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Steve Ballmer's Big-Time Error: Not Resigning Years Ago
Nerval's Lobster writes "Any number of executives could take Ballmer's place, including a few he unceremoniously kicked to the curb over the years. Whoever steps into that CEO role, however, faces a much greater challenge than if Ballmer had quietly resigned several years ago. Ballmer famously missed the boat on tablets and smartphones; Windows 8 isn't selling as well as Microsoft expected; and on Websites and blogs such as Mini-Microsoft (which had a brilliant posting about Ballmer's departure), employees complain bitterly about the company's much-maligned stack-ranking system, its layers of bureaucracy, and its inability to innovate. Had Ballmer left years ago, replaced by someone with the ability to more keenly anticipate markets, the company would probably be in much better shape to face its coming challenges. In its current form, Microsoft often feels like it's struggling in the wake of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook."
In an interview with ZDNet, Ballmer said his biggest regret as CEO was in how Windows Vista was developed. Opinions are divided on both the nature of his resignation and what it will mean for Microsoft. While the stock price is up, BusinessWeek and others suggest the purpose of the transition is to find somebody better able to anticipate future trends. That would certainly lead to more organizational changes within Microsoft, something employees suffered through just last month. Ben Kuchera at the Penny Arcade Report points out that this could mean Microsoft will try to re-enter markets it has abandoned. He asks the company to "stay the hell away from PC gaming."
In an interview with ZDNet, Ballmer said his biggest regret as CEO was in how Windows Vista was developed.
The aftermath of Vista is precisely when he should have resigned. CEOs of other tech companies have resigned for lesser debacles.
Ballmer resigned. Stock went up 7.29% in a big jump of about $20B in value.
So Microsoft without Steve Ballmer is worth $20B more than a Microsoft with Steve Ballmer.
That is the legacy of a great man.
Steve Ballmer the -$20B man.
The question isn't if he should have been let go years ago, the questions are when he should have been let and what the hell took so long? Defenders like to point out that Microsoft has become more profitable and larger under Steve Ballmer. Ballmer had disaster after disaster at the helm of Microsoft, imagine what the stock would have done /without/ all the disasters the Ballmer created?
Personally I'm of the opinion he should have been let go after the fiasco that was Vista.
My prediction is that by Windows 9, Metro will be an optional (and thus ultimately destined to be scrapped) feature.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
No one takes a nearly $1 billion write down and lives to make more humongous mistakes another day. There's got to be a line somewhere, and Steve finally crossed it.
Microsoft didn't miss the boat. They inadvertently helped create the very circumstances which led to them being excluded from the current tablet and smartphones we have today.
Back in the PDA days, it was a two-player game: Palm vs WinCE (later renamed Windows Mobile to get rid of the awful abbreviation). As with Netscape vs IE, Microsoft competed its heart out until it won, then dropped the ball. After Palm was more or less vanquished, Microsoft rested on its laurel. Windows Mobile pretty much went nowhere (and some would say it even went backwards with Microsoft trying to foist the Windows Desktop interface paradigm onto it). Everyone could see phones and PDAs were going to converge (and those who couldn't should've gotten a wake-up call from the Blackberry), but Microsoft made no real effort to add phone capabilities to Windows Mobile. So in the end PDA features ended up being added to phones, instead of phone capability being added to PDAs. And when PDAs went away, so did Windows Mobile.
Microsoft was a major driving force behind the Tablet PC. The Tablet versions of Windows were actually pretty good, especially the handwriting recognition. But where they erred was they wanted to make sure every tablet sold was also a copy of Windows sold. So they focused on making sure tablets were high-end PC notebooks which converted into the tablet form factor. While companies were ok with buying a $2500 tablet, regular people weren't. The immense popularity of netbooks should've been a wake-up call that there was a huge untapped market for a small, (relatively) cheap consumption-only device. But Microsoft did its best to steer manufacturers away from these low-end devices which didn't use Windows (and in fact killed off the Linux-based netbooks by making "Starter" versions of Windows). So tablets were relegated to high-end high-cost devices.
When you manipulate a market like this and steer people away from the direction the market wants to go, you create a lot of invisible pent-up demand. Apple managed to latch onto that demand with a tablet which neither used Windows nor Intel CPUs. Microsoft (and Intel) only have themselves to blame for trying to steer the market in a direction more favorable to themselves, rather than producing what the market wanted. That may have worked in the 1980s when computers were predominantly bought by businesses who could justify their high price by the additional profit they'd help generate. But once people began buying them for home use, the market became much more price-sensitive. I mean what was the point of buying a $2500 tablet PC, when you could buy a $800 laptop and a $500 iPad?
Who are they kidding?
Rule #1 for a large company: you don't anticipate markets with an eye to joining or ruling them. You kill them before they can start. If you can't do that, you play catch-up, or you use legal weight to try to stop them.
They were behind on phones and tablets in 2010 just like they were behind on the internet in 1995. They got *lucky* in 1995 that they could buy their way into it (at great expense: giving away IE and then all of the legal fees involved for the anti-trust cases in just about every country in the world...).
They simply couldn't get that lucky now 'cause everybody knew they would try and so could out-innovate knowing that was the one thing they could do that M$ couldn't (and never could, not since day one...).
Large companies, unless you're Apple (willing to sacrifice one generation of customers for another), or Google (able to get most of the products to drive eyeballs back to your core income stream), simply don't innovate. They simply don't try to take over businesses they aren't already in (except by buying their way in, a-la Oracle). Microsoft had all the brains in the world but would NEVER have actually let them create a new product line if it ever put Windows or Office at risk. Never. Just like Xerox could never market the desktop workstation because the paperless office was a threat to their copier business.
Microsoft simply would never have been able to compete here. Ever. Internally they couldn't muster it, externally the other companies knew how to handle them.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Eh, after using it a while, it's kind of a toss up. Windows 8 actually does have a few nice features, and I am able to do some things far easier than I can do in Windows 7... However, there are some changes that were mindbogglingly stupid.
The thing is, the the much maligned Start screen isn't really as bad as people make it out to be. I believe people are just using it wrong. In their defense, I don't think Microsoft makes it clear to their users how it should be used, and how it works best if used differently than the old Start Menu worked.
I think many people just haven't figured out that it's ok to remove apps from their Start Screen and customize it just be their favorites. Unlike the Start Menu, the Start Screen still allows you to easily access lesser used programs through the search charm or through the All Apps button. There's no reason to have some huge cluttered mess of everything you have installed on the Start Screen like the average Start Menu has.
Though, most Windows 8 metro style apps are rubbish. Only a few seem to be worth using instead of a standard Windows version, and I find that metro apps don't handle multiple monitors in a way that really makes sense.
I don't care for it enough that I want to bother upgrading my home machine from Windows 7 to Windows 8, but I don't hate it enough that it would bother me if I picked up a laptop that had Windows 8 pre-installed.
On the other hand, over the last few years I've found the number of reasons for sticking with windows to be slowly dwindling, and I might consider using Linux for more than VMs and toy machines.
Back when Windows was released, Unix was sort of crap, too.
Uh, no.
Uh, yes. I was there too, I saw how workstations were. They were more powerful obviously, but they were equally more expensive. Even before Windows 3.0/3.1 came, there was already a commercial ecosystem of spreadsheets, word processors and database systems that, though simple and primitive, provided a good ROI for the little investment you had to put in for the non-technical masses. Right in their work places. That. Was. A. Computer. Revolution.
No workstation system of the time had that. Computing power and windowing systems mean shit if platforms cost you an eye and a kidney while providing no productivity tools for the common non-technical person.
Us Unix workstation folks laughed at Windows users when it was first released. It was a cheap, crap, toy windowing system compared to Sun workstations and the like.
But since they were meant to be development or backend workhorses as opposed to office/home productivity tools, they were crap for what the general-case world needed the most, all the while we workstation guys were laughing with history giving us the bird while passing by.
It was only with Windows 95 and NT that it started to look comparable to the Unix alternatives, at a much lower price.
Again, just focusing on the windowing-system factor, you are missing the point. Even though you still had to rely on collaborative multitasking, Windows 3.0/3.1 was already well versed running in protected mode with which to run multiple DOS-based or Windows-based business applications or multimedia (rudimentary but effective at the time.)
We all thought workstations were the shit. And they were... on a very narrow niche market. They were the corvettes that could take you from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds, but that can only go in a straight line. PCs with Windows 3.0/3.1x were the dutiful Toyota Corollas that could un-glamorously take the common working man to the grocery store and other vital places around your neighborhood.
To use a workstation, you needed to be a fucking programmer or engineer. To use a PC and do things you needed or enjoyed, all you needed was one or two manuals bought from your local bookstore. That's why the former was crap, regardless of niche-specific computing powah!
See, the thing is, America, or rather the OECD in general, isn't interesting any more. PCs have penetrated everywhere they're going to, the population isn't growing any more, and all that's left is replacement. And there are all these annoying parasites and egg-robbers around (Google mail and docs, the various office apps for iPads, web-based workflow like Yammer, the BYOD wave, etc., etc.)
In the OECD, it's death by a million cuts for Microsoft. The slow decay back into the swamp. Not so slow, if they mess up Active Directory.
The computing market growth is in Asia. (To a lesser extent, also in Latin America, and Real Soon Now, Just You Watch, in Africa.)
And what are the Asians buying? They're buying el-cheapo 800x600 (or worse) TN panel 512MB RAM ARM-cored tablets running Android, made by Coolpad/Yulong and a million no-name backstreet factories on razor-thin margins.
Microsoft can't compete with that: its business model is high cost rent-seeking.
When Asians finally have high-enough incomes and want to go up-market, they won't want to buy something that's been perceived as a loser for the last couple of decades (as will be Microsoft's case by 2020), they'll want either what they already use (Android, or possibly Tizen by then), or new and shiny, and preferably made in their own country.