Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

Also having to sell silly products again is the CEOs problem for having to decided to sell those. Its just that the past 10-13 years have been cluttered with bad products and I would assume the ceo had a major role to play in it.

When Ballmer said nobody wants a phone with a keyboard, or that Zune would kill iPod he acted on that until reality was exhausted from beating him mercilessly over the head with proof he was wrong.

Ultimately, you have to remember that he had an agenda, and if he wasn't selling it that day, then he would probably say something negative about the idea or implementation (of a competitor's product).

Here's a page that has more examples: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/steve-jobs/

How so? The guy is absolutely brilliant!

Of course, you must realize he actually works for Microsoft, not Nokia.

Most public companies could give less of a crap about their share price after the IPO. What people trade shares for is really inconsequential as long as the company itself maintains 51% and stock market panics on them don't leak to their profit centers.

The comparison to railroads is apt. Railroads are still immensely important, even if people no longer romanticize them. Innovations in railroad technology are still very important. The financial difficulties railroads faced in the middle of the 20th century had more to do with the government promoting automobiles than with the superiority of cars and trucks. If Microsoft is the technology world's' equivalent of a railroad they are in a pretty good position -- they might not be the company everyone is talking about but they will be the company that everyone is dependent on.

In my view, Ballmer's mistake is to not go after Oracle and SAP much more than chasing Apple and Google.

The same thing happened with WinPhone. MSFT spent a lot of time developing an honestly pretty decent OS, only to have its launch lineup filled with unimaginative, plasticky bullshit phones from Samsung and LG.

I for one think Microsoft's messy divorce from OEMs is a great thing, my only disappointment was that they didn't throw the OEMs under the bus at supersonic speed.

As do all successful people. If success were easy, everyone would be doing it.

For all the ways I disagree with Ballmer, this seems like a poor choice to point out.

Has a lot of failures on his plate for one man? Please hand this comment an award for middlebrow remark of the year.

Let's put Steve Ballmer's accomplishments in perspective: Have you tripled a multi-billion dollar company's revenue over ten years? Did you launch the Xbox? Did you launch Windows Phone (10% marketshare in 3 years)? Did you launch Bing (growing faster than the search market)? Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world? Did you grow the Windows Server business out of nothing compared to where it was 15 years ago? Did you turn Visual Studio into the gold standard for IDEs?

Didn't think so. Ballmer will be remembered for one great mistake, and that's denying Microsoft's culture and employees a strong technical visionary over the course of his tenure.

Ballmer is a COO, kind of like the guy running Apple these days - neither Ballmer nor Tim Cook have a strong ability to anticipate changes in the way technology is consumed compared to their predecessors. And this is largely what's responsible for Microsoft's big whiffs - they missed the mark multiple times on the consumerization of technology.

People are already starting to grumble many of the same criticisms of Tim Cook's innovation that they did about Steve Ballmer, and who can blame them? Over the past three years all Apple has shipped are the same products they had before but with different screen sizes.

However, that doesn't mean that Tim Cook won't be successful in growing Apple's business, nor does it mean that Steve Ballmer was a failure.

As an ex-Microsoftie, I could not be happier to see Steve go. The company needs a technical visionary in order to stop having to play from behind every time there's a change in the market.

But to call Steve a failure is utter nonsense and requires overlooking all of the successes that he and Microsoft had during his tenure.

So we get a constant barrage of misstep boondoggles like Web Forms, Click Once Installers, Linq2SQL getting deprecated almost as soon as it was launched, etc. And with every step a larger pile of configuration and attributes that need to be added to get things to play nice with the OS.

No. The sensor was developed by PrimeSense.

However, the key part of Kinect is the software, which was based on machine learning work done at Microsoft Research.

MSR is somewhat infamous for developing all sorts of whiz-bang prototypes that never make it to market. Kinect was an exception.

As for who convinced Anders Hejlsberg to jump ship, that was Bill Gates. He was still CEO of Microsoft in 1996.

Generics, one of the CLR's major distinguishing features over the JVM, came entirely from MSR, at considerable resistance from MS Corp.

Yeah, but a CEO also gets blamed for everything bad that happens during his tenure.

It's like my Google+ account ... wide open for my friends. Except none of them are on there.

Personally I think WP8 is an excellent OS. But it's a distant third in market share.

Like hell it is. If you're a small individual developer, you get the 3rd class treatment and access to their "open" api. If you're a big company, you get much more access to the OS than everyone else. Example: when WP7 was introduced, only large companies could make apps using the double wide tiles for their apps, individual developers didn't have access. This and MANY other examples were prevalent all over the platform. I know of an ex-MS developer who complains that only large companies get access to the faster and better undocumented apis not available to everyday developers. As for incredible features, WP8 also lags behind android and apple in many areas.

Is everyone here too young to remember Palm, Windows CE, Pocket PC, et al?

We need new terminology for describing the transition that occurred once we had pervasive smartphones with built-in app stores, because it's nonsensical to claim that "mobile" didn't exist before that.

I used to hate MS. Now I feel sorry for them, I hope they can make a go of it in the future. The people who came after them in market dominance were so much worse..

You mean SP2? Reminds me of "Feature Packs".

You know what makes sense to me? MS is only broken according to engineers inside and people in the SV echochamber. They've got piles of cash, they generate piles of cash, they pay a dividend... Other than equity prices, they look pretty good. They were late to search but bing has carved out a niche, late to mobile but they've got a niche, late to games but they look like they are doing just fine there. Vista, Windows 8, RT and Surface seem to be missteps but they are still shipping numbers that most companies would be envious of.

If they were or are bothered by the flat equity prices, why did it take so long? And to be very honest, the engineers I've spoke to that have mentioned "problems" within the company generally have options that have been underwater, FWIW.

I think Ballmer and upper management think they are doing just fine, they think there is a competitive landscape but they are still making tons of money and leading a few sectors. He reorged them for what he sees as the next 10 years or something and he's going to find a replacement that sees his vision. They won't pull an outsider and probably don't see the need as there isn't anything "broken" that needs to be "changed." I predict no big changes.

> The MSDN Magazine Camp is always trying to convince you to use new and complicated external technology like COM+, MSMQ, MSDE, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and its components, MSXML, DirectX (the very latest version, please), Windows Media Player, and Sharepoint... Sharepoint! which nobody has; a veritable panoply of external dependencies each one of which is going to be a huge headache when you ship your application to a paying customer and it doesn't work right. The technical name for this is DLL Hell. It works here: why doesn't it work there?

> The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don't make things any worse, let's just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

Spolsky concludes, "Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle."

Incidentally, .NET was what finally convinced me to jump ship from the Microsoft world, and I've never looked back.

There is (probably) only so much change one company / person can do. Even if there is additional potential, in the end companies will seek profit and stability.

Consumers are fickle, and you have to be on top of the latest trends in GUI, service, products, business models.

Corporate customers tend to be stickier, and more resistant to change.

The A/G/A/F foursome are geared for consumers, and are suitably nimble. The others you listed aren't. The worst thing a company can do is try to be perfect for both types of customers.

This absurd notion that Microsoft could have ever possibly retained "control" of the future of computing (apparently forever would be the requirement) is non-sense.

Are you meaning to say that an enterprise software company can't be looking toward the future, and/or that only consumer facing technology companies are innovating and creating new stuff that will affect the future?

And I think that's fine. Added together, these are the bread and butter.

As a whole, we benefit more from them doing what they do well and having stable revenue than trying to make everything under the sun and creating gigantic monopolies that dictate standards and absorb any company doing something remotely interesting (like, sadly, today's Google).

You're forgetting the XBox a bit too quickly.

Microsoft is worth roughly three times what Facebook is at one-twentieth the P/E ratio. Why do people assume they are losing? I fully accept that they are continually riding the coat tails of Windows XP for the majority of that and have missed a number of opportunities though. But let's be honest, everyone but Apple missed the smartphone revolution except Google and Samsung and Microsoft owns part of Facebook and isn't really playing in a competing market for the most part.

What other enterprise company has major footholds in even half of the markets that Microsoft has? Who else has Windows?

Heh. You really think any successful tech company has ever had a mission besides making money? Some of them talk big in their first few years, but they never follow through and they get embarrassed and try to sweep it under the rug pretty quick. Remember when the RealPlayer company was called Progressive Networks, because it was supposed to "provide a distribution channel for politically progressive content"? Remember "don't be evil"?

...that is to say, it is a fairly reasonable thing to say. They just "missed it" in the opposite direction from how companies usually miss things. They came and went too soon. They sold smartphones and airplanes before everybody was buying them.

C# and Java do look the same, but the use cases for them are totally and completely different.

Java is a cross-platform language used when you don't want to write code more than once for more than 1 platform.

C# is a Windows-exclusive deal that gives you access to WFs and other Windows-centric things, including some low level shit that would be a pain to deal with otherwise.

Despite the languages looking really similar, they don't fill the same slot.

I'm glad they lost that lawsuit

If I've held a share since 1999, in place of it I don't just have a share today: I have whatever I've done with the dividend payments that came in the interim.

Profit-wise, Apple claim that their digital stores only break-even, but revenue-wise, the stores dwarf the Macintosh line, with music alone matching Macs.

So why are you completely ignoring dividends and a stock split?

Looking at 10 years of stock performance while ignoring those factors isn't decent analysis, it's terrible.

Inflation is only relevant if you want to see how the purchasing power of Microsoft owners changed.

Most hardware was not powerful enough for Vista when it was released. It's the pressed who killed it. Windows 7 received glamorous reviews. However, in hindsight, Vista and 7 are not all that different. Most of the changes that daily users would encounter are cosmetic.

Windows Phone

Microsofts primary problem was that it was late and (as one of the consequences) there are not that many Windows Phone apps. However, WP7 and WP8 were generally quite well-received by the media. Windows Phone is really a nice phone OS, what Microsoft f*cked up is the transition from WP7 to WP8.

As you pointed out, Beta is the correlation of a security's price history to the market's movement.

Approximately half of any group of equities will have a correlation below 1 against the group's weighted average performance. If the group is large enough, its movement will closely mirror the market, so for a large enough group of equities (chosen randomly) about half will have correlation below 1, and half above.

It merely means that Microsoft is reasonably closely tied to the market's movement, though slightly below.

You compared it against its sector, technology. The tech sector has a higher average beta than the utilites sector. That's just the nature of the sector.

Where it gets interesting is something like FB at 3.29. That's really high. But its price history is also short, having IPOd so recently... perhaps over time it will stabilize at a lower number.

Look what phone DIRNSA uses today: a Blackberry.

I'd sell non-core assets (Xbox, Bing, hotmail, consumer stuff in general, etc.), and focus on the core OS/mobile/Azure/Office/MSDN systems.

With Ballmer gone, if people like Hanselman and ScottGu gain more influence within the company, I'm sure we'll see great things being open sourced.

It's hard to shift the company to open source with someone like Ballmer at the top, it would be like admitting defeat to the open source movement, and people in such positions of power never like to admit they were wrong in their strategy. It's human nature, I almost don't blame him.

They really need to either spin off a separate business, sell some divisions or just stop trying to compete in some areas. Experience shows their OS dominance doesn't count for much in the phone, tablet, search or cloud markets.

I'm voting for private cloud.

1. They have a strong presence in businesses in both the desktop and server spaces.

2. They have the cash in the bank and plenty of good people to throw into a serious push to move the market.

3. They'd be playing to their established strengths, instead of trying to challenge the likes of Apple and Google in areas where the latter are already far ahead.

4. They'd be playing to today's cloud-happy market sentiment, but also able to avoid some of the inescapable flaws that have been starting to show as more businesses have gained experience with the reality of outsourcing too much.

5. This strategy is compatible with almost any serious strategy for the home user/entertainment market. In fact, with the rise of practices like remote working via VPNs and mobile working with BYOD, there is a lot of potential to bridge the two, again in ways their competitors simply aren't geared up for.

Linux is superior for mobile platforms. Even Ubuntu with it's bloated software and UI can run. Someone just needs to develop a good ecosystem for that merges Desktop, Laptops, tablets and other mobile devices where you actually develop for them sort of simultaneously. Or your framework can be designed to incorporate all factors of computing and even make them interoperable.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-23/call-it-ballmer-gam...

But no product lines last forever - even Windows is bleeding market share, and upgrade rates are dropping like a brick. It seems a lot of people are happy with Win7 (or even WinXP) and not moving.

This strikes me as a Blackberry situation - market leader by a mile, but attempts to modernize and develop the Next Big Thing have all failed. They have enormous momentum and can coast for a long time - but what happens after? RIM failed to react to changing markets due to iPhone/Android, and arrogantly threw around their (momentum-based) sales numbers. Then those dried up.

The only reason people use it at all isn't because it's fantastic, but because it's incrementally better than Windows XP without all the garbage Vista foisted on the user.

After having used it for an extended period of time, the only real improvements I've seen are in the explorer shell, which are minor at best, and the theme.

I think that he could turn the company around in months. After all recent failures in MS history are policy errors and not execution ones. The teams still ship high quality software - the problem is mostly with what management wants (at least what I see from the consumer side)

A similar memo would have done the most good in 2005, when it was becoming clear that we'd soon all have access to pretty decent wireless networks and high performance pocket computers, but also clear that WinCE and the PocketPC were lousy ways to take advantage of those facts.

"The Board of Directors has appointed a special committee to direct the process. [...] The special committee is working with Heidrick & Struggles International Inc., a leading executive recruiting firm, and will consider both external and internal candidates."