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Steve Ballmer Blew Up At the Microsoft Board Before Retiring
mrspoonsi writes with this excerpt from Business Insider on Steve Ballmer's final months as Microsoft CEO: "Ballmer decided to announce his retirement a few years before anyone expected him to. It all came to a head in one board meeting with Ballmer in June 2013. According to Businessweek, Ballmer got into a shouting match with Microsoft's board when directors said they didn't want to buy Nokia and start making smartphones. Ballmer told the board last June that if he didn't get what he wanted, he wouldn't be CEO any more. Businessweek said Ballmer's shouts could be heard in the hall outside the conference room. In the end, the board compromised with Ballmer. Ballmer wanted to buy both Nokia's handset business and its mapping platform called HERE. Instead, Microsoft ended up buying just the handset business for $7.2 billion and licensed HERE maps from Nokia."
Ballmer seems to be regretting not getting into hardware sooner (although given that not making hardware propelled them to success in the 90s...)
I'm sorry... is there a better word to describe this self-absorbed troll?
Ballmer just comes across as a big fat baby with all the charisma of a loose turd.
Will someone tell me why he was there in the first place?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
He wasn't really mad.
If only he would just blow up
Damnit. :P
And making typewriters and mainframes propelled IBM to success in the 60s.
What a dipshit.
phones and tech in general is going the way vertical integration like the auto industry almost 100 years ago
at one point cars were "open" where you could mix and match and lots of manufacturers made the different parts
then came henry ford and the industry went vertical where one company was doing all the design and most of the manufacturing for most of the parts
alfred sloan took it one step further where he had a few basic designs with slightly different bodies to look different and sold them under different brands
"Ballmer seems to be regretting not getting into hardware sooner (although given that not making hardware propelled them to success in the 90s...)"
That's because during the 90's there were dozens of people in hardware but only a few strong software people. By the time the 21st century got rolling, the tables had flipped, software as an industry was well developed and now it was all about miniaturization and portability, so the pendulum swung back to hardware being the profit driver. Just because something worked last decade doesn't mean it's going to work this decade.
So Microsoft avoids buying a failed phone co and Balmmer rage quits. What's the downside? It's like killing two turds with one flush!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
They dominated the smartphone market, had a decent OS and very good harware prowess. They could have just opened symbyan up . Set up a community and let it spawn . Instead they decided to open symbian after it was almost dead . I'm not a Steve Jobs fan but the man has proved that a company needs vision and balls . not Ballmers.
There's no reason MS couldn't have taken the route Google has with branding phones (eg. the Nexus 4, actually made by LG or Asus or I don't remember). I don't think buying Nokia is going to look like a good decision down the road.
Overall, MS's continuous doubling down on mobile has succeeded only in poisoning their other products.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Microsoft was trying to push smartphone before it was popular, but no one wanted or wants what they were or are selling. They have never really had the kind of charismatic salesman that Apple had in Jobs, so they weren't able to create convince people to buy this new thing and create a market. Now that the market's set, and Microsoft essentially isn't part of it, they're done. Just copying Apple or Samsung are doing by having hardware isn't going to make people want Windows Mobile (or whatever they're calling it these days) anymore than they did previously. The Nokia purchase is a huge waste of money. Most people aren't going to buy Microsoft phones. Microsoft needs to spend its resources building something cool (that isn't a phone) and a separate brand for it. That's the kind of gamble that big companies don't take though. There's too much to risk, and it takes a long term vision and commitment that investors don't have.
... I will quit and you will be forced to hire A MORE COMPETENT CEO!
That is right. I will QUIT because I failed to make revenue off WIndows 8 mobile due to things that were all my fault! DON'T Make ME make your job easier now by having me LEAVE?
Board of directors: (... a look of shock. Then grins with each other. ) Oh Balmer. NO!! You may not. Take your anger out.
Balmer: Throws a chair. I QUIT!!
Board of directors: (... in a lame semi sarcastic tone). Oh no Balmer. What a shame. Soo sorry it had to come to this.
http://saveie6.com/
It's always confirmation bias!
Should have bought Here instead. I don't see what they gained with the Nokia handset business. It's basically a $7B buy for the Lumia line. Here/NavTEQ is really reliable data source. They've been in this mapping business for a long time and know what they're doing.
spent their money on improving Windows, one of their major income sources. If they had spent some of that money making an upgrade utility to let Windows XP users upgrade to Windows 7 or (ugh) 8.1, they would have done their existing customers a great service. Many people don't upgrade because they don't know how, or don't want to have to start from scratch. If MS had made Windows more reliable and easier to install and update drivers, that would have been a big help to their existing customers. Every time MS goes into hardware (with the possible exception of the Xbox) they fail. I think they would have had a lot of money left over from the 7.2 billion dollars if they had put their efforts into their main product, rather than trying to get into the smartphone business. It's not like Windows is perfect, and doesn't need any work, especially Windows 8.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Microsoft still has a chance...
They need to make Windows Free, maybe even open source (ok, that's a pipe dream)
Then they need to invent all kinds of stellar business apps that integrate with it flawlessly...
and license those apps to businesses. Businesses will pay for supported apps, because they like to be covered if something happens (thats how oracle makes money)
Basically everything Microsoft is currently doing is wrong. They are digging their own grave and anyone with any tech savvy at all knows it.
the chairs! Whatever you do, DO NOT give that man chairs. If he has to sit on one, make sure it's bolted down. It's for your own protection.
I think Ballmer inherited a very large unwieldy and nearly ungovernable organization. All the real genii had either cashed out, burnt out or were pushed out. Near monopoly status meant every one is producing huge torrents of revenue and it was difficult to cull out the wheat from the chaff. Those who remained and got promoted were the third or fourth echelon of talent who excelled in office politics and political intrigue. Much of the credit the media heaped on him in the early were undeserved and so is most of the scorn heaped on him.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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Ballmer is basically the Dick Cheney of tech executives. It's amazing even at this time with the benefit of hindsight his point of view about Microsoft is so far from reality. And that he incapable of seeing what has happened, allowing events to alter his worldview and acknowledge his mistakes
I'm glad that the angry idiot is leaving the house.
So Microsoft could have declined to buy Nokia's handset business, retained the $7b they would have spent on it, and have gotten rid of Ballmer sooner? That just has win all over it. And in classic fashion, they stumbled once again and made the completely wrong move. At this point, watching Microsoft implode is starting to transition from hilarious to slightly sad. After what they've done to the software industry, they deserve to suffer, but at some point they're going to need to start making smart moves if they want to continue providing serious competition.
Maybe some day he will be the "Chair"man. Will feel sorry for the chairs and the maintenance dept.
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Sometimes those heavy stones complain when you toss them down a ravine where they belong.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
When Jobs was on stage and first introduced the iPhone, he stated that he would be happy if they captured 3% of the smartphone market (which itself at the time represented only 1% of the overall mobile phone market).
Apple took a big gamble to create a product that at the time, was mostly a niche product, I don't think anyone was expecting the iPhone to be the staggering sensation it became. Yet, Apple spent millions to develop the hardware and the operating system, both of which were, at the time, quite revolutionary.
Apple didn't capture a segment of an existing market, they *created* their own market -- people that had never bought a smartphone before were buying this thing.
Now let's contrast to MS; They launched the Zune, hoping to capture some segment of the market that would have otherwise have purchased an iPod. When it failed to do that after 2 years, they dumped the entire thing. They launched a smartphone geared towards teens and canceled it after a week, if I recall.
For MS, the product has to be a huge hit or it's a disaster, and there's no in-between for them. That's their failure, which is they are looking for the kind of success Apple had, or they kill the product before it can even get a foothold.
Contrast to Google, who suffered through years of crappy Android releases before the OS became a serious contender to the iPhone. Google (fortunately) stuck with it, but MS don't play that game. They want instant success or the product is dead.
What they could have done differently is had an overall vision to tie their products together. What if the Zune's OS became a launchpad to a phone OS, and they had used their existing PDA experience from Windows CE to make a really good product and stuck with it, even if sales were initially slow, but they kept improving it?
But either due to incompetence or interoffice politics, no microsoft product works with any other microsoft product, and they never seem to learn from their past products what works and what doesn't -- and that's why their stuff fails.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
in the early 90s, and I'd rate him as one of the nicer executives I've dealt with. I spent about half an hour with him setting up equipment for a meeting, he was quite friendly and unpretentious. I have a friend who's related to him by marriage, and likes him well enough, though he doesn't know him well.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Awwww... Did Pumpkin Wumpkins not get what Pumpkin Wumpkins wants?
Typical microsoft attitude. When will his corporate monstrosity fade away?
I have no doubt that he can be quite harsh when the situation calls for it. Part of being a CEO is bringing down the hammer. A lot of them don't know when to turn that off, I give Ballmer some credit for not being one of them.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
MS has been a company that sells broken products that cost people time and money. Remember billions of people are forced to use their crap everyday. It should be considered a form of worker torture. They purposely have not fixed problems in compatibility between Mac and Windows apps. Word on a Mac is a piece of unusable crap, that can't even format a page correctly. They currently hold everyone hostage with Exchange Server, that most companies are still running version 2007 since they can't afford all the licensing fees to upgrade. They use to pay companies like Adobe to move their products over to Windows and then update them first, and to not fix issues with Flash.
There is a cancerous meme in business. Thinking that buying some other company which makes something is the same as making it yourself is such a destructive idea.
Because he owned like 30% of the stock and was a cofounder of the company and a personal friend of bill gates who owns 40% of the company.
Balmer never owned more than about 8% of Microsoft. Gates owned about 45% of the company at the IPO but now is down to around 6.5% last I checked which still makes him the largest private shareholder.
Over the years I have grown to hate Microsoft because of their greed.
They could have charged $25 for their operating system and still been very rich men, they knew we had no other choice.
Instead Microsoft was responsible for completely draining the American economy of its operating money.
Killing growth of the economy, creating a economic poverty that was unnecessary.
There are millions who think just like I do.
Microsoft is a dead company they just don't know it yet.
I am not an anonymous coward, where did that come from?
I think you're wrong there. I think Carly Fiorina _is_ smart enough to run a hot dog stand.
"I mean, who would have thought in the mid-00s that the smart device would become the pre-eminent consumer computing platform in less than a decade?"
You mean other than Apple and the other people who helped make it happen?
Microsoft's problem moving off of the desktop has always been that they want a very similar experience on the desk and in the hand. This was a bad idea when they tried to emulate the Windows experience in WinCE, and is a bad idea going the other direction with Metro.
(laughs)
FULLY SUBSIDIZED???
(hilarity ensues)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
As a civilization we are amazingly uninterested in the common themes we see with large organizational structures. How they frequently let people with low interpersonal / ethical intelligence run large structures. So we see all manner of childish behavior, extortion on resellers selling competing products. Personnel policies that mandate that someone on every team must fail. I could go on and on. Maybe one day in the future, we will require a psychological assessment of these people. There was that study out of England suggesting business leaders qualified as psychopaths at four times the general population. Maybe one day we will require that a company be an asset to a society, that profit alone should not be the only measure. I was eating dinner one night in Redmond with my little niece. I spotted the Balmer entourage at another table. I told the waitress, I am picking up their check. She came back and said they thanked me but they would pay. I thought it would have been an interesting story.
They also had enough money to have a long war of attrition against the video game makers in xbox. They were able to drive Sun out with their money. Then their luck/charm/talent ran out.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The guy is just not tech-oriented. He was not excited about cool stuff that tech can do to make lives better. No, he was excited about making money...and that's the problem with Microsoft today. One gets the impression that 'making money...and lots of it' is the main focus of all of the top execs. Tech is different. It has to excite...to be cool...to stir passion...to truly change people's lives for the better...and the money will follow. Jobs was that way. Google is that way. Microsoft still makes all of their money selling Windows. When Windows was new, it was bringing a gui user interface to millions of computers that did not have that...as was Apple with their Mac. That was a transforming thing. Now, though, gui is expected. Everything has that. It's not new. People still buy and use Windows, though, because 'Windows' is a standard that gives people a familiar, comfortable experience...except that now it no longer does. So, Microsoft has trashed their own ersatz 'standard,' tossed the compatibility 'chair' out of the window, and embraced a lot of me-too mobile stuff that everyone else is already doing longer and better. Those are the actions of execs who are trying to milk more money out of their captive cows and don't give a second thought about actually doing something that transforms peoples lives for the better.
Not in Europe. Not in India.
Windows Phones crossed 10% in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K for the 3months ending Jan 2014.
Nokia 5xx is the phone which is opening up new markets in Europe. Most of Nokia 5xx phones were people upgrading from non smartphones.
Some of India's local cellphone brands (who mostly sell rebranded Chinese phones & tablets) are planning to launch cheap Windows phones & tablets.
Microsoft really lost its way since Ballmer arrived. From the perspective of the end user, everything since 2003 (the year of Windows XP and Office 2003) has been garbage, from the atrocious Vista to the infuriatingly buggy and non-configurable Windows 7 to the monstrosity that is Windows 8. And need I say, "Ribbon?"
Microsoft can't even be a Windows company any more. They're failing at all the models they're trying like phones and tablets, whilst also failing in what used to be their core competency, desktop. Ballmer's departure is about 10 years overdue.
Purchasing Compaq was the RIGHT decision.
Spinning off Agilent was the RIGHT decision.
Carly might have been the wrong person to implement* the changes necessary after the decision, but the decisions were the correct decisions.
In the modern world - and we can whine and bitch and moan about why this is from now until the cows come home - but in the modern world, a firm can either grow, or it can collapse.
Carly chose growth, which meant purchasing Compaq.
*Mark Hurd [or someone like Mark Hurd] was the right guy to implement the changes.
The disastrous outcome for HP was having to fire Hurd because he couldn't keep his dick in his pants and he went and put his mistress on the company payroll.
Fucking idiot.
Fuck those crooks man . You have a place in my bord room.
Too bad Ballmer didn't continue as CEO, right until the bankruptcy.
Reminds me of the stories I heard of Jack Tremel back in the Commodore days. They used to call his fits Jack Attacks. You didn't want to be on the receiving end of one of those.