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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.
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'.
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.
Good guess, but I think you mostly mirrored what a lot of people think -- that clearly Ballmer hasn't fully understood the market in some places, and that Microsoft has had some misses lately.
Those are the kinds of things that, while not personally responsible for every detail, Ballmer as CEO gets to 'own' and take the blame for.
Microsoft may or may not fare better without Ballmer, but if the market watchers are looking at things which could bring Microsoft out of these doldrums, then the perception that his departure could change is bound to lift the stock.
Of course, this being the stock market, everybody is going to be buying and selling now based on what they think will be happening in 12 months or more from now -- and in 12 months, they'll be doing it based on something totally unrelated to this.
I will be interested to see if the next CEO is so arrogantly out of touch with what people want, or will continue with the standard party line of "we can do no wrong and people really want these things" even when nobody is buying them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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
It's not that Microsoft is 'late to the party', it's simply that they make bad products.
Apple was late to the tablet party but ended up dominating it with pretty and functional products.
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
That and NASDAQ was down yesterday due to a computer glitch. Chances are investors are doing double time to get back.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think the next CEO has a few big challenges on his hands. I'd highlight three in particular:
First, he needs to get the company out of the mindset that has it still behaving as though it commands monopoly power. It doesn't, or at least, it doesn't in many of the markets where it now needs to compete. It found that out with with the XBox One launch, where it thought that it had the power to force customers to accept things they didn't want to, then was forced into an embarrassing U-turn when Sony offered a viable alternative. It is finding that out in the mobile and tablet marketplaces, which it came to as a late entrant and failed to provide reasons for people to switch. And it's about to find that out on the desktop, where the message coming through on Windows 8 is that even die-hard Windows users will bide their time and see what else comes along rather than making the shift to an operating system that forces unwanted changes onto them.
Second, he needs to sort out communications. MS does have some good products. The Surface is by no means bad - but it was marketed via that whole incomrpehensible break dancing thing. The XBox One is turning into a decent product (thanks to the aforementioned U-Turns), but every time MS speaks about it, their message comes over as either an apology or a horribly mis-aimed pitch for TV services. MS needs to stop being afraid of selling its products on the basis of its features, rather than coming over like an embarrassing parent trying to be trendy at a teen disco. The obvious answer to the old "I'm a Mac, he's a PC" advertising slur was "yeah, Mac guy looks pretty, but he's actually useless. Look at what PC guy can do". They always seemed curiously afraid to go there.
Thirdly, judging by the stories that come out of the company, the new CEO needs to sort out some of the staffing and corporate culture issues. MS increasingly looks and sounds like a public sector bureaucracy. Its stack-ranking system in particular is a cack-handed system that's been demonstrated to destroy morale and drive down performance wherever it's used. If MS doesn't want to reduce the size of its workforce, then it needs to adapt its organisation structures in such a way that they actually enable an organisation of that size to respond to new challenges flexibly. That probably means a lot more internal devolution (including over staffing issues).
The big thing? Games...
Apple's been culturally hostile to gaming for most of its history. And yet it remains a huge driver of home computer sales and platform choice - but it never so much as figures in MS's OS advertising.
Disagree very strongly here. PC gaming is in a much better place than it was a few years ago. Back then, it was a toss-up as to whether the PC got a port of major multi-platform console games and, if it did, it usually got the crappy port. For the last 12 months or so, the PC has been the primary platform for most releases. The piracy rates and DRM-avoidance thing is a rather tired straw-man. PC gamers accept Steam DRM. Developers mostly live with the fact that somebody really determined can break Steam DRM.
The next-gen console may shift the balance back to the consoles. That's what usually happens early in a console cycle. If so, it will be a temporary thing (just as the current console decline is probably a temporary thing).
The App Store looked potent a couple of years ago, but it's losing momentum as a gaming platform - largely because of diminishing returns on IAP laden pay-to-win games. The bubble on those has already burst - Zynga and the other companies which rode the crest of it are now going to the wall.
PC gaming has been "dying" ever since I first started playing PC games myself in 1990. It's no more dying now than it was then.
Investors voice their opinion when a CEx quits, usually by selling. m$ stock went up, maybe more investers are favoring Linux?
It's about the most visible slap in the face to a CEO one can imagine - In one voice, from those who matter most to him it says, "We're glad you are leaving, please make it soon."
It may be lonely at the top, but this makes it humiliating, as well.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I would say they have spent the past few years burning their bridges more than the one giant fail that is a shark jump. it would be like you heard the next town over has incredible mansions and great jobs that pay a fortune...so you take a torch to your home and place of business without even bothering to see if the next town over will have you because "hey how could anybody resist me, didn't you hear I was a star 10 years ago?".
MSFT had 3 golden geese that consistently brought in good money, they may not have set the world on fire but they still brought in piles of cash, and that was Windows desktop, server, and MS Office...so what has Ballmer crapped all over these past few years because the press is going "Mobile mobile mobile ZOMFG CELLPHONES!"? Why Windows desktop, server, and MS Office of course! It takes a special kind of hubris and arrogance to ignore every single bit of data and metric you are shown yet that is EXACTLY what Ballmer has done over and over AND OVER. From everybody pointing out the Zune was big, bulky, and offered nothing over the iPod to Win 8 not working worth a shit except on the teeny tiny niche that is Windows tablets and touchscreen laptops, it didn't matter how many screamed "THIS FUCKING SUCKS!" Ballmer just gave them the finger while sticking out his tongue, thinking that just sticking a WinFlag on something was enough to make it a hit.
If there is anything we should take away from the Ballmer years it is this, focusing only on what Wall Street cares about while ignoring your customers is a recipe for massive failure, that all the advertising in the world isn't gonna make people buy something they can't fucking stand, all you are doing is pissing money down the drain. By remaining myopic in his focus on making MSFT into Apple Steve Ballmer threw out every strength they had and thought that advertising and name recognition alone could push through changes that benefited ONLY MSFT while giving the person buying the product the finger. The lesson the next CEO should take from this is that you can put sprinkles and glitter and make videos of people dancing with a pile of fresh poo but that ain't gonna make people suddenly want to go out and buy poo, you have to offer them something they actually want to buy.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.