Slashdot Mirror
Ballmer To Retire
Today Microsoft announced that CEO Steve Ballmer will be retiring within the next 12 months. He said, "There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time. ... My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction." Ballmer, 57, has been Microsoft's CEO since taking over the role from Bill Gates in January, 2000. The company's board of directors has formed a committee to find a replacement for Ballmer, and he will continue his duties until a new CEO is found. Questions about Ballmer's fitness to remain CEO have been circulating for the past several years, particularly after the company struggled to get a foothold in the mobile market. It will be interesting to see how this affects Microsoft's stock price. Upon retirement, Ballmer will be able to cash out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Microsoft stock.
He can't even retire properly, should have done so years ago.
Chairs just won't fly around the same without him
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...in response, Microsoft's stock jumps up 10%
I'm so happy I could throw a chair!
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
It will be interesting to see how this affects Microsoft's stock price
I would think it would have a positive affect on stock price...
They should hire Steve, he'd be about as useful at this point.
"There is never a perfect time for this type of transition ..." Yes there is. Too bad it was five years ago.
DaveyJJ
This may be the best thing that's happened to Microsoft in a long time. Perhaps they will get their clarity back again. I can't help but wonder if there's a deeper story here though, like his abysmal performance causing a backlash to force him out 'gracefully'.
... that he can use Ubuntu and google search, like all the other silver surfers.... WAIT. Well, maybe he isn't gray...
And nothing of value was lost.
Proverbs 21:19
haha its about time the m$ boys and gurls had some good news /. on this prompt story
congrats
Would the recent cutting of price in the Surface be tied to the decision at all?
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
"Microsoft says CEO Steve Ballmer will retire within 12 months. No successor named. Stock surges."
Captcha: finally
All the money that MS saves on broken chairs will go RIGHT TO YOU!
And how many Windows 8 meetings where they in?
Retirees, Retirees, Retirees!
Will he celebrate by dancing for us again? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc
I love how he can state something as truth at the beginning of a sentence and then make a fool of himself by the end of it.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The investors are so happy Ballmer is leaving that the stock is up 10%. Last time this happened was when Carly was fired from HP and the stock rose.
It is funny that the value of MSFT with Ballmer in it is $20 Billion less than MSFT without Ballmer in it!
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
Is to just hire Sinofsky back and give him carte blanche to fire anyone and everyone who supported Ballmer as a job perk. With the chance to fire the woman who forced Metro on him as a job perk, they could probably get him more reasonable on the compensation package.
Shareholders shareholders shareholders shareholders shareholders!
Retirement! Retirement! Retirement!
and
Golf Monkey Boy, Golf!
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHJoj9IqeKg
My prayers have been answered.
Retirement! Retirement! Retirement!
Owns 333.3m shares. Up $2.86 so far. Not too shabby a day at the office.
Maybe this will help Microsoft stock for the short term... I still think they are screwed long-term. The "Devices and Services" market is already saturated by Apple, Google, and Samsung. Microsoft is too late to the party. If they wanted to sell more devices and used for more cloud-based services they should have followed standards in IE and open sourced their underlying kernel long ago, just like Apple did with Unix, Mozilla did with their browser, and Google did with Linux and Webkit.
http://i.imgur.com/lwCye9E.jpg
Microsoft has been one of the most influential ( good or bad ) companies on tech and Ballmer has been one of the most influential people at Microsoft.
This news is one of the biggest pieces of tech news for the year.
I only hope he is replaced with someone as ineffective as he was. The last thing the world needs is an evil monopolist running Microsoft who actually knows what he is doing.
Although it is fluffy marketing speak, the statement that "There is never a perfect time for this type of transition..." is funny because leaving before 2006 and Windows Vista would have been the best time for him to make an exit. A lot of scrambling after Vista seemed like wasted energy from misguided efforts that seem to come from the top down. At that point onwards Microsoft seemed to be off balance and felt like they were scrambling and groping from that on wards.
The board should look out side the company for the top spot not because I believe they don't have any one internal who could do better than Ballmer but they really need to break with the past decisions and reboot.
I just hope that Ballmer has nothing to do with the picking of his successor.
Based on his overall personality, I strongly suspect that if Steve Ballmer hadn't just happened to be college buddies with BillG and Paul Allen, chances are pretty good he'd be selling used cars somewhere and enjoying the nearest football team. Instead, we're going to take him seriously for the rest of his natural life and possible beyond.
I am officially gone from
If they dig Steve Jobs up and put him in charge now, he'd do a better job than Ballmer ever did!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There was a perfect time for the transition:
Avoiding those disastrous products would have made Microsoft billions, and those decisions were made by you, Ballmer.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
naff said
Chairs all round ....
Lets give him 3 chairs
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Awwww shit, I'm getting a cake! FINALLY, my computer repair and sales store can make some damn money with the architect behind touch interfaces and Windows 8 gone. I ran out of used Windows 7 laptops a long time ago and since then, my entire laptop income segment is gone, sparing a few custom orders from Toshiba Direct with Win 7. Good riddance! I hope they replace him with someone who has a brain.
Big difference there. Wall St. hates it when a company fires its CEO.
I guess this was the best way the board found to get rid of the chair-throwing monkey without disturbing stock prices.
because Microsoft is basically like Mike the headless chicken. 2014 may be the year of Linux on the laptop.
That's the first non-lame chair joke I heard in a long time.
I mean, his successor is the one that will get one, whoever he is just for not being Ballmer.
I think this "retirement" (which probably wasn't as voluntary as Ballmer and MS are pretending) spells doom for Metro, at least on the desktop. Virtually no one outside of MS actually likes it. The only reason why they haven't backed down on Metro on the desktop before now is that it is Ballmer's baby and he doesn't want to admit he screwed up. The next CEO will likely not have any such attachment, and will probably be much more willing to ditch Metro in response to market demands – or at least allow it to be an option that can be turned off completely, for a Win7-style experience.
Microsoft's foray into portable devices has been an abject failure. The smartest thing to do would be to focus on the business licenses that actually bring in the big bucks. That means stability, familiarity, and backwards compatibility – not flashy touch BS meant to appeal to non-technical home users.
get in time for windows 8.2 or 9 to be right with start menu and build in modern mix.
The damage Mr. Ballmer has done to Microsoft in the past eight years is strategic and structural. His successor will have an enormous uphill battle to turn the company around.
This is bad news, having Ballmer in charge of MS is a good thing as he was slowly mismanaging the company into the ground. A successor could be more competent.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
How long until the Balmer movie is released?
Looks like the Captain of the Titanic is fleeing the sinking ship, after he turned the ship right into that iceberg.
Retirement, Retirement Retirement, Retirement.
Retirement, Retirement Retirement, Retirement.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAA. COMMOMMONNNNNN!! GEEEEET UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUPP!!
And don't forget.......you can rearrange the letters in Steve Balmer to spell "Beer vat smell" -OR- "Tremble slave"
I've found the last decade or ago to be a welcome relief. I remember when I had to use/support/program_for Windows machines all the time. Windows was just an inevitable fact of life that was imposed upon everyone, no matter how hard they advocated upgrading. But then since the urn of the century, upgrading actually became realistic and more and more laypeople did it. I literally go months in between ever seeing it anywhere. I'm not deluded: I know it's still out there and plenty of offices are still in its grip. But there are a lot fewer of them, somehow I've been lucky enough to not have to visit those offices.
I don't know if this is due to Ballmer's incompetence, his failure to keep the lock-in going, or if it's just a matter of the populace waking up, needing better tech, etc. But there's of course a fear, that the next guy will be a better monopolist than Ballmer, and create new situations where people are required to use MS products where they used to not have to, the way it was back in the 1990s. Mobos or hard disks will come with Windows licenses, etc. Who knows?
Ballmer leaving MS is a bad omen for the computer industry, and I just hope that believing in omens is as stupid as it seems to be.
MSFT up, but HNI is down slightly.
This will be the best thing to happen to Microsoft in many years. Ballmer alienated customers, the public, the press, their employees, the enterprise and those who made their career out of Microsoft's products. 8.1's start button instead of start menu was the nail in the coffin for many, many people from a sheer contempt standpoint. Getting rid of technet and a hundred other things that showed their customers were viewed with contempt as the the enemy can all be cited as examples of why he had to go.
Nobody trusts him to do a good job of wiping his own ass!
"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"
This is very good news. Monkeyboy messed MS up really badly. I've never been a fan of MS. Under Gates they were evil incarnate, and under Monkeyboy they became the bumbling stupid giant. Windows 7 was something they ALMOST got right, which they had too, because Vista was a catastrophe. And what did they follow it with? Windows 8, another catastrophe. Hopefully with someone who isn't such a short fused belligerent douchewad at the helm, MS might be able to make excellent products.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Will Microsoft understand, they will NEVER be a device company, EVER!!!!
They need to keep with their software as THAT IS WHAT THEY DO!!!!
Win-Win situation if Elop from Nokia to Microsoft.
Wonder if he is going to try and leave his mark on Microsoft and create one more big blunder that will destroy Microsoft? Like maybe sell off their enterprise products to another company because he wants to focus 100% on consumer desktop PC's.
Love how their stock is rising on this news.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I know I might catch some flack for this but I would like to see what he could do with that kind of capital.
In my experience, a *LOT* of people like it. The problem was the cheap touchscreen products that benefitted from it didn't show up for what, 2 years after it was released?
If they'd ensured vendor touchscreen support across product ranges 2 years ago, I think the majority of non-techies would be using it daily now.
Still doesn't excuse them from the start menu fiasco, but the hate of the Metro UI is definitely overrated.
Don't lock me in bro, resistance is futile.
then the stock raise... but then Lord-BalDOmerO says "It was a joke, I stay... Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"
OMG
...on the board's short list.
... bring back Stephen Elop !
Meet "CEO Blue"
I mean, they would like to mirror Apples success. There is a certain part of me that wonders if Bill gates might be planning to come back in a the style of Steve Jobs. It would be very very tacky, but taste is not the MS strong suit.
Slashdot is like an elephant - has long memory and can't see well in front of it.
Microsoft hasn't be a monopoly since mid 2000s. Sure, they have a dominant market share in the horse-buggy and whip industry of desktop OS, but this matters less and less every day.
He needs 12 months because his retirement is behind schedule. And of course, just days after his retirement, he will have to download all the new retirement patches and Retirement Service Pack 2.0.
No. He has 12 months left on his Windows Phone contract. Days after retirement he will get an iPhone 5S.
No text.
Lots of Balmer-bashing here. (not surprising)
I forget exactly where Microsoft was when Balmer took over. Did they even have windows phone out? Was it still in the XP days or had Vista come out? Given the state of things, what should he have done differently?
A better question: where should Microsoft go now? They have a shrinking desktop market. Nobody seems to be buying either their phones or their tablets. They bought Skype, making them more or less the dominant player in VOIP services. The Xbox One pre-launch has been a mess. But Xbox is hugely popular, and people happily fork over $50 a year to subscribe to Xbox Live Gold. Where would you take Microsoft from here?
This is bad news, having Ballmer in charge of MS is a good thing as he was slowly mismanaging the company into the ground. A successor could be more competent.
Note that the same guys who put Ballmer in charge will be picking his successor. We might not have anything to worry about. ;-)
That would seriously shake things up.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
... for every time someone used a Ballmer chair joke in the millions of comments over thousands of websites that are announcing his retirement, I could buy Microsoft and open source all of their products.
Questions about Ballmer's fitness to remain CEO have been circulating for the past several years, particularly after the company struggled to keep a foothold in the mobile market.
LMFTFY. MS had Windows Mobile and Windows Tablets before the iPhone and iPad. They were uninspired and sometimes buggy translations of the Windows paradigm. MS had only lately realized that these devices need a different experience than Windows. However Ballmer still considers an iPad as a crippled PC. Well that crippled PC outsells PCs in some quarters making Apple the #1 PC seller. A key difference is that Apple is making tons of profit on it unlike the OEMs which make tiny margins on their PCs.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
lolz
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
This is bad news, having Ballmer in charge of MS is a good thing as he was slowly mismanaging the company into the ground. A successor could be more competent.
Note that the same guys who put Ballmer in charge will be picking his successor. We might not have anything to worry about. ;-)
Well, the board have not been happy with him for years, but he was Bill's BFF so there was little the board could do. I gather Bill or his foundation still control a sizable investment portfolio in MSFT. Perhaps they'll grow some spines and fight for a better leader, not yet-another-BFF-of-Bill.
fast forward to mid-2014: Melinda chose him, she liked his hair and the color of his eyes.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I heard it was Julie Larson-Green, actually - the same genius behind the ribbon. You know, little miss "everyone I force to use the ribbon internally LOVES the ribbon." Why she keeps getting promoted is beyond me. She's must be pretty.
Vista Flopped, Gates is Gone
Win8 Flopped, Ballmer is Gone
A Pattern?
Sure, pile on, but ... SQL Server is an enterprise-class database that's less expensive than Oracle and used in about all of the vertical-market packages out there. Even Java shops use SQL Server because it's cheaper than the alternatives (DB2, Oracle, etc) and better than MySQL. Visual Studio and .NET are much improved - I had not used them in almost a decade, and was shocked at how sophisticated they had become. Windows 7 is an incredible achievement.
Microsoft could easily leverage their strengths and turn into the MS of the late 1990s again. Put SQL Server instances in the Azure cloud, and suddenly a million businesses looking to fire their SQL Server DBAs to save money will be listening. Migrate vertical-market packages to the cloud so companies don't have to have their own servers, and you sell more copies of everything. Dump "Metro" and make Windows 9 look like Windows 7 and you get the desktop market back. Port your stuff to Android and you slide the knife deeper into Apple. Pave the road to success with a lot of unsold Surface RT units.
The next CEO needs to come from outside Microsoft, with no affiliation to the insiders, and he should be a technologist business person, not a salesman. Ballmer, over the years, loaded up the Microsoft board of directors with people who were "kiss up, kick down" moochers, and got rid of those who didn't fit the mold (Ray Ozzie, Jeff Raikes, etc). The next CEO needs to free the company of Lisa Brummel and Kevin Turner, among others who ran the company into the ground by mistreating employees and OEM partners over the years.
.... and on another note Microsoft stock skyrocketed on news of Balmers's retirement but quickly plummeted on news that John Sculley was going to take over and start a new line of soft drinks called Micro-Cola
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
And that is totally MS's fault. They still don't get it. If they did, they would remove all DRM from Windows. That includes the whole product key and activation nonsense they continue to harass all users with, legitimate and otherwise.
There was a day when MS was cool. They broke the early Office software monopolies, software such as Word Perfect. They reduced Apple and their MacIntosh to a small niche market. MacIntoshes were more user friendy, but MS-DOS on a PC was way, way cheaper. MS didn't rest on their laurels either, they rolled out Windows to challenge the Macs. Then in the 1990s, MS started to slip. MS's slowness gave IBM a chance to grab back the OS crown with OS/2. Lucky for MS, IBM blew it. MS also nearly got the Internet wrong. Remember that at first they pooh-poohed browsers. They came to their senses in time, barely. Windows 95 was very nearly too late. In the early 2000s, even the anti-trust conviction didn't much damage the MS brand. People still believed MS knew tech.
But now? MS has made many mistakes, but I could hardly believe it some years back when MS signed onto the RIAA and MPAA position on DRM. One might expect entertainment organizations to fail to understand that DRM is a bad idea, but a tech company? MS should have been savvier than that. Instead, they happily poodled to the RIAA! Let the entertainment industry do their thinking for them! They should have been educating the entertainment giants, not the other way around. It was a terrible show of incompetence and anti-customer positioning. Having backed themselves into a corner on DRM, they then turned to their customers and compounded the mistake, trying to sell us on the idea that DRM is good for us, talking down to us most insultingly. DRM helps stop us from being naughty pirates, and that's why it's good for us, right? Windows Genuine Advantage, ha ha! MS treated those moronic entertainment moguls like they really know stuff, and then treated their customers, many of whom are quite tech savvy, like a pack of adolescents who would try to sneak a few beers if they weren't carded all the time. They further magified the disaster by then insisting that Vista was doing very well. MS lost a great deal of credibilty.
It is only sheer size and inertia that has allowed MS to survive such bad blunders. I don't know how much more blundering MS can tolerate. Quite a bit, I suppose. Will they pick a decent CEO? There any reason to think they will pick a winner there?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
So giddy about this!!
They make Windows 8, it sucked as well as the mobile devices, and then he's reorganizing drastically and then immediately leaving.
So basically he started losing at the game because of a stupid strategy, flipped the board and the table over, and left. Great job!
He's available for parties and bar mitzvahs, folks.
I assume the next in line will be Crag Mundie.
I guess Balmer's exit is also testimony to the fact that their approach to the smartphone and tablet revolution has failed. So they question is: what is the new vision? Here's my take:
First of all, they should abandon their Windows-everywhere dogma. It's come of old and the Windows kernel is well past its best of times, if it ever had one. Second, they should focus on what they do best, and that's office & small enterprise software. They should target this software for any device out there, whatever operting system it is running. If they don't, somebody else will. The HTML5/javascript platforms are just waiting to be commerzialized, and that would be Microsoft's chance, combined with a best of breed cloud offering. With Windows out of the way, they wouldn't have to continue to try to push devices and operating systems into the market that no body wants, at least not on their smartphones, tablets, cars, televisions etc.
"A giant snorlax retires!"
There's one great perk of being a poor performing CEO:
The day after you announce your retirement, you can place a sell order for your stock and get $1 billion in additional profit.
The nice thing is that it's perfectly legal -- as long as the order is placed after the public announcement.
Bill Gates? Paul Allen? just asking
now if i can only understand stocks and the stock market
Days after retirement he will get an iPhone 5S
I pity the fool.
I've had a iPhone 5 (company phone) for a few weeks now. Not at all impressed. I eagerly await my Windows 8x Nokia 928 today (personal phone).
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Want to guess that his severance er retirement package will also set back the company a pretty penny? Possibly restrict the company of capital to fix the deep-routed problems.
The damage has been done to Microsoft, anybody good has left years ago. Incompetent people have no doubt been promoted into management, into places were Balmer's legacy will continue. So much of the development work has been offshored and shows in the quality, more specifically lack of quality and lack of innovation. It would be easier to start a brand new company and make it successful than to resurrect this lifeless corpse of a company.
Either Michael Dell or one of the C-levels from Samsung. Microsoft fancies itself a "device and services" company now, they will think they need someone who can build "things" rather than ideas.
He propably owns so much stock that his departure and the inevitable rise will make him richer than anything he is bound to achieve. No kind of severance golden parachute pension for a life time that MS is able to pay will match that effect.
20 minutes into the future
Well, the board have not been happy with him for years, but he was Bill's BFF
Big Fat Fuck?
What with the abortion that is Windows 8, the Surface tablet with the ARM processor, etc. That was a HUGE mis-step for Microsoft. But I can understand why they did it, both Apple and Google are going in the tiled direction so Microsoft though it should get into the mobile market (Good luck!) and thought a tiled view would work. It didn't.
He is suffering from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
Casteism
until they realize what Ballmer's retirement gift is going to be.
I'd recommend Bill Clinton as new CEO of MS
Casteism
He will retire by running around shirtless in the boardroom dripping full of sweat yelling DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS while throwing CHAIR AFTER CHAIR AFTER CHAIR!
Of course it's the right time, he's leaving the sinking ship to try to save some of his legacy.
The obvious answer is that he's Bill's buddy and that's fundamentally the correct one. But not every bright, visionary (and you can argue these if you want) tech founder like Gates gets to have his right hand man as his successor, so the question is what what was the MSFT board thinking when it approved this transition upon Gates departure? Consider Ballmer's CV: He has an incomplete degree, held no executive offices outside of MSFT, built or manged no noteworthy products or divisions at MSFT and presided over numerous product failures. Anywhere else, even if he's Bill bud, he would have been shunted to some seemingly executive, but harmless job that didn't totally humiliate him years ago. Any one of a number of technical successors (Ozzie, Sinoksky, Myhrvold, or others) would have carried Gates vision of a developer driven ecosystem revolving around the core of Windows and Office products further and would have a least given MSFT a shot. The company has been a cash cow on autopilot for the last half decade, milking an intrenched legacy product base and making Ballmer's reign look just profitable enough to stifle the obvious question... Who let him in charge of something as big as Microsoft?
Not.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It has been said that one of Balmer's biggest assets at MS was his fierce loyalty. If that is important for his replacement as well, I suggest they give Miguel a call.
Throwing chairs on stage while chanting: Retiring, Retiring, Retiring, Retiring, Retiring, Retiring, Retiring...
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
He owns enough stock that the effect of the 10% stock price increase after the announcement translates to $1B in absolute terms.
Of course, this is still largely theoretical, since if he were to sell all that stock now, it would deflate the price - and it's unlikely that the increase would persist in long term.
...retirement!
Retirement, retirement, retirement, retirement!
Retirement, retirement, retirement, retirement!
Retirement, retirement, retirement, retirement!
Retirement, retirement, retirement, retirement!
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.
Perhaps they'll grow some spines and fight for a better leader, not yet-another-BFF-of-Bill.
Unfortunately for them, a significant number of senior leadership figures at Microsoft who might have been credible candidates have instead left the company in recent years. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, that limits the talent pool from in-house.
It will be interesting to see whether they can attract someone good from outside. Big tech firms don't seem to have a great track record in that respect lately, though perhaps that perception is partly because we hear about the spectacular failures at places like HP but modest success stories go mostly unreported.
Either way, MS still has an effective monopoly on desktops, a significant presence in business server rooms, a substantial war chest, and a lot of smart people. Someone with a better vision for how to use those assets than "It's like Apple but for people who didn't buy Apple yet" might do well there.
I've suggested previously, even before the post-Snowden cloud/privacy concerns, that Microsoft could be in a very strong position if they swam across the current a little and promoted private clouds. It looks like a much more natural fit for their portfolio and expertise, it plays on competitors' weaknesses, and it plays to their strengths as an established provider on both client and server ends for business. It even gives them a potential way into the mobile market, via consumer-friendly devices with integral BYOD features for those who also want to use them for business but don't want to hand over the root password to corporate sysadmins. Any takers? :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Ok, Jobs said there would never be a 7" ipad. Jobs died, and the company immediately made plans for a 7" ipad. (No offense meant to Apple fanbois. 7" is a good form factor for certain kinds of work, and Jobs was a true visionary who had a few blind spots, like many visionaries do.)
Now, Ballmer is leaving. What radical changes do we expect from the company?
Speculation:
(1) We will see something like "Windows 8 Workstation" released, which optionally restores the traditional desktop. It'll still run Metro apps if required, but will look and feel like an interface that actually works well on a traditional PC. Motivation: (a) Microsoft can't afford to take a big hit in the PC OS marketplace, which is their bread and butter. (b) Microsoft now credibly has someone to blame for Windows 8. (Similarly, they can't afford to piss off businesses with Server 2012; expect changes there.)
(2) Something radical will happen with Surface. Either the RT will be abandoned completely and with extreme malice, (which is my guess) or the company will seriously bear down on it and make it, I dunno, actually worthwhile. One way or another, there will be a major shift in priorities.
(3) The facilities manager will feel better about ordering new office furniture.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
They do promote private clouds.
In the sense of having a product or two that are aimed at that market? Sure. In the sense of spending some marketing budget on it? Probably. In the sense of throwing the weight of an 800lb industry gorilla solidly behind it with the goal of shifting the entire market? Not even close.
My take is that with the right person at the helm, private cloud could be Microsoft's iPhone/iPad. It's a big enough potential market to move an entire industry, it's certainly not a new idea and some companies have dipped their toes in the water, but no-one has really done it well yet. I think Microsoft are uniquely well-positioned to attack that market, just as a lot of the hype about external cloud is giving way to some harsh realities, and as the mobile device market is starting to settle down now that much of the market that wants a smartphone or tablet already has one.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
At least we'll always have this video of Steve Ballmer doing the monkey dance.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
astrosurfing much ?
Cheers are carrying as far as the west coast.. threatening to drown out the airport next door... To be fair, while Bill was at the helm, I thought Steve *was* the perfect foil for him, kind of like the teams of Laurel and Hardy, or Penn and Teller.. And certainly Steve imagined himself as a comedian .. I refer the the windows 1x ad (1.1? or it could have been 2x, i don't recall ATM) where he promotes it like a Ronco chopper/dicer ad... Does antyone even remember this one?I think it only made the rounds at trade shows, because there was no worldwide web at the time.. Of course there were BBS's but there was no way you could post videos on them (well you could, if you had loads of patience, cheap telephone plan, and enough of a grasp of the CLI to reassemble binary files ;-.) I believe even back then, video CDs had already arrived, which would be the only way to play them afterwards.. I have never run into this video since, however. Does anyone know what I am referring to? At any rate, if Steve wants a new post-retirement career, he could try comedy !
I'm not glad he's undead, but I'm glad he'll be gone.
One bright spot is Apple blatantly ripping off Metro for iOS 7
You couldn't be more wrong and ignorant if you tried.
Just because they both dropped 3D bevels does not make them the same.
iOS does not have clipped areas like Metro, and has multiple layers of depth totally UNLIKE metro.
What's sad is most of the world thinks as you do and has no idea what is to come.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yep, I like Microsoft, there I said -- I know, it's blasphemy here to say that, I'll go into an iChurch later and pray to the image of St. Jobs for forgiveness.
MSFT has squandered so many opportunities in the last decade, the mobile/phone market, tablets, O/S messes, etc. He should have been ousted been long ago. He took over a pretty solid company (like them or hate them) and just kind of coasted along at best or went down the wrong road at worst. I'm thinking Ballmer's replacement is unlikely to be any worse imo, time will tell.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
.. that, Ballmer was a great, and MS will miss him.
how much did they put in your pocket for you to say that?
He says so himself (see quote below) - his thinking was, give it a few years for MS to transition to a devices/services company. But something convinced him instead that that transition needs a new CEO right from the start. That's not the kind of conclusion you come to on your own - and clearly inconsistent with several weeks ago, when he gave himself an enhanced role in the related organizational change (with more key direct-reports). He may or may not have been strong-armed - but clearly there was some "persuasion" involved.
From the chair-thrower's mouth: "My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction." - Steve Ballmer
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Ballmer too old to throw chairs or do his famious Monkey Dance. A wise move; for Ballmer.
Microsoft on the other hand could use more Ballmer; I'm going to miss being a spectator to their slow demise.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
is how I would summarize his tenure as CEO at Microsoft. When he was given the rains by Gates, he inherited a company with a $50 stock price. It was stalled out at $30 for the longest time. Only now is it approaching $35, largely due to the glee associated with his departure. He has missed every significant innovation in the past 10 years. Windows 8 is tanking. Windows Phone is stuck in the single digit market share. Despite slashing prices on the MS tablets they continue to languish in the marketplace. Were it not for the entrenched monopolies of Windows and Office, MS would be losing money hand over fist. They have done some good things in the server market but Linux has made significant inroads. Maybe he can find a position at HP...seems to suit his skill set perfectly.
1 - To become CEO of a corporation doesn't take talent, it's who your friend is.
2 - If you were next in line to become CEO and an idiot gets the position because he was friends with the former CEO just shut up and act happy.
3 - Take a good solid product like Win7 and instead of making it better, make it confusing. After all the customers are stupid and will buy it anyway.
4 - Get your friend, the former CEO to give you much stock and options in the employment package as possible.
5 - When the company's market share is in free-fall make up a story then quit. When the market rejoices sell your stock and truck home billons of dollars.
This is long awaited good news for Microsoft. With this barnacle finally off the bow of the SS Microsoft, maybe they'll get some edge back? Ballmer was a trend setter though. He's proof that the mentally handicapped can indeed lead an organization. Ok... lead it into the tank I realize, but never the less - lead. In reality, we all know that Ballmer is being forced to retire for inflicting Windows 8 on the world. What a freeking moron! Touch screen laptops? Are you kidding me! I'll be glad to see the last of this idiot. This is all, of course, just my opinion. Yours may differ. :)
"My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company."
You're being retired because NOBODY ELSE IS STUPID ENOUGH TO WANT THAT.
Actually the last Microsoft sales rep that visited us as of ~3 months ago was carrying an iPhone.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Or was he fired for the Windows 8 disaster? I would've fired him for that. But then again I would've fired him for a lot of the things he's done.
while
And go home. That'll show him.
Steve Ballmer is a known issue. As someone who still has some dead cat flat Microsoft stock from the days I worked there, it's good that he's finally going away. Of course the succession which should have happened when Bill G left is going to be horribly mismanaged over the next 12 months.
People have been saying this for years. It was BS then, and it is BS now.
iOS/Android is for the most part a totally different market. There might be some cross talk, but insignificant.
Linux and Apple still have an insignificant market of influence.
Consoles have always been competing with PC market. However there are many types of games that just haven't been able to translate to the consoles. Namely MMO's and RTS. Even shooters are crippled.
There are plenty of things that are being pushed to obsolesce, but PC gaming isn't one of them. Seeing what is coming with the Xbox One and PS4, I see PC gaming growing personally. I know I just bought a new gaming rig this week. I would rather get back into PC gaming a bit more than deal with that rats nest.
I had a chance to try iPhone 4 for a few days. Well, it could have been longer, but I just did not want to keep it longer. I guess the appeal of iOS is solely the apps, which I obviously did not want to invest in. For all it's shortcomings, my current WP7 phone is just nicer. I was genuinely surprised about this too, I was honestly expecting much more after all the iPhone hype I've heard over the years.
Note that it was not a big difference, so someone who likes iOS doesn't have much reason to change to WP either.
You had one job. Billg left you with one job. "Mind the store and don't fuck up Windows."
Well, I guess that was two jobs, technically. Either way, the results need no further elaboration.
Enjoy your retirement.
I wish they'd have let him stay at the helm long enough to make sure Microsoft went bust.
Everything went downhill after Windows XP. They single-handedly killed the PC.
And now, they're killing off XP this Sept.
It's interesting seeing the Slashdot comments because they are actually less negative than those of the press.
From a May 12, 2013 article in Forbes: Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, "Should Have Already Been Fired." Quote from the article: "Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today."
More about Steve Ballmer from that article: "The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value -- and jobs."
Scroll down in this article to see Businessweek's January 16, 2013 cover that called Steve Ballmer "Monkey Boy". The cover says "No More", but that doesn't take away from the fact that the magazine called him Monkey Boy -- on its cover. That's the greatest disrespect for a CEO I've ever seen.
Real talk: me and my roommate just went to the grocery store and bought cookie dough and then baked it and ate the cookies when we heard this news. You should, too. Everyone should have a batch of warm, gooey Steve Ballmer Is Retiring cookies.
Steve ... never did much with balls in any case. underwhelmed
I really don't know at what point on Microsoft's timeline you are referring to here...M$ has never had clarity...they've practically defined an era in computing with their inscrutible, abusive user interface and organizational infighting.
You're only seeing 'clarity' in comparison to total chaos. Compared to the options, M$ had 'clarity'... Microsoft was the only option for a business computer for at least a decade, mostly because government contracts (taxpayer $$$) gave them the capital to exist.
Compared to other successful tools for human work....Microsoft has been total shit from day 1 and nothing more than a wholesale re-invention of their business model (not a 'change in direction') will result in anything truly 'good' from them.
No matter what, in M$'s present mode of operation, fire whatever CEO they want...change the mission statement...WHATEVER...means nothing.
The business was founded off-kilter...it's like when they aimed Voyager...
Like the Voyager craft, huge corps like Microsoft cannot correct a course once they are on it (small adjustments aside)...when they launch, according to Microsoft's business model, they are stuck in that mode until the mission dies.
Microsoft was not the right company for the task when they got the government contracts that got them started...that misfire of trajectory, combined with a business structure that actively opposes any feedback or change would have killed the company long ago in a competitive market.
Microsoft had no competition in the US for over a decade!
Thank you Dave Raggett
"Ballmer To Retire"
Furniture at Microsoft HQ heaves a sigh of relief!
licet differant, aequabitur
I don't think we can blame Balmer for killing Steve.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Windows never completely adapted to the networked world. They didn't have a good shell and they never gave their shell commands full access to the TCP/IP stack. Most things had to be done through the GUI and complex UI operations are often worse with a GUI. Windows was slow to start processes and thus slow to spawn threads and handle new connections. It didn't fly like UNIX. Apple bit the bullet and adopted UNIX. Linux is now the major OS player, via redhat, debian and Android.
If anything the windows userland was the real failure. Microsoft should have invested in better shells and utilities earlier.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Slashdot likes Ballmer because many if not most use Linux or something similar, and anyone who has screwed up in a position of authority at such a company as much as Ballmer has, whether or not he meant to, is a friend of the FL/OSS community in general and Linux in particular. Think how many fewer people would have been so disgusted with Windows 8, just for example, that it caused them to flee the Microsoft ecosystem of wretchware ONCE AND FOR ALL! If Windows 8 had been even close to as usable as Windows 7, many more people would still be using it who have instead opted for something better, like Linux, for example.
So thanks, Ballmer, you've been a great help to those of us who try to raise awareness for how shitty your company, and its products TRULY are. You deserve a medal.
WE (THE LINUX COMMUNITY) SHOULD HAVE A MEDAL TO GIVE OUT! DO WE? IF NOT WE TOTALLY SHOULD! It would have a snippet from Linus' e-mail to the world on one side, and a penguin on the back winking, or giving a thumb's up on the other. It would double as a USB drive, naturally, and boot Linux, what else?!? Also, it would be able to be used as a beer bottle opener, and a pizza cutter.
Someone PLEASE make this NOW!
Because as harsh as we are, we know better than to resort to ad homeniem attacks. There's so much more real material we can use...
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Why would they need a Windows 8 Workstation? Companies can standardize on free Start Menu programs like classic shell. From what I hear, major Computer vendors are installing Pokki for Windows 8 Start Menu since they can customize it.
Windows 8.1 brings back the start button. While it only takes you to the start screen, you can have it go to the all apps screen instead. The start screen is a full screen start menu. I removed all live tiles on mine, and pinned all programs that I launch on it.
Uncle Fester may be annoying byt for years and years has has been by far the best tool (sic) in Linux and FOSS toolbox. Nasty sure but for his services to Linux, in all the various mistakes including permanently offending the majority of Linux supporters by publicly slandering them at any and all opportunities, well done. Of course Bill deserves full blame for putting and keeping his buddy in power.
All those Ballmerites of course are now living in fear, cleaning house after Uncle Fester is gone means all those yes men are doomed as well.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
That's because we know how difficult making a success of his job would've been while the journalists mainly know MS's failures.