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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...
"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.
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.
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.
The problem with Microsoft and Nokia, is that nobody really wants a Microsoft Phone, and Nokia was driven into the trash heap by going the Microsoft Route exclusively (among other notable awful choices).
Microsoft has been a "Windows Company" for so long, they don't know how to do anything else besides "Windows". And now, with the dawning of Google Apps and Libre/Open Office, and ChromeOS / Android / iOS as choices to compete, there is a huge problem for Microsoft Windows ... it isn't even a good choice any more, it is just another choice. Microsoft is stuck, being a Windows Company.
Anything they do now, is too little, too late. They needed to change 10 years ago (yes, 2004) when the tide started to change. I saw it then, and knew the end was near. Microsoft has no new products, no new vision. It is dead.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Microsoft makes billions from selling Windows. The most popular consumer operating system ever made. You want them to forgo that revenue stream so they can become a more trendy 'open source' provider, in the hope that they might, potentially, maybe make more money in another way. Despite the fact that no company doing this makes money in this way.
Apple -> gives away software (kinda) -> makes money from hardware (and always has)
Google -> gives away software (kinda) -> makes money from ads (and always has)
Microsoft -> gives away software -> makes money from 'supported apps'
Do you really think you have any idea how to run one of the best companies in the world?
Astronomical arrogance.
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)
They already have that. It's a little-known suite of programs called "Microsoft Office"
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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.
Microsoft still has a chance
Microsoft is a huge successful company, and is not going anywhere. If anything, they will have to scale back in a few sectors.
They need to make Windows Free, maybe even open source (ok, that's a pipe dream)
Absurd. The near monopoly of Windows gives them the muscle to keep better products off the market. They are also the only player in town when it comes to PC OSs (sorry Linux), and the Windows tax is not something that they would or should give away for free.
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)
That has never been their business model. Either buy the better app and rebrand it MS, or else crush the competition through their Windows monopoly, e.g. withholding parts of the API.
Basically everything Microsoft is currently doing is wrong. They are digging their own grave and anyone with any tech savvy at all knows it.
I really don't think that you speak for the "tech savvy."
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
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.
Tasteful and profitable wins over open or closed.
OSX might have awful market share but Apple sells more than most Windows OEMs do and they make money on each unit sold.
That's winning. Not massive market share. Profit and sustainability. Only fools go after popularity.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Microsoft has not been a "success." It's been a cancer eating away[...].
What is precisely the definition of "success" from the cancer point of view.
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