Ten Reasons Why Steve Ballmer Should Be Fired | Hacker News Reader

Ten Reasons Why Steve Ballmer Should Be Fired

extremetech.com

4 pointsraganwald6 comments

A couple of weak points--XBoxes overheating is hardly a reason for dismissing the CEO--but a couple of the points are right on the money, AFAIC:

1. Stock price. That's Steve's ONLY job. The only excuse for a dismal stock price during the same period that AAPL and GOOG have enjoyed great success is to claim that anyone else would have made the stock drop and he protected investors from actually losing money on their MSFT holdings.

I'm sorry, but anyone else with the same performance in a Fortune500 company would have been gone a while ago. The only exceptions are companies with family dynasties like Ford and Kraft, or Microsoft where Steve is Bill's long-time friend.

2. Milking the Office and Windows cows while the herd escapes the pasture. The OP turns these into several different points, but they are the same point: Releasing uncompelling upgrades just to keep the money rolling in while allowing competition to take customers away. Steve needed to play better defense, meaning customers should not be walking away from Windows or Office.

3. Yahoo. Yes, the OP is right. The merger--at any price--looked like a way for make things so confusing that Ballmer couldn't be fired until he cleaned up the mess. It's a classic BigCo move: Do a re-org to protect management from being fired. And there's no re-org like a massive merger.

Now that people have stopped criticizing Jerry for turning down the B$44, the spotlight--and axe--should fall on Steve for starting the whole mess. How many people have already resigned or started job-hunting at Microsoft when they heard about the merger and the obvious impending layoffs and confusion?

This piece in a lot of ways reads like a hack piece, but I'd like to point out the author's repeated examples of Microsoft stealing from Apple. In particular:

Apparently Microsoft has already stolen...excuse me...incorporated "multi-touch" into a preliminary version of Windows 7...I suspect there will be a lawsuit if Windows 7 comes with anything resembling the multi-touch features already found on the iPhone.

Multi-touch has been in development for approximately 25 years, and technically in the Apple Vs MS battle, MS struck first with the Surface, which was usable (if not purchasable) in April of 2007. The iPhone was available in June of that year. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch)

I agree, that was a weak beat. I consider the surface computer to be like a concept car from Detroit: it's an exercie in puffery. Apple did the same thing with their "Knowledge Navigator" video.

And any ways, stealing from Apple is MSFT's job. I sold my MSFT stock a while back, but if I still had any I would be distressed if they weren't stealing anything. We're talking about Ballmer's job here. His job is to make the stock make money for investors.

Does anyone go long on MSFT because they want to put some R&D in their portfolio? I don't think so. They buy MSFT because they want to invest in a company that executes on monetizing other people's ideas.

(side beat: much as they invest in GOOG because they want to invest in a company that monetizes other people's content.)

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch the Microsoft Surface runs Windows Vista and costs between US$5,000 and US$10,000 and the hardware for an open source clone is between US$500 and US$1,000. You're not going to sell many Microsoft Surfaces when your local computer shop can make five times as many for the same price.

Granted, and bear in mind I'm not saying the Surface is a viable product--but the assumption in the article is that Multi-Touch is Apple's, when the tech is anyone's.

That Apple has the trademark is another story, and raises (for me) questions of how trademarks are managed and issued.

There's only 10?

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