Mr. Ballmer did not underperform - a closer look at Microsoft's "lost decade" | Hacker News Reader

Mr. Ballmer did not underperform - a closer look at Microsoft's "lost decade"

zdnet.com

8 pointsgrellas6 comments

The article seems to argue that Microsoft did well for a company in the PC industry, which totally ignores the fact that Microsoft spent the past decade desperately trying to diversity its way out of the PC industry the same way Apple has.

You have to judge Ballmer based upon the expectations and goals he set out for himself. If he was content to manage a PC software company in a period of maturity, he wouldn't have wasted resources on trying to dominate every market from web applications to internet search to gaming consoles to mobile phones to digital music players to god knows what else. He would have focused on a smaller number of extensions with more strategic value rather than chasing trends.

Instead, Ballmer set out consciously to expand Microsoft into new markets, with limited success and multiple costly failures. Their biggest success was Xbox, and I don't know if that's even broke even yet (considering the loss they took on consoles for so long).

Yeah, Ballmer's not the most pleasant person, and it's easy and fun to hate Microsoft, but they've consistently made a LOT of money for 25+ straight years now. Jobs record is much spottier over that time frame, to say the least. Granted, Ballmer didn't take over till 2001 or whenever, but still, that Gassee article was myopic at best.

That's simply not true. Gates was the CEO up until 2000 and though Ballmer had a lot of influence the Senior VPs still reported to Gates. People like Brad Silverberg and Jim Allchin weren't taking their marching orders from Ballmer during the 90s (and I'd personally argue Silverberg had a lot more to do with Microsoft's success than Ballmer did).

In that context the '00s have largely been Ballmer taking the money from Microsoft's 90s victories and funneling it into a series of failed attempts to enter new markets.

As for Jobs he introduced the first iPod 9 months after Ballmer became CEO of Microsoft and I think we all know how Apple's fortunes have gone since then

Wouldn't you agree with the general idea that Microsoft has lost their ability to successfully innovate and release products that anyone cares about? They've failed so many times in the past decade that their reputation is greatly tarnished. They may still be making money from entrenched customers, which means ongoing profits, but you have to be nervous when there horizon looks so bleak.

I would agree that that's the perception, and certainly the case with some of their products (I'm thinking of IE and Vista, among others), but Windows 7, Xbox Live, Zune music software, and the ZuneHD/Windows 7 Phone Series are all pretty darn good products. Oh, and Bing. Bing is actually great. That's not to say they're going to be successful, but they've definitely been innovating in recent years. They've simply been eclipsed by both Apple and Google in the media.

And I have a hard time agreeing the horizon is bleak when they still have like 80-90% marketshare in desktop OSs, Office Suite, and Exchange. I work with Dynamics AX at work, something no one's ever heard of, and it makes them like a billion dollars a year in revenue.

It does look bleak on the mobile and tablet horizons, which are certainly the growth markets, but I'm not ready to write off Microsoft there yet. Perhaps Windows 7 Phone Series will bomb and perhaps not, but they started off in the hole on desktop OSs and word processing and spreadsheets as well. And they succeeded there with inferior products for the most part.

Personally, I'm cheering for the Google model over the MSFT and Apple models. But none of them seem to be facing an early 90's Apple-style crash anytime soon. Should be fun to watch any way it turns out, though.

The author of this article seems to totally forget that Microsoft sells something other than Windows.

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