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Ballmer Leaves Microsoft Board
jones_supa writes: After leaving his position as CEO of Microsoft a year ago, Steve Ballmer has still held a position as a member of the board of directors for the company. Now, he is leaving the board, explaining why in a letter to fresh Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "I have become very busy," Ballmer explains. "I see a combination of Clippers, civic contribution, teaching and study taking up a lot of time." Despite his departure, the former-CEO is still invested in the company's success, and he spent most of the letter encouraging Nadella and giving advice. Nadella shot back a supportive, equally optimistic response, promising that Microsoft will thrive in "the mobile-first, cloud-first world."
. . . customer last.
Burma Shave.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
WTF! Then why did he lay off me and all of my friends that work on mobile? No. They gave-up on mobile when they laid-off most of the mobile employees.
.... Ya, if I was Ballmer I would be distancing myself and selling stock as fast as I could.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
They're already the second largest Iaas provider after Amazon (EC2 vs Azure) and the second largest business Saas provider after Salesforce (SF vs Office365/Dynamics cloud). As they cloudify more of their offerings they'll be able to capture plenty of revenue from mobile, and since they'll actually be eating their own dogfood their tools for large customers should get better and more and more small customers will just host with them.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
M$ never dominated the mobile market with WinCe or PPC
They were highly unpopular compared with the Black Berry and Palm Pilots.
it's basketball. REBOUND, REBOUND, REBOUND!! (tosses chair. another chair. water jug. wig. money. case full of Surface II tablets, one at a time. tosses T-shirt cannon ....)
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Yeah, because Bill would never give money to charity.
Microsoft doesn't have many fans on Slashdot but even the most die-hard of fans must now see that they're in a real bad position.
The used to be invincible in the consumer space but now the computing device of choice is either the tablet or the smart phone. Precious few of these are Windows based.
The used to be invincible in the business user space but the move to mobile computing means business people are using iPhone and iPads, not Windows Phones and Surface.
Then there's Bing, who's only claim to fame is being the world's greatest search engine. For. Porn.
Then there's Azure. We actually looked at Azure and discovered that the same hardware in EC2 was half the price. If you going to twice as much you might as well give up and go home.
Then there was the own goal of the latest generation XBox. They managed to piss everyone off for no discernible gain.
The only area their grip is still strong is PC gaming. For how long, who knows?
Microsoft is a spent force. They're out of ideas. In a few short years they've gone from being the 800lb gorilla to just struggling just to remain relevant.
It reminds me of Brazil versus Germany at this year's world cup. I'm not celebrating any more; it's just sad at this point.
Dear Satya,
I sincerely feel that microsoft stock is very high and is unsustainable over a long period. I cannot sell my stock while still on microsoft board. By leaving the board, I will be able to sell the stock before it crashes. Why do you think, I made you CEO in the first place?
Your former boss.
I'm sorry but you're incorrect. In 2007 Windows Mobile had the largest market share of any OS for mobile devices, with 42% of the market:
http://bgr.com/2011/12/13/appl...
They had tied Blackberry the year before, and edged them out in 2007 which was when iPhone was released. Then the next year iPhone took over.
Going back pre-smartphone, when the only real players in the PDA arena were Palm and Microsoft, Microsoft surpassed Palm in 2004, and from then on it was all downhill for Palm as they tried to update an archaic OS to utilize advances in hardware.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/65...
Microsoft soundly won the PDA war, but then were totally decimated soon after the PDA market transitioned into the Smart Phone market. In turn, Palm, then Blackberry, then Microsoft all owned the market and then stagnated, failed to innovate, and were superseded by new OSes that didn't have legacy issues (or trying to maintain backwards compatibility, etc).
Better known as 318230.
| Tablets have also failed in the market. Apple is the only vendor to have seen some success, but that was built more upon hype and the quasi-religious attitude that many people hold toward Apple devices, rather than out of any real need or use for such devices. Outside of a small number of niche use cases, people in general have found tablets to be useless.
The niche use cases are
a) reading email
b) sending messages
c) using web apps
d) watching movies
e) playing games
which as it turns out are very common.
However it's true that Microsoft doesn't have a huge play here on the terminal (tablet end), but it does on the service end.
It just means that now such software will be expected to be readable and usable (for some things) on a tablet terminal as well as a laptop terminal. There's plenty of traveling businessmen who might want to access a service application through a tablet (e.g sales force) that starts in 2 seconds when they're in the airport instead of using the whole laptop.
For Microsoft, tablets are not an opportunity to make hardware or sell operating systems (the total global revenue from tablet operating system sales is $0), but only as another terminal to hosted applications.
They should stick to writing business software. Instead of trying to fight and lose against very capable competitors in their primary niches, i.e. Google and Apple, they should compete in the space of general business software. There's much more opportunity beyond Office. Soft targets, for example all of Oracle's horrid non-database application software, where the standards are egregiously low, and make Office seem like a work from Michelangelo.
"the mobile-first, cloud-first world."
This sums up the core MS issue better than anything else I've ever read. MS has never been innovative, but worse: It has never been a company that likes change. Their world-view is static and stationary. While they acknowledge the world is changing (reality can be quite persuasive), they don't see movement, they see a succession of stationary status quos.
They will now throw everything at becoming the perfect company for the picture of the world they have. And in five years look out the window and see that the world has changed - again.
It's also the reason we all hate MS - due to their still existing stranglehold on computing, they keep much of the rest of the world static with them. The damage done by preventing innovation and progress is easily ten times MS net worth.
All because some people don't understand that life is dynamic.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org