "scapedick" :)

scapegoat - In modern usage a scapegoat is an individual, group, or country singled out for unmerited negative treatment or blame.
scapedick - An individual, group or country singled out for unmerited negative treatment or blame; then accepting the blame, and overly going along with the plan against them to the point of looking like a dick

Re:Well,

[Grishnakh]

Slashdot has decided that Ballmer is the physical incarnation of all that is evil and malicious in the computing world.

Don't be ridiculous. Ballmer is far too incompetent and too much of a buffoon to have such a reputation.

Ballmer to the rescue!

[meowgoesthecat]

...somewhere, the Sony executives just let out a chuckle.

Reorg

[recoiledsnake]

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.

Re:Reorg

[recoiledsnake]

You have absolutely no clue how big reorganizations are handled in big companies. First everything is done in secret as much as possible with the fewest people knowing. Then each person is called to the CEOs Office and informed about the reorg. Things do leak, but revealing rumors and the CEOs hand early causes damage. Do things any differently(letting people know from the media or other employees) and it's going to cause a lot of bad blood and bad morale on top of those caused by the decisions themselves. The process is the same in almost all organizations including Google, so I don't know what you're foaming at the mouth for.

MS, according to you, is in such a state of disarray that Ballmer cannot reveal the real head of Xbox, but instead has to step in temporarily??? And we expect that pending reorg to accomplish what, exactly???

This reorg is just not just about switching heads, it about reorganizations the divisions themselves. There may not be a Xbox division at all and instead may be merged into a new hardware division along with Surface etc.

Deja vu?

[Kwpolska]

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.

The title is misleading

[Skiron]

It should be eXboss

Re:NSA backdoors in closed source closed standard?

[CanHasDIY]

We are nothing like 1984. 1984 reflects a society that willingly wanted the conditions told in the book to occur. That is no way the case in modern society, regardless of how your feeble thought process wants to pervert it. No one in modern society wants to be spied on.

Dear lord, but do I wish that were true...

In reality, there's actually a fair contingent of the populace who will not only bow to the governments every whim on the dubious claim of "safety," but will demand you hit your knees as well, with equal fervor.

You don't see this because you insulate yourself from them, partially by posting here on Slashdot; I implore you, go check out the comment sections on Yahoo, MSNBC, or Fox News for any of the stories about Ed Snowden. You will not like (and may have trouble believing) what you see.

Ballmer Kong

[Junior J. Junior III]

I don't know why everyone is so down on Ballmer in this story. I think he's perfect. For years, Nintendo have made a ton of money off of a great big monkey. Now, Microsoft are finally competing on equal terms.

Re:I predict

[mjwx]

...a series of chair throwing games.

A game of throwns?