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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?
He wasn't really mad.
Damnit. :P
And making typewriters and mainframes propelled IBM to success in the 60s.
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
His amazing salesmanship skills:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
At the end of that, I feel myself pulling my wallet out and going "NO, IT CAN'T BE JUST $99, let me pay more!"
Possibly because CEOs aren't hired for charisma, their ability to strut on a walkway, or twirling a baton? I think they SHOULD be, and I think many CEOs are still little more than celebrities to promote the company, but charisma isn't it.
"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/
He shared many of the same visions as Gates. He had a mostly positive history with Microsoft and a plan to get things done. Over time his own self image and the pressure from the changing markets twisted him (further?) into the image we see him as now.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
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.
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.
Absolute bullshit.
CEOs are a cult of personality in modern society. It isn't about smarts, savvy, or any other jazz. It's a type of show business.
Go look at the "promotional photos" available for people like Carly Fiorina. She's not smart enough to run a hot dog stand, but boy can she take a good photograph. And the corporate worshipers eat it all up.
Because he was the recipient of the "luckiest dorm room assignment in history". See http://www.washingtonspectator.org/index.php/Steve-Ballmer.html
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 his history in the company was what went horribly wrong, and if Gates were still around, the same mistakes would have been made. Microsoft operated under the old adage "don't change your horses in midstream", and that meant hanging on to Ballmer even as everyone saw the titanic shifts in the marketplace.
To my (admittedly untrained) eye, I'm not sure what Microsoft could have done differently. It had put forward mobile operating systems before; Windows Phone and Pen both had longstanding iterations. So while I think it's easy to blame Ballmer, it strikes me to some extent that Microsoft suffered a lot of bad luck. It's timing was wrong on some products, and after having won the PC wars it simply didn't know where to go.
In the meantime, RIM comes along and recreates the mobile computing industry, and then Apple, and a little later Google, take the initiative and basically create the computer marketplace we see today. Maybe Microsoft could have done something earlier, but the way I look at the chronology of smartphones, I don't see where Microsoft had a lot of room to take the initiative. 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?
Where Ballmer screwed up, if you can call it that, was in the vain attempt to basically buy Microsoft a market; with the Surface tablet line and the Nokia purchase, and even worse, to try to force a homogeneous GUI on everyone from Windows Server customers to Surface RT users. Metro is the real Ballmer fuck up, the one that spread Microsoft's mobile weakness across its entire product line.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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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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.
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But it isn't a natural conclusion. The workflows on mobile devices is entirely different than a PC. Metro was based on a false premise, and Microsoft is reaping the punishments of that false premise. Even Microsoft seems to know that, and Metro on the desktop has taken the first step towards becoming a gimicky new gadgets bar with Windows 8.1, and I'll wager by Windows 9 it will have completed that voyage.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sometimes those heavy stones complain when you toss them down a ravine where they belong.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It would have made more sense to have the mobile GUI run as an application over a desktop system, and just give users the choice.
Agreed. But Microsoft got greedy. It wasn't just about getting into the mobile market, it was BEING a market. Metro is a vector for the Microsoft store, where they get to take a cut of every app sold. Bean-counters saw the revenue of Apple's App Store, and demanded that Microsoft get in on that racket by leveraging their market-share of the desktop.
They figure if Metro wasn't front-and-center on every desktop as a non-option, people would opt out and the Store might take too long to take off and generate the apps needed to persuade people to switch from iOS or Android. Trouble is, these things can't be forced.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
> It would have made more sense to have the mobile GUI run as an application over a desktop system, and just give users the choice.
Given that my mobile phone is more powerful (or at least responsive) than the desktop my company provides, largely due to the SSD, we may not be too far off from seeing a world where your mobile phone is your desktop and having the right UI up will depend on whether or not you're connected to a screen and keyboard or not. The underlying technology you're suggesting would make that seamless and could be autodetected and swapped on the fly. Microsoft could dominate that market.... if they could get their shit together.
I've got a Note3, and while it doesn't quite manage it yet, by the Note5 you could see it being technically possible to move seemlessly from voice input, to pen input, to touch input to keyboard input, outputting to any of the built in screen, a desktop display or a TV or projector (say for netflix) in a way that makes sense. I'm not sure android can rise to that challenge, but the hardware is almost there as is the software.
As for Microsofts disasters trying to do hardware to compete with Apple it all started a long time before Surface. Remember Zune?
CEOs are a cult of personality in modern society. It isn't about smarts, savvy, or any other jazz. It's a type of show business.
It's not even in modern society, though. It's in a subset of modern society: movers and shakers, and their dick-riders. Only a tiny percentage of people would recognize a significant percentage of vulture capitalists, CEOs, or other wearers of golden parachutes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
To my (admittedly untrained) eye, I'm not sure what Microsoft could have done differently. It had put forward mobile operating systems before; Windows Phone and Pen both had longstanding iterations. So while I think it's easy to blame Ballmer, it strikes me to some extent that Microsoft suffered a lot of bad luck. It's timing was wrong on some products, and after having won the PC wars it simply didn't know where to go.
It's not *what*, it's *how* and *what for*. Microsoft had everything they ever wanted - complete dominion of the computer industry at the time. At the dawn of the millennium, no one made a move if they weren't sure Microsoft wouldn't or couldn't compete in that arena. A few years earlier, a stray remark from Ballmer brought the tech market stocks down 5% in a single day. They have everything to lose, and nothing to gain.
Apple, Google, and RIM were *hungry*. They each had a vision that didn't necessarily involve dominating the market and instead was more customer focused. They cared about the finer points of their customer's issues. They iterated rapidly.
Microsoft's attempt to grow the computer industry ran into their real desire to simply dominate what existed. If they couldn't dominate it they wouldn't grow it. And that attitude persisted for over a decade, so they became incapable of competing - they didn't have to for years. They still don't have to in their core markets. It's just that those markets don't comprise "all of computing" anymore.
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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.
To my (admittedly untrained) eye, I'm not sure what Microsoft could have done differently.
Divest itself of the operating system business. The handwriting was on the wall 10 years ago that there is a coming race to zero for the price of what an operating system is worth to the end-user.
I still maintain that the US Justice Department splitting Microsoft into multiple companies would have done wonderful things for Microsoft. The operating system people would be forced to compete and free to pursue their goals of making the best O/S without influence from the applications, enterprise software, and hardware sides of the company. The MSOffice team could have embraced the concept of running across multiple platforms earlier (iOS, Android, Linux...).
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
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.
I think you're wrong there. I think Carly Fiorina _is_ smart enough to run a hot dog stand.
RT not being based on .NET was (and still is) the biggest mistake Microsoft made. They would have triple the apps if they had done this. They just had to swallow their massive pride and base it on Mono.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I'm not clear. Why is Metro the right thing for the staff of my company, who have basically been using the same GUI for the better part of 20 years now? What exactly does Metro offer my staff that they don't already have, and aren't already familiar with? Why should I spend my company's IT and training budgets on:
1. Teaching them a new GUI paradigm?
2. Investing in new technology like touch screens to actually use this GUI?
3. Invest even more money in new licensing costs to take advantage of the advantages you plan on specifying?
Here's what I think, if you want my 2 cents. Metro offers absolutely fuck all that wasn't already available, is a retard's GUI on a desktop, fucks up the kinds of multiasking that the taskbar makes easy, and has done fucking to sell Redmond's mobile offerings.
Here's what I want, if Microsoft ever wants to see me spend another fucking nickel on their operating systems. I want Metro if not outright removed, then made so that it can basically be ignored. I want the GUI that my staff have known for two decades back right in front where it fucking belongs.
Otherwise, we'll just keep using our Windows 7 licenses until January 14, 2020, by which time the last software that requires Internet Explorer will have been updated and discarded, and we can abandon Windows on the desktop.
You see, in the business world, conservatism tends to reign over "the latest fucky dunky dunky" GUI set that the Redmond developtment teams seem to masturbate to these days.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"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.
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.
If you think you can cram the same UI for a 5 inch touch-screen and a 25 inch desktop computer, I'm afraid it just means you haven't much of a clue about UI in general.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I'm not clear here. Why should I use Start button replacement of dubious merits to replace functionality that was present prior to Windows 8. I'm in an enterprise environment, where GPOs rule the roost, and your suggestion is that I use a third party tool that likely won't integrate into that environment in any meaningful way.
You seem to be of the opinion that the world should bend to Metro. Pretty much every organization I deal with does not want it, will not use it, and wants it completely hidden. Most plan on using their Windows 7 licences until that becomes nonviable for security reasons.
And if you think, by 2020, there won't be challengers to Microsoft Office, then you're deluded. If Metro isn't invisible by 2020, we will be moving to other platforms. Period.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
All I heard from people doing applications for Windows Mobile was how nasty it was to program for. When the competition was still Symbian this was ok. It was the best mobile operating system for a time but it was utterly outclassed by iOS and Android. Windows CE was not Windows NT kernel based. It was a completely different beast altogether.
Divest itself of the operating system business. The handwriting was on the wall 10 years ago that there is a coming race to zero for the price of what an operating system is worth to the end-user.
errr....you mean drop the business that has 90+% market share and earns them tens of billions of dollars per year? That's how they do business in the bizarro world. They still make record profits thanks almost entirely to that business.
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
To my (admittedly untrained) eye, I'm not sure what Microsoft could have done differently. It had put forward mobile operating systems before; Windows Phone
When MIcrosoft released WP7, they still had an ~18% marketshare. My brother sold phones when the iPhone came out, and he would sell it to anyone who wanted to use Microsoft documents on a phone.
WP7 ruined all that by being a pretty UI that couldn't do much. If they'd maintained backwards compatibility (which they went out of their way to prevent), while making a pretty UI (which they did), then there's a good chance they would be competing now, and Nokia would still be alive.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've always speculated that when MSFT was nailed for monopoly behavior, the DOJ gave the MSFT BOD a choice; MSFT would be broken up or put Ballmer in charge.
Instead of breaking MSFT up, the DOJ figured having someone like Ballmer in charge would be punishment enough. And ultimately achieve something close to the intended results of a breakup.
By using this strategy, the gov't didn't appear as though it's trying to tell a big business how to operate, but MSFT's growth certainly was stunted thanks to Ballmer's decisions.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Probably the smart ones that want todo away with archaic file extensions. Does Mac have them, or Linux? Or unix? Just how do they get by without seeing them?