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?"

Comments

He deserves it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:He deserves it

[Opportunist]

Well, he's gotta compensate somehow...

The company you keep

[intermodal]

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.

Re:The company you keep

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Look at his right-hand man, Kevin Turner. Human waste on legs.

Look who he ran off, before anointing Turner: Kevin Johnston. Actually decent.

Balmer also flushed good guys like Allchin and Maritz, or drove them away. While toadies live Valentine were perked.

The best of the remaining lot hangs out a tier away from the stink. God bless Bill Laing. Actual good human being, and a pleasure to work with.

Re:The company you keep

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at his right-hand man, Kevin Turner. Human waste on legs.

Look who he ran off, before anointing Turner: Kevin Johnston. Actually decent.

Balmer also flushed good guys like Allchin and Maritz, or drove them away. While toadies live Valentine were perked.

The best of the remaining lot hangs out a tier away from the stink. God bless Bill Laing. Actual good human being, and a pleasure to work with.

For those of us who DON'T passionately follow the minutia of Microsoft's internal management and political issues and who generally tend to glaze over news about their VPs/middle managers as if they WEREN'T the most fascinating people with the most compelling stories to tell, what you did there was throw up a bunch of generic names that very, very few people could possibly recognize or care about. Would you please provide more detail as to who these people are, what they did, and why we should care, all while keeping in mind that the fact that we don't currently care about any of them means we're not at all compelled to waste our time justifying your personal corporate obsessions by Googling their names?

Re:The company you keep

[Threni]

> I tend to judge leaders by those they choose to surround themselves with

Hmm. If the company tanks, no-one's going to remember those other people. Or the company, ultimately. In business, it's just profit that counts - keeping the company going, making products people want (or need). Currently, Microsoft don't seem to be doing very well, hence the falling PC sales, price cuts on Microsoft's overpriced tablets with poor battery life etc, shocking Windows 8 sales to which Microsoft reluctantly conceded needed a change so that people could actually use them the way they were used to etc. More time is needed to see if Microsoft can recover from these decisions or if the decline he's ruled over will continue until Microsoft exit the stage.

Re:The company you keep

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

If you don't own a fair amount of MSFT stock or make million-dollar IT contract purchases? Why should you then care?

If you do, then these names are at least passing familiarity.

The whole article is a parlour game, even if you do own or buy significantly. Yes, Ballmer is shite. No, he's not going anywhere... Ever.

Re:The company you keep

[Anonymous Coward]

> If you don't own a fair amount of MSFT stock or make million-dollar IT contract purchases? Why should you then care?

This is the upper leadership of Microsoft, whose products have an impact on your day to day life whether you use the products yourself or not.

captcha: restrict

Re:The company you keep

[hedwards]

The CEO sets the priorities and the big picture stuff for the corporations and leaves it up to the other executives to actually make it happen.

When you have a company like MS that doesn't seem to have a particular vision, that reflects poorly on the CEO as it means that something is getting screwed up. Either he doesn't have one, isn't effectively communicating it or the marketing department isn't adequately communicating it to the world.

But, considering that MS has largely failed to do much more than maintain the status quo, it's pretty clear that the people he's keeping company with aren't getting things done. MS has a ton of great R&D going on, but very little ever seems to make it into a product. And when it does they tend to screw it up by making it brown or otherwise unpalatable.

As much as I hated the Apple of the latter half of the noughties, the fact is that Steve understood that and spent a lot more time and energy on making sure that people knew what Apple was about and that the products they released expanded upon that, rather than entering into random arenas with little commitment or focus.

Re:The company you keep

[Anonymous Coward]

PENIS

Re:The company you keep

[s.petry]

And what do you think of:

An exec who trows chairs across a room and yells "I'm going to F^#*ing kill Google" when an employee puts in his notice?

A good follow up is:

What do you think of a summary that insinuates that is a "good" management tactic/effort?

I respect your point, but can't agree that the only thing to judge a managers merit on is delegation. Delegation should be a majority of what a manager does, but crisis management and people skills are two other areas I tend to judge. Balmer has failed in both of those areas, as well as what people claim to be his strength (sales).

Re:The company you keep

[gtall]

GE has no single vision either, yet they do okay. MS's problem is that it defines itself by destroying competition, not competing with them. Hence its products are limp. MS doesn't care, they figure to screw their competition out of the marketplace and then their limp noodles will necessarily be bought. This strategy also makes it possible to attack a lot of markets simultaneously, because they never have to concentrate on a few and make good products for them.

And it isn't Ballmer's fault, it is Bill's fault. He designed the blind octopus that is MS. Were it not for their received monopoly and their cutthroat tactics before other companies cottoned on to their tactics, they'd have been toast long ago. In a way, they forced the only competition they couldn't beat to arise just out of evolution, i.e., FOSS.

Hard to argue with regular quarterly profits

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hard to argue with regular quarterly profits

[ArcadeMan]

Slashdot, where Microsoft is Satan, Google is Evil, Apple is the Devil and open-source projects are pointless because thousands of programmers pulling in different directions.

Re:Hard to argue with regular quarterly profits

[K. S. Kyosuke]

and open-source projects are pointless because thousands of programmers pulling in different directions.

Just like the universe is pointless because thousands of galaxy clusters pull in different directions...hey, wait a minute...

Steve is that you?

[waddgodd]

I think we found out Steve Ballmer's /. account name

What?

[Antipater]

. '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"?

Re:What?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I see Ballmer as the captain of a large, very slowly sinking, rudderless ship.
Someone needs to patch up the holes, find a pump, and build a rudder. I just don't see Ballmer doing any of those things.

Re:What?

[webdog314]

And given that Microsoft has an 80%+ marketshare, a "largely stagnant stock price" could have been pretty much achieved by doing absolutely nothing, which, when you look at the company over the last decade, isn't far from the truth.

So it begs the question: what in the world are they paying him for?

Re:What?

[FuegoFuerte]

What do you mean rudderless? Of course it has a rudder... it's just hard over to one side, and the control cable is broken.

Re:What?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

That is not a rudder. It used to be a chair. :)

Re:What?

[thegarbz]

And given that Microsoft has an 80%+ marketshare, a "largely stagnant stock price" could have been pretty much achieved by doing absolutely nothing, which, when you look at the company over the last decade, isn't far from the truth.

This! Too big to fail doesn't only apply to corporate bail-outs. It also means that massive companies can ride through one period after the other of colossally stupid mistakes. If you split Microsoft up into various division then take a look at where the money is coming from, the company is surviving on it's monopoly and cash cows Windows and Office, and neither of those can be attributed to Steve Ballmer.

We can attribute to him everything else at Microsoft. Unfortunately all those things seem to be making a loss. Search, mobile, entertainment, all of these things are what Ballmer has been pushing for in the past few years while letting the Windows and Office divisions rot and all of them can at this point be considered a failure.

Now the real question is, given Ballmer's fetish for trying to one-up Apple and screwing Windows in the process will the company continue to survive on it's old cash cow, or will he let that slip through his hands? Honestly I don't know what the board of directors is thinking supporting the drunk at the wheel.

Re:What?

[jbolden]

Building an enterprise products division: SQL Server becoming very high end, Dynamics, Lync, SharePoint becoming a central component in many enterprise applications. That's Balmer's contribution and it is worth tens of billions per year.

Re:What?

[Billly Gates]

Building an enterprise products division: SQL Server becoming very high end, Dynamics, Lync, SharePoint becoming a central component in many enterprise applications. That's Balmer's contribution and it is worth tens of billions per year.

What about IE, Windows 8, Bing, Zune, Windows Mobile.

The fact of the matter is MS once owned 85% of the mobile market too with Windows CE. MS owned 90% of the market with IE. Windows was liked more and XP loyalists are still hear loving that OS and refusing to upgrade as it was perfection. Those my friend happened under Gates and were handed too Balmer.

First Blackberry and now Google and Apple are all eating MS PDA and smartphone market. Mozilla and now Google took IEs dominance away. Bing never materialized and Apple too got rid of WindowsCE as MS planned to own 90% of the embeded and mobile market by now and iOS, Linux, and Android have taken that away.

Those are all under Balmers watch. He deserves to go.

Even if MS did make improvements for Windows 7 and Sharepoint it doesn't matter as there is no compelling reason to upgrade. Ms is competing with the ghost of itself as Windows 2003, IE 8, Exchange 2003, are here to stay for a very long time. That hurts and costs money.

Windows 7 is great but took almost years to get there from XP as we know longhorn failed (vista is not Longhorn), same with IE 10 being too little as IE 6 was the last thing close to cutting edge and none of the users count as they were catch-up to Firefox.

He failed. Apple and Google are the new kings now.

On his watch

[istartedi]

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.

Stack ranking?

[berchca]

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.”)

Bad CEO? No.

[Bob9113]

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.

Biased, much?

[whoever57]

I expect some MS fanboi will mod me down for this, but:

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, built on a solid grasp of numbers and proven sales techniques, with wildly successful products that people actually pay for. Contrast that with social networking companies such as Twitter and Facebookâ"and of course Google, with its rapey contextual advertisingâ"all of which throw their users âoefreeâ toys but violate them with privacy-invading ad sales and user-data scandals. Microsoft can seem positively virtuous by comparison.

This is pure Microsoft talking points.

Given the most recent revelations about Microsoft, the author should be reconsidering that claim to Microsoft's virtue.

Monty Phython

[Starteck81]

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.

Dance while you can monkey boy

[0xdeadbeef]

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.

Re:Dance while you can monkey boy

[whoever57]

I never understood why he was ridiculed for "developers developers" anyway. I don't remember the rest of the speech

And you answered your own question -- you don't remember the rest of the speech.

The message may have been a good one, but the way it was presented invited ridicule and was so memorable that the only thing people remember is the way the message was presented and not the message itself.

One can infer from this that Ballmer either does not invite criticism or does not listen to criticism. A properly prepared person would have tried his moneky boy dance in advance in front of a small group of insiders who would have told him what a terrible idea it was.

But then, perhaps rehersals are not part of Microsoft's culture. Remember the Surface RT presentation in which the device crashed?

I don't hate him.

[jcr]

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

Ballmer's performance

[soft_guy]

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.

Stock Price Comparison

[ScottCooperDotNet]

'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.

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.

Microsoft could have been more

[BLToday]

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.

Hewlett Packard had intense competition.

[mbkennel]

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'm saying if not is

[sgt scrub]

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.

Re:About your Thesis...

[hedwards]

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.

I would go further, 7 wasn't a winner, it wasn't a

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Re:all the marketing-speak

[TaoPhoenix]

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.

Re:About your Thesis...

[Opportunist]

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.