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Maybe Steve Ballmer Doesn't Deserve the Hate
Nerval's Lobster writes "Who could forget Steve Ballmer's defining moment, that infamous 'Developers! Developers! Developers!' rant that became a YouTube hit? Or the reports of frighteningly accurate chair-throwing? Who could miss the tech media and investors blaming him for everything from Microsoft's largely stagnant stock price over the past decade to its inability to get in front of trends such as mobile devices? But tech columnist (and Kernel editor-in-chief) Milo Yiannopoulos talked to a bunch of Ballmer's friends and colleagues, picked through Microsoft's history, and came away with the argument that the man deserves a second look as an effective leader. 'He stands accused of running one of the greatest companies in American history into the ground, even as its stock price remains remarkably resilient and the company continues to turn a healthy profit,' he writes. 'The mature verdict on Steve Ballmer is that he has made only one major strategic error: not combining his own brilliance for sales and detail with a visionary product leader who has the authority to create bold new revenue streams for the company.' Do you agree? Or does Ballmer deserve his reputation as a bad CEO?"
He's a bald CEO, there's no denying it.
Oh wait, you said bad CEO. My mistake.
I tend to judge leaders by those they choose to surround themselves with. Delegating is one of the most important tasks any leader or executive has, and choosing to whom you will be doing so is the most vital decision they can make.
Therefore, I refuse to judge Ballmer as a leader, since I haven't really examined who he keeps company with. However, I still generally dislike Microsoft's products and strategies.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Many of which are usually a record for the company, even if it's a company that hasn't used it's brilliant engineering talent to maximum effect. Oh wait, this is /. uh, Microsoft is Satan, all hail our savior lord FOSS.
I think we found out Steve Ballmer's /. account name
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
No IF's, AND's, or BUT's, Worst CEO ever!
. 'The mature verdict on Steve Ballmer is that he has made only one major strategic error: not combining his own brilliance for sales and detail with a visionary product leader who has the authority to create bold new revenue streams for the company.'
I don't know a thing about Ballmer - I don't follow corporate politics. But if you dig through all the marketing-speak there, didn't that just say "Ballmer's one major error as a CEO was not doing that thing that CEOs should be doing"?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
He's a jackass even for a CEO.
...and Milo Yiannopoulos is an idiot. The kind of right wing idiot they would laud any CEO just out of bootlicking habit.
It all happened on his watch. The buck has to stop somewhere--at the top. That's how it works. If some VP was causing problems, it was his responsibility to get rid of that VP. If it was a particularly bad market for tech, that's not his fault; but it wasn't a particularly bad market. Other companies innovated and grew. They didn't. The whole strategy became, "let's make lame Apple clones that will piss off people who prefer the traditional Windows way, and won't convert people who prefer the Apple way".
I just don't see how the man at the top can escape responsibility for all that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
There are always two sides to every argument, but this one is particularly damning:
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer
(Kurt Eichenwald traces the “astonishingly foolish management decisions” at the company that “could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success.”)
Basically, a good leader/manager tries to find the best possible people for his organization to get things done. It is not necessarily his own job to do things himself, but rather to find the right people, promote, coach and help them to deliver the best possible results.
So, if it's true that Ballmer didn't have a good product guy next to him, then it would be his fault as he is the President & CEO of the company, i.e. he is the ultimate decision-maker for hiring such a person.
Either he didn't see the need (which means he is a bad manager), he couldn't find someone (bad manager, too) or he didn't want such a person next to him (a very bad leader).
In any case, as I always tell my people: If an employee doesn't perform, it is not necessarily his fault but rather his boss's - because his boss is the one who either hired him/her or decided to keep him/her at the current position.
There are only very few tasks that a manager needs to do, among of the most important ones are defining the tasks to be done to deliver a specific result, define a job description for it and find the right person/assign the person to do that task. After that, it is the responsibility of the manager to make sure that that person can deliver - by creating the environment needed.
This might sounds overtly "optimistic", but this has always been what I believed in what a good manager is... (apart from some other tasks, that are less relevant)...
So, with that definition in mind, I would say that Ballmer was not a good CEO - nor a particularly bad one either as he didn't manage to bankrupt MS. He is/was just a mediocre one...
Every man makes mistakes, that's for sure. But we're talking CEO-level here, which means "best of the best". Any small mistake that would otherwise pass unnoticed or with minimal impact at lower levels would turn into a disaster if you're a CEO.
Ballmer can be a good manager, even a good VP. But CEO is a different league.
It's the difference between driving a car or a plane: if you flip the car lights switch instead of honking, it's no biggie, but if you drive a plane with 300 people and pull out the landing gear too late, there's going to be dead people littering the airport runway.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
does Ballmer deserve his reputation as a bad CEO?
Bad CEO? Throwing chairs, browbeating your employees, prioritizing squeezing your customer over making a quality product, bribing government officials all over the world to expand your regulatory monopolies while preaching laissez-faire extremism to excuse cheating on your taxes -- those things don't necessarily make you a bad CEO. By the quarterly profit measure, they make you a good one. Those things don't make you a bad CEO; they make you a bad person.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
This is pure Microsoft talking points.
Given the most recent revelations about Microsoft, the author should be reconsidering that claim to Microsoft's virtue.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I think you need to define what you mean by a good CEO. Is it stock price ? Overall corporate earning performance? Growing the company? Innovating? Being a good leader? Until you define what makes a CEO "good" no one can give a meaningful opinion.
We found a CEO, may we burn him?!?
All kidding aside he is not a great or even good leader. If he was half as effective as Bill Gates MS would have have only lost half of the product wars that it has. He has perpetually missed the boat on emerging trends, and then tried to chase the boat down in a runabout with a 5HP outboard motor.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
I never understood why he was ridiculed for "developers developers" anyway. I don't remember the rest of the speech, but I doubt it was wrong. Platforms live and die based on how many apps they have.
It's kind of like that Howard Dean "yeargggg!" thing, something that sounds ridiculous out of context and is promoted by spiteful enemies for that reason.
Everything he has touched has turned to shit...
Doesn't deserve the hate if you invest in his competitors i guess...
Either way steve ballemer is still a chimp.
I don't really know much about Ballmer, or how he runs Microsoft. ... and I couldn't give a shit less; I don't work for MS or buy any of their products, so his policies, abilities, success/failure... doesn't really affect me.
I do, however, very much enjoy the jokes and memes that have resulted from Ballmer's tenure as CEO, especially the chair throwing incident. That shit was hilarious, if only because it actually happened.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
i always picture him where he belongs. hawking used cars on a low budget local tv commercial.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Specifically, that is. Microsoft's business strategy has been to crush upstarts with overwhelming force (even at a loss), then move on. My company had started working on Palm apps just as that tactic took effect. In the oughties, technology expanded so far that there were simply too many holes in the dike to plug. And, with mobile devices and broadband eating into the role of the desktop, MS doesn't have the money tree of Windows and Office giving them unlimited cash to throw around squashing mosquitoes. They really need to start being realistic about what kind of a niche they want to hold onto just as IBM has kept themselves relevant. They're still making tons of money, I just don't think they should keep on trying to hop on every passing train.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I have no opinion (about Ballmer). My level of caring is zero (about Ballmer).
I refuse to pay the "Micr$oft tax". I DO CARE about that.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
Speaking as one who has a large part of my net worth invested in Apple shares, I am grateful to Mr. Ballmer for the job he's done over the last 13 years. I'm even more grateful to Jim Alchin, for botching the Window Longhorn project in a manner that was damned close to optimal for Apple's interests.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If the man were as dumb as /. thinks he is, monopoly or not, lock-in or not, M$ would have imploded years ago. Sun, Palm, Compaq, Blackberry, they all had leaders who took their eyes off the ball and pissed away their corporation's leadership position.
I think that Ballmer is a decent operations guy, but obviously not a tech visionary, nor does he have good taste and an iron fist the way Steve Jobs did. I think that Microsoft was in a very strong position when he took over and that it just isn't that hard to keep Microsoft on its current glide path given a halfway decent operations guy in charge. John Sculley, who is widely viewed to have run Apple into the ground, could almost certainly done just as good of a job running Microsoft as Steve Ballmer. I realize this is speculation, but I think its true.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I *hear* that MS has a culture of fear, where lower levels are basically expected to kowtow to the management line. A company without dissent and an environment where employees can air and discuss their opinions is VERY bad since decision making then lays in the hands of the select few, and when mistakes are being made, people are prevented from even pointing out those mistakes.
So far we've seen the disasters of Surface pro, Windows 8 metro, XBone, and I'm sure there are others I'm missing. That a company could have such a litany of product disasters suggests that the culture doesn't exist where *innovative & good* products can be made anymore (MS does have good products but these tend to be either their mainstays e.g. office, rebadged hardware).
The blame for this *has* to rest at the top.
" its stock price remains remarkably resilient and the company continues to turn a healthy profit"
That's not success, that's momentum. Under the current leadership, entropy will continue to take its toll.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Maintaining a steady stock price isn't what makes the Wall Street Casino happy.
Microsoft is down from its high in 2000 while competitors like Apple and Google are now worth significantly more than they were. Considering Microsoft's once-dominant position, it shouldn't be flat.
Microsoft has done better than HP and Yahoo, but considering even stodgy old IBM has seen its stock price rise you have to wonder if Ballmer knows how to set a new course, adjusting to changes in tech, or just keep the ship afloat, buoyed by Windows and Office.
Microsoft had Windows for Pen Computing, Windows XP Tablet Edition, and later Courier, but lost the tablet market to Apple and Google. They had Windows CE and Windows Mobile well before iOS and Android, but never really made inroads in the smartphone market. Leveraging their default IE homepage, they couldn't get MSN / Live.com / Bing to overtake Google. Even in successful things, like HoTMaiL or IE, they simply stopped innovating until competitors appeared, and in the process those competitors took away chunks of Microsoft's market share. That they continue to exist off the profits from Windows and Office isn't the same as thriving, and that's why Ballmer gets the criticism he deserves.
So many times in the last 15 years, you could tell that Microsoft was really really close to getting it right. Just a few more revisions and they would have done it.
* Smartphones: really an outgrowth of PDAs. WinCE (version 3 and later) bested Palm OS. Palm was crushed and what did Microsoft do? Sit there for 5 years with minimal investment in WinCE. WinMo 2003 was barely an upgrade to the previous version. I had the Jornado, HP iPaq, and the HP hw6515 (I think) smartphone. It even had GPS well before the iPhone.
* Tablets: Bill Gates was right, we all will have a tablet in the future. It's just not running Windows. I bought the HP TX tablet/convertible. And you can tell that even with Vista, it was potentially a great device. Handwriting recognition, touch support, pressure sensitivity and decent weight. But terrible bloat in the initial Vista release made the tablet boot up in about 2 minutes on a good day and put out heat like a nuclear reactor.
* GPS/media players: Remember all those Magellan and Garmin GPS units, and portable media players from China? They were likely running WinCE.
* Email: Hotmail was there early on and they sat there while Google took over. I remember the 4MB account limit.
Compare him with other CEO's that inherited company's that were in far worse shape when becoming they became CEO's he seems fairly mediocre. Take Apple as an example, when Jobs came back in as CEO Apple the company was like 90 days from bankruptcy. Seems like Ballmer is coming in and collecting a paycheck basically. Expects excellence from his people when he doesn't seem to want to put in the work, that's what it seems like anyway. What MS products can you point to that are disruptive? Zero as far as I know.
From the inside (thus posting AC), it’s apparent that the last shakeup including Sinofsky’s hurried exit was all about Ballmer consolidating power and eliminating potential successors. This week’s changes, from an exec perspective, are aimed at the Board: solidifying the structure of Ballmer and his non-threatening herd to make them impervious to removal attempts should the service & hardware gambit’s revenue fail to beat the past decade of software revenue. Honestly, tho, the exec chair-shuffling usually has little impact on real work anyway.
From the perspective of anyone level 66 or below, the changes are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic -- and a real inexorable decline has been underway for years. Now... Tying MSR to product groups? Consolidating Studios/Xbox with Office/RibbonUX slop? Enforcing massive cross-enterprise bureacracy for any major initiative? Just as when Dan Hesse took over ATTWS and eviscerated R&D's 2-5yr projects in favor of any project that would sell in 1-2 quarters and adopted one of these silly One-Company pogroms, the new One-Microsoft is well on its way to running out of new things to sell. Aside from a dwindling handful of great exceptions (kinect applications, a phone or two?) when was the last time anything revolutionary happened in a division that makes money (Office, and uh Office)? The age of innovation is long over, and the age of sales and marketing is now giving way to the age of the bean counters and turnip-squeezers. All the execs really want right now is to keep collecting GDP-sized paychecks until retirement.
I don't know about CEO but the only way he could be a good front man would be in a KISS cover band.
Microsoft has great technology (as a developer, I think dotNet is the best), but their behaviour has been odius, e.g. always trying to hold back the web and scare users from the cloud in a failed attempt to safe-guard their client side bastion. And stuff like the Xbox One fiasco just re-inforces that.
And I rather doubt that Balmer is responsible for how good dotNet is.
Microsoft had a near monopoly. Like IBM for many years with lousy management---the recurring revenues coming in from backward compatibility let mediocrity evade responsibility.
One thing is true, Ballmer did not ram through a value-destroying merger over the objections of Gates, for instance the way Fiorina did with HP.
But the destruction of valued corporate culture is the same.
I've been enjoying M$ slow decline for years, please keep Balmer!
MS has been on the way down for a long, long time.
If you think Balmer's job is to take it to new heights, I personally think you're stupid. He's not the man for that kind of job, and everyone knows it.
His job is to keep the ship afloat as long as possible, to make the inevitable decline as slow and smooth as possible. And yes, he has been doing quite well on that task. Time and time again we on /., nerds in general and sometimes even the tech press have predicted MS imminent demise, but Balmer has managed to prevent any serious crash & burn.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I've been saying the same thing for years. Microsoft is hugely profitable, that is what the CEO is supposed to do, keep the company making money. Ballmer, despite his flaws as a leader, as a person, is doing a great job as CEO.
The mature verdict on Steve Ballmer is that he has made only one major strategic error: not combining his own brilliance for sales and detail with a visionary product leader who has the authority to create bold new revenue streams for the company.
It was my impression Ballmer's contribution was the bulk licensing trap that leveraged their monopoly. If that is the case, and with rules preventing manipulating the market using your monopoly, Ballmer's only strategy has been eliminated.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Is the author looking to drive traffic to their video? I followed the link but only 31K people have viewed it (as of 4:20pm, PST, July 12, 2013). That can't be right - did the author put that in their just to drive traffic to their version of the video?
He's the guy in charge; the problems at Microsoft are well known and documented, hell I'm pretty sure there's even BOOKS on the topic.
I don't know what the hell is going on at Microsoft but I sure hope it's all sorted before Windows 7 gets EOLed.
2021 - year of the linux desktop?
..don't panic
But if he a great salesman but has not made any great products, but still continues to make great sales, what does it make him? A con man? The Great Snake Oil salesman?
They also say nice things about Bill Gates as a person. Apparently his assistants contested the property tax assessment from the city and Bill ordered it be withdrawn and paid the assessed tax quietly without fuss. Also both Bill and Melinda were very nice and polite to the parents of playmates and friends of their children.
Sorry no citations.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The only reason they've got any customers left is because of their monopolies. Their only customers are companies that don't know how to migrate away.
- Their latest OS: Just a remake of the same-old, many people don't see the need to move from what they have (XP/7). They only sold a bunch of licenses because you can't buy 7/XP but you can use the license to downgrade.
- Their latest Office: It moved to the *cloud* and thus everybody just stays on what they have currently. If they want to make the expense to move to an online platform, they might as well not spend money on it and use Google.
- Their latest Exchange: Just a remake, nothing innovative or new. The only reason people stick to Exchange is because there is no way out. There are organizations that have attempted moving their stuff but Exchange simply doesn't cooperate. So maybe they move to Outlook.com but that's also running Exchange, so nothing changes.
- Their cloud offering: Too expensive to compete in the home market
- Their server/virtualization offering: Too expensive, too resource intensive and too much lock-in to compete with free and open source solutions. Consumers don't care about what's running their servers so many companies that have at least a number of smart people have converted the Microsoft server stack to something else, startups historically (the Googles, Twitters, Facebooks, SalesForces), can't afford Windows Server and Database (which runs upwards of $20k or the cost of 4 well equipped servers) when they startup and when they eventually turn profitable they've built their world around MySQL, Hadoop, OpenStack and improved upon it.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Are you talking 80%+ marketshare in America?
Do some research..... it's now down to 20% and falling fast world wide,
Where MS excels is the corporate IT stack - a nice fat margin business.
Everything mentioned by the parent is consumer products - products purchased on the whims of the public base upon fads and style.
But let's talk about stock price. Wall Street is a market prone to their own fads and lemming thinking.
Microsoft's stock languished because Apple and Google are exiting and MS isn't.
But look at the numbers - nice!. ROE +20% Operating margin of 35%.
It's a safe stock and a respectable addition to a portfolio - even when the Fed stops QE, I don't expect MSFT to take it on the chin like AAPL and GOOG will.
Put a question mark at the end and you've got yourself a class Betteridge headline.
Not just that, but the company has been largely coasting since Bill left. The reorganization is well over due.
Ultimately, they had a winner with 7, and chucked all the gains that they made with 8. Considering how important Windows still is to their bottom line, they should have been more mindful to evolve the product rather than chucking everything out.
They've also been doing abysmally at entering new markets since sometime in the mid '90s, and probably before that. Which hasn't improved under his watch. The XBox was the last successful entrance that they've made into a new arena. The Zune, windows phones and their other attempts haven't gone very well.
The share price itself is largely a reflection of the fact that they're still hugely profitable, albeit heavily dependent upon one or two product lines which are likely to be in trouble in the future if they can't enter new areas.
"Contrast that with social networking companies such as Twitter and Facebook—and of course Google, with its rapey contextual advertising—all of which throw their users “free” toys but violate them with privacy-invading ad sales and user-data scandals. Microsoft can seem positively virtuous by comparison."
Strange how not even half way through the article, the microsoft fanboy is bashing google..
is the perfect person to be hated even undeservedly.
Oh, but the laughter!
He's just the head of the company, he shouldn't be held accountable for everything that Microsoft does. That is why we shouldn't have prosecuted Joseph Hazelwood for his actions as Captain of the Exxon Valdez. After all, he was only the head of the ship, there were plenty of other people on board.
... "Deserve"'s Got Nothing To Do With It
A CEO has a single responsibility: Provide profits for the shareholders of Microsoft.
If you bought a share of Apple and a share of Microsoft on the day Ballmer took over, your share of Apple would have gained more value today.
We can speculate what he would've / could've / should've done differently.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter, because that's the next CEO's problem.
Microsoft needs to let Ballmer go and find a CEO who can actually do the job.
What Ballmer deserves is irrelevant, but Microsoft shareholders clearly deserve a better CEO running the company.
Windows 8.
There are many more reasons, but Windows 8 is reason enough.
If he didn't try it, but relied on underlings telling him that it was good, then shame on him.
If he tried it, realized how bad it was, but let it go out anyway because usability was less important than some other agenda--forcing developers into writing apps that would work on Windows Phone 8, maybe--then shame on him.
If he tried it and he thought it was good, then shame on him.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Every video of him I've seen make me think that he is a heavy user of cocaine. If so, he might be a nice guy when not on cocaine.
Mind the frickin' laser...
They might not have been first to the punch but: .Net, Azure, significant UI redesign (for good or bad) of windows and Office, XBox. Yep they've been pretty stagnant.
I don't know if I like him or not I think Bill would be more of a fun guy to have a nerdy chat with. But I think this is the common scenario where the CEO that is in charge when a company goes from rapid growth to Blue Chip slow and steady gets blamed for "breaking" the company. Think of MS like a corner store. In this case you can by the corner store for 67B and it pays 17B a year in profits. 25% return on your money per annum with no growth is still a deal I'll take.
Your also forgetting this is the man who coined the term "linux is a virus", and with it, inadvertantly the phrase "going viral", back in the 1990s. Before he was CEO, he was VP, durring Gate's day, and he was head of MS FUD, threats, loosing his temper.
Microsoft products are nasty crap which is awful to use, and this has
been true for decades.
Rather than spend precious energy "hating" Ballmer or Microsoft,
most of the intelligent people I associate with choose to ignore the
existence of Microsoft and the trash it produces.
In the end, hate should be reserved for that which we may have loved at
one time, and surely anyone with a brain has never felt any love for Microsoft
or its products.
*
Windows 7 is a failure too. Why?
It came out how many years late after XP?? Windows 7 should have come out in 2004 at the latest. Longhorn was bad. Vista was bad. Then Windows 7 but now the cost accountants at work noticed how much money they saved by using IE 6 and Xp for 10 years and how the competition didn't cream them for using older technology.
Now there is a resistance to change and a view that is a worthless cost center that adds no value. Gee thanks Balmer.
You do not see these same users and software that requires Mac OSX 10.0 do you? That is because of the updates Apple kept making without costing as money in collasol failures.
http://saveie6.com/
I would go further, 7 wasn't a winner, it wasn't as big a loser.
Ballmer is overseeing a drugs operation in a city of billions where there is no law, everyone is a millionaire and all the other drug barons have long since gone from shooting themselves in the foot to traveling back in time and shooting their ancestors in the head.
MS didn't rise to dominance because of the brilliance of its leaders but because the competition made some of the biggest and most classic mistakes in business history. They have been discussed before but IBM just handing the PC business to a tiny upstart has to be rank in the top 3 biggest mistakes ever.
Windows and Office are gigantic sellers and unlike Intels Itanium, when MS goofs with a release, they don't have to factor in gigantic hard production costs of shifting a production facility back to old products, they just print different keys to ship to business. The actual physical Windows 8 boxes are a tiny fraction of their business. Large customers just get a load of keys and download the version they want. And when Intel is sued to keep making chips, MS can fume all it wants about still having to sell XP during Vista, the costs of doing so are trivial compared to keeping an unprofitable chip line open.
I am not saying the lack of sales on Vista and 8 don't hurt but they don't hurt as much as having to retire a physical production line and getting rid of unsold stock.
You might claim their are losing money in mobile and that is true enough but it is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. It is just not going to have an effect any time soon.
Basically right now MS is operating like a government that is ruling willing slaves. It collects what is essentially a tax on every PC and the public goes out of its way to re-inforce its shackles every day. Note that the Xbox One pre-orders didn't really hurt at all over the entire fuzz about always on online and always on kineckt. People were fuming on it on the internet while standing in line to get their pre-order in.
You can therefor judge Ballmer NOT by asking how good he has to be to keep the business running as normal (cash cow Windows/Offfice loosing money everywhere else) but just how bad he can be before the Windows/Office cash cow would take a massive hit.
And let us not forget the company rose to power on Dos, Windows 1-2-3 95 etc etc. It was normal for early Windows machines to crash several times a day, not to support common hardware, refuse to run older software and be downright insecure by design. And sales GREW!
That makes me think that MS could release a Windows 9 that killed you cat, impregnated your daughter and fucked you up the ass with a ten foot spiked dildo and people would either buy it because it is the latest version or totally burn MS by forcing MS to take their money for old software. I wish women would use that logic for dating "Date you? A nerd? No way, ever! Burn nerd, I am just going to have sex with you in ways you can never imagine AND pay you for it whenever you want but I am never going to go on a date because you are a nerd and I want to hurt your feelings". Well... I think I could live with that.
People made much about people demanding to buy downgrades from MS. I am sure Ballmer cried bitter tears of defeat and only had billions of dollars to console himself with.
No, the question isn't how good Ballmer has to be to keep MS running, it is just how fucking bad he would have to be to actually HURT MS in any serious way. I think he would have to start physically assaulting each and every customer.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Windows 8
Nuff said - stick a fork in it.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Trust the person responsible for heading up the group of people that were convicted of Fraud, and Theft. Sure, what could possibly be wrong with that?
Kinda drifting of topic, but "Nerval's Lobster" is/related to Slashdot BizInt guys, so anytime you see that handle, and it's increasing, it's another effect of the Dice takeover.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I've been around a long time. I watched IBM begin to slide. I watched Data General begin to slide. No tech company can live its glory days forever, and Microsoft is no exception. What makes a difference in how people feel about it has mostly to do with how a company treated others while it was in the catbird seat.
In Microsoft's case, they often wanted to destroy other companies, even when they didn't need to. They exhibited what I can only describe as paranoid and sociopathic behavior toward some software companies. I recall in 1997, they told several different vendors of TCP/IP stacks for Windows that Windows 98 was going to check to see if a user had installed third-party network software, and if they had, Windows was going to treat it as a virus and remove it. Many programmers had to find something else to do. Six months later, the DoJ finally took action.
I never thought of Ballmer as a nice guy.
Microsoft hasn't had a home run since he took over. They are no longer respected or innovators. They are corporate cronies with a sole mission of revenue maximization not giving a rats rump if you want or need the product.
is a good mother...
As written, an assertion:
'The mature verdict on Steve Ballmer is that he has made only one major strategic error: not combining his own brilliance for sales and detail with a visionary product leader who has the authority to create bold new revenue streams for the company.'
This misses entirely Steve Ballmer's employment at Microsoft and his life!
The evidence to the contrary is Steve Ballmer himself.
RIP
Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! the remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRm0NDo1CiY
All he's managed to do is nothing. He's kept the company pointed in the same direction doing the same thing for far too long. Eventually it will fall down around him.
The problem is that all the VPs are in a good damn penis fight over who will be the next Balmer instead of doing their god damn jobs.
Being CEO of the dominant provider of technology performance is measured along many lines.
The rod to measure his success by isn't any of these things though.
An exceptional position implies exceptional expectations of an exceptional person. For over a decade he has had billions of dollars a month to do what he will. What could an exceptional person have achieved with those resources? Did he beat or even equal that? Did he come anywhere close?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The problem is, what could they have pushed in 7 that would have made it a success in the office market? Even in 2004 it would have sunk.
XP is, has and offers everything the office environment wants. Does printers out of the box, does networking out of the box, does WiFi out of the box, does USB out of the box... What does 7 offer more than XP? Aside of graphic gimmicks the average CFO brushes aside before you're done saying "graphics gimmicks"?
The main changes with 7 are not where the average user would see them. ...
Sales drone: Umm... there are improvements in security and a few things are done easier now.
CFO: Ok, for both things I have an IT department, they should do some work for their dough. Next?
Sales drone: Umm... well, graphics gimmi
CFO: GTFO!
Another thing that broke 7s neck was the browser. Yes, IE. There are various sites, various very expensively done sites, mostly internal sites, that rely on "features" (read: bugs) of older IE versions which invariably breaks them with newer IE versions. Want to use IE6 with Win7? Weeeeeelllllll... technically it is possible. But MS made it about as hard as it can possibly get to work out a way. Now, why should the average company that has such an expensive and hardly portable cludge running move to an OS that not only costs them money, but also costs them manweeks if not -months to bring it up to compatibility again?
And I say it again, without ANY reasonable benefit to them.
tl;dr version: XP was too good. It's all any normal office will need until some new and must-have hardware comes along.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Duuuuuude, can you imagine him on weed? He's gotta be aaaawesome!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is that the old IE6 browser harms the rest of the web at the same time too, and IE is a global system component.
As long as there are MBAs and military brass, there will be Office. They have no other way of expressing their alleged thoughts.
Bill built Microsoft's sluggishness, it is his fault. Ballmer is just an uninspired fall guy.
Years ago MS made some seriously compelling software. I happily jumped onto DOS, Window 3.0 3.1 3.11, Then the amazing 98, 98se. Around the 98 time I made the leap from Borland C++ to Visual C++ 1.0 which was amazing. Then ME came out which was a monstrosity. NT was awesome which any developer worth anything was on instead of the many initial versions of XP. Eventually XP stabilized and many applications stopped working on NT so I reluctantly made that switch.
.net products let me get away from Java. But then the products just died. IIS started getting really complicated, .net became a windows product marketing machine. Windows server got really expensive. SQL got even more expensive. All this at the same time that Linux got really good, Apache got really good, mysql got really good.
On the server side NT was amazing, IIS was pretty good as compared to the netscape web server. The early
So basically since around 2001 MS has not made a product that I have found terribly compelling. Visual Studio is fairly impressive but since it primarily develops windows applications it is useless to me.
Even on the office front I could probably use a copy of Office 97 or 2000 perfectly well. So the key problem to me for MS is what have they done for me in a decade to make my life as a developer (thus deploy-er of their technology) better? White papers from their marketing department don't count.
"a large part of my net worth invested in Apple shares"
A high risk position there my friend.
Suggest you hedge.
Actually, it's easier to justify ill feelings toward Ballmer if you just look at past press releases and interviews with the man, Google on your own, too much material to list here. The man is quite clearly a megalomaniacal jerk who cares more about money than users.
The problem isn't that they stopped with the breakneck growth. The problem is that they haven't been doing any expanding lately. They're mainly making money off Windows and Office even as the competition makes better and better products. Sure, they've managed to successfully launch the XBox series of consoles, but that's a cutthroat industry and one or two ill received units can lead to you not having any more customers in that arena.
MS is also doing a shitty job of protecting it's OS from other interests. They change the UI and system so frequently that it requires substantial retraining for workers to know how to use the new version, and not any more training than it would take to switch to a different OS. Governments are starting to require interoperability out of contractors so that they aren't vendor locked into a single provider.
But, what's worse is that MS has a fair amount of cool stuff in development that rarely if ever gets into their products. When Bill was running things they would at least aspire to something grander. Often times it didn't work out, WebTV, Bob, Active Desktop, but at least there was passion there and an aspiration to make something amazing, even if it frequently exceeded their grasp.
https://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/why-all-the-hate-for-steve-ballmer/
Probably one of the most blatant pieces of propagan we've seen outside fascist and stalinist societies.
Did this guy speach write for pionichet before he got this gig writing for balmer?
Its full of appeals to emotion and other logical fallacies
The first two paragraphs are nothing more than fluff.
Then we have some gems:
"Since October 5, 2011, the technology industry has been left with only one legendary chief executive called Steve. Ballmer,"
I feel bad for whoever is paid to write this.
"Why was such a brutal hatchet job written in Americaâ€(TM)s most illustrious magazine, normally so unctuous in its praise of the rich and powerful?"
Oh, I get it, he's rich and powerful. He must be a good guy. George Bush, Kaddafi, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, where all rich and powerful, great bunch? But I guess this is America, and not siding with the winner is some form of defeatism.
"We should begin in Silicon Valley, which resents Microsoftâ€(TM)s chief executive at least in part because he has helped grow what the Internet industry has so rarely managed in all its decades of boom and bust: a stable, profitable company"
What?
Nothing to do how MS whrecked dozen and a half companies, intimidated hobbyists. Made untrue and misleading statements to scare people away from his smaller competitors(poison the well attack), or made shitty products, with lots of bugs he refused to fix because he had more fun intimidating the compitetion than fixing their own problems.
It also has nothing to do with his lobying of congress to get open source activists put on terrorist watch lists either.
"But itâ€(TM)s not just the hipsters of SoMa, of course."
The irony of this is Balmmer's biggest critics are the geeks themselves, no one else gives a fuck. We are the people who were sick of not having an alternative to microsoft, or being verbally attacked, slandered, etc... The irony is that the author of this article is most likely a hipster, an underemployed retard with a BA in English. The people who he accusses are techies, who do actual productive work.
"itâ€(TM)s tough to believe that Microsoft used to be the cool place to work"
There was a nice documentary on this, that it was always a terrible place to work, and they've abused employees, and ran a cult like, to keep pay down, along with dissent, run the employees until they quit, and get more. Usually fresh out of college so they didn't know better.
"Now itâ€(TM)s Microsoft that represents the evils of establishment largesse, complexity and corruption"
Believe it or not, less so than previously. You know when slashdot had the borg icon for microsoft. Back when BSoDs were daily, port 139 winnuke left everyone vulrneable, and there were no free updates, or live updates. Service Pack1 for windows 95 cost $150. All so you didn't get winnuked.
Back in the 1990s, hatred for microsoft was universal. PR people for microsoft used to be known as "Brown shirts", after the nazi SA, for their distruptive tactics at conventions and tradeshows. You could spot them as the only people who had nice things to say about linux. It lessened after the Xbox was released.
"Itâ€(TM)s true enough that for all its uncoolness with West Coast elites"
Yes, the vast, varried critism of microsoft could be summed up as a handful of complainers, with a political agenda. Laughable. Considering its more likely that its written by some douchebag with a BA, snobby "elite" is more likely true of the author than MS's critics.
"Microsoftâ€(TM)s re-engagement with developers and the start-up world has, to an extent, been a success."
Traditionally, microsoft's "engagement" is of the same type, when an Army says "engangement with the enemy". usually results in the destruction, absortion, or surrender of the
...if Ballmer wants to increase efficiency, creativity and development at Micro$oft, all he really needs to do is build a basketball stadium on their Redmond campus, or maybe even include a giant Ferris wheel there!
Paraphrased but mostly directly quoted Steve Balmer:
"Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards. I'm going to fucking kill Google. I know, let's embed Bing into Windows 8.1, track everything, make everything touch, turn the Xbox into a disaster that nobody could ever possibly buy, and see if people are stupid enough to rent Office 2013 on a subscription for 5x more TCO. Then we're fucked I can go down with the ship like a famous captain and be all famous and noble and stuff."
Yeeeeah, he deserves much more hate than he's getting. He's a raving lunatic that's out of touch with reality.
I'd say office will live and prosper till there's no viable alternative to Excel. There are departments that practically live on it and Google doesn't even try to compete.
He was put in charge of a company that's a convicted monopoly.
The company is the king of nasty contracts...the only reason that the company actually succeeded is that they were criminals.
Now, I'm vaguely mystified why the hell the company is still surviving. The only product that's actually impressed anyone was Visual Studio. Everything else was rubbish.
It's 2013, and I /still/ can't change the width of the console? I can't take advantage of 4K screens? I can't use Capitals to name files? Courier died, zune was stupid, Windows phone is an abomination (with the almost exception of WP8), the complete failure of Surface RT, the crazy pricing of Surface, the subscription pricing of Office, the beyond-greedy xbox moves, the e3nd of the line for Direct X, the nothing-but-advertising of XBox.
What can they /not/ screw up?
I take it back...I'm completely confused why the stock hasn't tanked yet.
I don't know if I like him or not I think Bill would be more of a fun guy to have a nerdy chat with. But I think this is the common scenario where the CEO that is in charge when a company goes from rapid growth to Blue Chip slow and steady gets blamed for "breaking" the company.
Yes, Bill is a fun person to have a nerdy conversation with, particularly if you can get him talking about Microsoft BASIC, and the Easter Eggs they put in it to keep people from ripping it off.
People (shareholders) blame Balmer because he fails to increase shareholder value. Shareholders elect the board, and the board hired Balmer.
But Microsoft isn't in "slow and steady growth" mode; they've pretty much had a flat stock price since the .bomb in 2001. In the same period, IBM (which is another Blue Chip) went from just under 100 following the .bomb and are now trading at 192, as of today. That's nearly double. Apple did even better (also NOT a Blue Chip) going from ~$12 post-split price to $427 -- although Tim Cook was unable to sustain a $705 high at the end of September of last year, so perhaps his board should be looking at his leadership as well.
One of the hardest things to do for any company is to have a successful transition for Bill Gates type persona and intellect. Even Bill Gates did not do it all alone. I can remember reading an article in which Bill Gates said his greatest achievement was hiring smart people. Steve Ballmer is one of them. Ballmer needs to find a counterpart. He needs to find people who can complement him. instead of letting them retire or go to other companies or other opportunities - he needs to pay them very well and he needs to reward them so that they stay at Microsoft and continue to produce. But Ballmar also needs to create a corporate environment in which future leaders of are groomed, but not groomed to the point that they are âoeyes" men. It was easy for Bill Gates to step down and to promote Ballmer is his successor. and, it was easy for Ballmer to take the vice president of the applications division and put him over the operating system division. Windows 8 for all its shortcomings is nothing like Vista. The leadership pipe at MS of needs to be filled up. At one time, Microsoft was the game in town, and they could basically do what they wanted. Creative, brilliant people need to be promoted, and if they have any shortcomings, they need to be paired up with other people, so they are successful. And, what about vision? One of the things that kept Steve Jobs going was that he had vision for the future.
The XBox was the last successful entrance that they've made into a new arena.
Successful by what measure? Exposure for Microsoft, yes, and that's surely very valuable to the company. Successful as in it became popular, yes. But it is not a profitable product. In 2003, MS gaming division lost US$348 million per quarter. That's some price to pay for what amounts to nothing but MS marketing spend. What was gained? For a product to be "successful", it should float on its own, not perpetually buoyed up by tax-deductible division losses.
And now this:
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/158279-microsoft-is-losing-it-over-the-xbox-one-if-you-dont-have-the-internet-stick-with-the-xbox-360
All that money down the drain, and STILL they are alienating users from a new product. Same is happening with Windows 8. Someone somewhere is a bad product manager.
He's a jackass even for a CEO.
In the tech business, that seems to be uncorrelated with being a good or bad CEO.
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Microsoft is a blue chip stock that pays dividends, so it can't be judged by stock price alone. Their most recent declared quarterly dividend is 23 cents per share and Microsoft stock currently sells for about $35 per share. That is a dividend rate of 2.6% annually; not a huge return but competitive in the current marketplace. For example, compare it to ExxonMobil's dividend return; their most recent dividend is 63 cents per share and the share price is $93, giving a yield of 2.7% annually. Or to look at a competitor in the computer business we can look at Apple (which I believe also has to be viewed as a dividend paying blue chip stock now); their most recent dividend is $3.05 and the stock sells for $426 for a yield of 2.85%. And Apple stock has fallen substantially in the recent past; if you bought Apple at its $700 peak last ffall you would be even less happy with your return. Microsoft stock is near its peak for the past 12 months.
Side note: although the selling price of Apple stock is much higher than Microsoft stock, their total market capitalization (that is, the total value of all their stock) is much closer as there are more Microsoft shares in existence. Apple's current market capitalization is $400.96 billion; Microsoft's is $297.88 billion.
The problem is, what could they have pushed in 7 that would have made it a success in the office market? Even in 2004 it would have sunk.
XP is, has and offers everything the office environment wants. Does printers out of the box, does networking out of the box, does WiFi out of the box, does USB out of the box... What does 7 offer more than XP? Aside of graphic gimmicks the average CFO brushes aside before you're done saying "graphics gimmicks"?
More than 3.5 gigs of memory. All our hardware for years has at at least 4, but we can only use 3.5. Some of our apps can really use that extra memory and even our standard office workers could make use of it as their normal workflow often require being logged into multiple systems and documents at the same time.
"Out of the Box?" Huh? you mean the printer is shipped with a CD that holds the drivers for windows. Oh, the CD is in the box? what if i get it second hand and the cd is broken or lost? Then the box gets a little troublesome.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.