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.

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]

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.

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?

[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.

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.

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.