Steve Ballmer's Big-Time Error: Not Resigning Years Ago 357
Nerval's Lobster writes "Any number of executives could take Ballmer's place, including a few he unceremoniously kicked to the curb over the years. Whoever steps into that CEO role, however, faces a much greater challenge than if Ballmer had quietly resigned several years ago. Ballmer famously missed the boat on tablets and smartphones; Windows 8 isn't selling as well as Microsoft expected; and on Websites and blogs such as Mini-Microsoft (which had a brilliant posting about Ballmer's departure), employees complain bitterly about the company's much-maligned stack-ranking system, its layers of bureaucracy, and its inability to innovate. Had Ballmer left years ago, replaced by someone with the ability to more keenly anticipate markets, the company would probably be in much better shape to face its coming challenges. In its current form, Microsoft often feels like it's struggling in the wake of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook."
In an interview with ZDNet, Ballmer said his biggest regret as CEO was in how Windows Vista was developed. Opinions are divided on both the nature of his resignation and what it will mean for Microsoft. While the stock price is up, BusinessWeek and others suggest the purpose of the transition is to find somebody better able to anticipate future trends. That would certainly lead to more organizational changes within Microsoft, something employees suffered through just last month. Ben Kuchera at the Penny Arcade Report points out that this could mean Microsoft will try to re-enter markets it has abandoned. He asks the company to "stay the hell away from PC gaming."
Vista (Score:4, Insightful)
In an interview with ZDNet, Ballmer said his biggest regret as CEO was in how Windows Vista was developed.
The aftermath of Vista is precisely when he should have resigned. CEOs of other tech companies have resigned for lesser debacles.
$20B the value of Steve Ballmer leaving (Score:5, Insightful)
Ballmer resigned. Stock went up 7.29% in a big jump of about $20B in value.
So Microsoft without Steve Ballmer is worth $20B more than a Microsoft with Steve Ballmer.
That is the legacy of a great man.
Steve Ballmer the -$20B man.
Question is when (Score:5, Insightful)
The question isn't if he should have been let go years ago, the questions are when he should have been let and what the hell took so long? Defenders like to point out that Microsoft has become more profitable and larger under Steve Ballmer. Ballmer had disaster after disaster at the helm of Microsoft, imagine what the stock would have done /without/ all the disasters the Ballmer created?
Personally I'm of the opinion he should have been let go after the fiasco that was Vista.
Re:"Stay away from PC Gaming" Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
My prediction is that by Windows 9, Metro will be an optional (and thus ultimately destined to be scrapped) feature.
Ballmer was fired (Score:5, Insightful)
No one takes a nearly $1 billion write down and lives to make more humongous mistakes another day. There's got to be a line somewhere, and Steve finally crossed it.
Re:$20B the value of Steve Ballmer leaving (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad thing is that... (Score:4, Insightful)
...Microsoft's future directions are so obvious. Microsoft needs to"
Give away all those extra Windows RT tablets to developers in exchange for a promise to deploy their app on the platform.
And so on. All of these things are obvious to a casual observer. Why they aren't obvious to Microsoft is beyond my comprehension. It is as though they have been managed by somebody who has been on vacation for the past decade, left to continue doing what they have always done, in the vain hope that somehow their previous offerings will become relevant again. They won't, and the longer Office is managed under the same bozos, the more likely it is to become completely irrelevant in the same way Windows has in the mobile space.
Re:"Stay away from PC Gaming" Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot basement dwellers tend to vastly overemphasize the importance of PC gaming. The entire PC game market could disappear and it would make barely a blip in Microsoft's revenue.
Even the idea of owning a desktop PC (especially with huge red fans and bright blue LEDs) is considered ridiculous by most people in year 2013.
So:
1. Businesses aren't buying desktop PCs because Windows 8.
2. Consumers aren't buying desktop PCs because they're 'ridiculous'.
Then who's buying those desktop PCs, other than gamers?
Re:$20B the value of Steve Ballmer leaving (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you are saying is that if Ballmer was an awesome CEO who made good decisions that the stock price still would have jumped as much as it did?
Re:Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Ballmer had one job: don't fuck up Windows.
He failed at the modest task which was his charge.
They didn't miss the boat (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft didn't miss the boat. They inadvertently helped create the very circumstances which led to them being excluded from the current tablet and smartphones we have today.
Back in the PDA days, it was a two-player game: Palm vs WinCE (later renamed Windows Mobile to get rid of the awful abbreviation). As with Netscape vs IE, Microsoft competed its heart out until it won, then dropped the ball. After Palm was more or less vanquished, Microsoft rested on its laurel. Windows Mobile pretty much went nowhere (and some would say it even went backwards with Microsoft trying to foist the Windows Desktop interface paradigm onto it). Everyone could see phones and PDAs were going to converge (and those who couldn't should've gotten a wake-up call from the Blackberry), but Microsoft made no real effort to add phone capabilities to Windows Mobile. So in the end PDA features ended up being added to phones, instead of phone capability being added to PDAs. And when PDAs went away, so did Windows Mobile.
Microsoft was a major driving force behind the Tablet PC. The Tablet versions of Windows were actually pretty good, especially the handwriting recognition. But where they erred was they wanted to make sure every tablet sold was also a copy of Windows sold. So they focused on making sure tablets were high-end PC notebooks which converted into the tablet form factor. While companies were ok with buying a $2500 tablet, regular people weren't. The immense popularity of netbooks should've been a wake-up call that there was a huge untapped market for a small, (relatively) cheap consumption-only device. But Microsoft did its best to steer manufacturers away from these low-end devices which didn't use Windows (and in fact killed off the Linux-based netbooks by making "Starter" versions of Windows). So tablets were relegated to high-end high-cost devices.
When you manipulate a market like this and steer people away from the direction the market wants to go, you create a lot of invisible pent-up demand. Apple managed to latch onto that demand with a tablet which neither used Windows nor Intel CPUs. Microsoft (and Intel) only have themselves to blame for trying to steer the market in a direction more favorable to themselves, rather than producing what the market wanted. That may have worked in the 1980s when computers were predominantly bought by businesses who could justify their high price by the additional profit they'd help generate. But once people began buying them for home use, the market became much more price-sensitive. I mean what was the point of buying a $2500 tablet PC, when you could buy a $800 laptop and a $500 iPad?
Re:"Stay away from PC Gaming" Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
windows 9 will come with the new Windows BOB interface as default.
Honestly, they can no longer design anything. They jumped the shark 5 years ago and have been living on rerun royalties ever since.
"more keenly anticipate markets" (Score:5, Insightful)
Who are they kidding?
Rule #1 for a large company: you don't anticipate markets with an eye to joining or ruling them. You kill them before they can start. If you can't do that, you play catch-up, or you use legal weight to try to stop them.
They were behind on phones and tablets in 2010 just like they were behind on the internet in 1995. They got *lucky* in 1995 that they could buy their way into it (at great expense: giving away IE and then all of the legal fees involved for the anti-trust cases in just about every country in the world...).
They simply couldn't get that lucky now 'cause everybody knew they would try and so could out-innovate knowing that was the one thing they could do that M$ couldn't (and never could, not since day one...).
Large companies, unless you're Apple (willing to sacrifice one generation of customers for another), or Google (able to get most of the products to drive eyeballs back to your core income stream), simply don't innovate. They simply don't try to take over businesses they aren't already in (except by buying their way in, a-la Oracle). Microsoft had all the brains in the world but would NEVER have actually let them create a new product line if it ever put Windows or Office at risk. Never. Just like Xerox could never market the desktop workstation because the paperless office was a threat to their copier business.
Microsoft simply would never have been able to compete here. Ever. Internally they couldn't muster it, externally the other companies knew how to handle them.
Re:$20B the value of Steve Ballmer leaving (Score:5, Insightful)
actually you are the moron. I actually trade the market and know the market. When change happens the market does not always react the way that it does. Often if the CEO leaves in this manner the stock DROPS! The stock market does not like change in a winning company. The reason why Microsoft went up is because Microsoft is a value trap and the stock market has determined that Ballmer is indeed a dud! In fact look at the stock price during Ballmer's reign, its neither up nor down. It just sucks. Thus the GP is right.
Re:Microsoft needs to be loved again (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft started out making really cool things
Like what? DOS?
Microsoft were always the cheap, crap option. DOS over Unix, Windows over Unix or Mac. I can't think of a single 'really cool thing' they've ever done.
With Android already owning the cheap, crap niche in the mobile space and Apple owning expensive and cool, Microsoft have nowhere to go.
Mobile was obviously the future (Score:4, Insightful)
Just about the only MS thing that I have wanted in years was an XBox. That is pretty poor output for the last decade. But if we go back in time MS did put out useful products one after another. Windows 95 was a huge leap, 98 another, NT 2000 was fantastic, and XP after a service pack or two was solid. But then it sort of went wrong.
Now just about the only MS products that I use (until I can find a secure replacement) are Skype and my XBox 360. Even the XBox One isn't catching my attention. I feel pity for anyone with a MS phone and when I hear people using MS servers I just wonder what has kept them away from Linux.
So quite simply prior to Balmer MS was doing some interesting things. But during the entire time Balmer is there they have done almost nothing interesting. Boring has continued to make them bags of cash because so many companies out there were unable or not interested in switching. So where Balmer has been shockingly lucky is that there has been no real competitor to MS Office. Google docs has been making some inroads, and some people compromise with the various OpenOffice products but the simple reality is that once you get complicated with your documents these other product begin to show their incompatibilities. In a business environment it is just not worth futzing with the software when the MS product can be so readily purchased. But my long standing theory is that if someone comes out with a solid word processor/spreadsheet then MS is then going to begin to die.
The one that I had hopes for was Apple's iWorks product but that seemed to have been abandoned 4 years ago plus they never ported it to other platforms. Now if they opensourced iWorks for the world to build on then something exciting might happen.
So my prediction on MS's future is based upon Balmer's replacement's relationship with the Office Division. If the replacement comes from the Office division then MS is dead. But if the replacement recognizes that office is a cash cow but that the company can't rely upon it for ever then there is some hope. If the replacement comes from their R&D division it will probably be exciting even if completely crazy.
Re:"Stay away from PC Gaming" Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
I had Vista when it first came out. I never thought it was total crap, but it was more cumbersome than it should've been. They screwed up the user rights. Not every little thing you do should have required UAC. Plus, while I didn't have this problem, they should've done more with hardware compatibility.
The way Microsoft has positioned Windows 8 is just moronic, as far as I can tell. One version for the desktop, one version for tablets, and don't mess with the frigging Start Menu. Seriously, how hard would that have been? Now you've got millions of users for whom Windows 8 is a joke, because they don't have touchscreen monitors on their PCs, and worse, they put out two different versions of Windows 8 for tablets, one of which is just slightly less useful than a Cracker Jack toy.
Re:$20B the value of Steve Ballmer leaving (Score:2, Insightful)
AAPL stock is up about $100 since he croaked and they now pay a respectable 2.5% dividend so I don't know what you're trying to say...
Re:"Stay away from PC Gaming" Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
I have yet to find a SINGLE person that says "OMG Windows 8 is so much better than Windows 7!!
That's not what he said. He said it's better than people think it is, not that it's better than 7. Since most people think it's shit, it doesn't take much to be better than that.
Now, there are definite improvements in Windows 8, but it's understandable that people don't see those because of the humongous issues it has. Windows 8 tried to integrate the desktop UI with a touch UI, and failed miserably. The two aren't integrated in Windows 8, they're segregated. My hope is they'll manage to actually integrate them in Windows 9.
Re:"Stay away from PC Gaming" Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh, after using it a while, it's kind of a toss up. Windows 8 actually does have a few nice features, and I am able to do some things far easier than I can do in Windows 7... However, there are some changes that were mindbogglingly stupid.
The thing is, the the much maligned Start screen isn't really as bad as people make it out to be. I believe people are just using it wrong. In their defense, I don't think Microsoft makes it clear to their users how it should be used, and how it works best if used differently than the old Start Menu worked.
I think many people just haven't figured out that it's ok to remove apps from their Start Screen and customize it just be their favorites. Unlike the Start Menu, the Start Screen still allows you to easily access lesser used programs through the search charm or through the All Apps button. There's no reason to have some huge cluttered mess of everything you have installed on the Start Screen like the average Start Menu has.
Though, most Windows 8 metro style apps are rubbish. Only a few seem to be worth using instead of a standard Windows version, and I find that metro apps don't handle multiple monitors in a way that really makes sense.
I don't care for it enough that I want to bother upgrading my home machine from Windows 7 to Windows 8, but I don't hate it enough that it would bother me if I picked up a laptop that had Windows 8 pre-installed.
On the other hand, over the last few years I've found the number of reasons for sticking with windows to be slowly dwindling, and I might consider using Linux for more than VMs and toy machines.
Re:Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
His (going up) career was always following visionaries who DID have the vision, while he handled the nuts and bolts of business.
His (going down) career mistake was in thinking he could handle the vision part. That was pretty obviously "NO" from the start. His SECOND biggest mistake was in failing to snare someone else who did have it, to run new product development.
Let's face it. Gates was a greedy, selfish, often dishonest businessman. But he had vision that Ballmer does not.
Re:Vista (Score:4, Insightful)
Jobs was kicked out just because the Mac sales were initially a bit slower than expected. I've got no idea what they expected because schools and universities seemed to fill up with those early Macs pretty quickly.
Meanwhile Balmer has been spending years trying to prove that MS is too big to fail by destructive testing.
Re:Microsoft needs to be loved again (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when Windows was released, Unix was sort of crap, too. [wikipedia.org]
Uh, no.
Uh, yes. I was there too, I saw how workstations were. They were more powerful obviously, but they were equally more expensive. Even before Windows 3.0/3.1 came, there was already a commercial ecosystem of spreadsheets, word processors and database systems that, though simple and primitive, provided a good ROI for the little investment you had to put in for the non-technical masses. Right in their work places. That. Was. A. Computer. Revolution.
No workstation system of the time had that. Computing power and windowing systems mean shit if platforms cost you an eye and a kidney while providing no productivity tools for the common non-technical person.
Us Unix workstation folks laughed at Windows users when it was first released. It was a cheap, crap, toy windowing system compared to Sun workstations and the like.
But since they were meant to be development or backend workhorses as opposed to office/home productivity tools, they were crap for what the general-case world needed the most, all the while we workstation guys were laughing with history giving us the bird while passing by.
It was only with Windows 95 and NT that it started to look comparable to the Unix alternatives, at a much lower price.
Again, just focusing on the windowing-system factor, you are missing the point. Even though you still had to rely on collaborative multitasking, Windows 3.0/3.1 was already well versed running in protected mode with which to run multiple DOS-based or Windows-based business applications or multimedia (rudimentary but effective at the time.)
We all thought workstations were the shit. And they were... on a very narrow niche market. They were the corvettes that could take you from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds, but that can only go in a straight line. PCs with Windows 3.0/3.1x were the dutiful Toyota Corollas that could un-glamorously take the common working man to the grocery store and other vital places around your neighborhood.
To use a workstation, you needed to be a fucking programmer or engineer. To use a PC and do things you needed or enjoyed, all you needed was one or two manuals bought from your local bookstore. That's why the former was crap, regardless of niche-specific computing powah!
Re:Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
Where did you get the curious notion that Microsoft is a programming company?
Skype, Exchange, SQL Server, MS-DOS, Dynamics, Sharepoint... Good software and bad, Microsoft bought it. It doesn't know how to make mass-market software. The partial exceptions are Word and Excel, and the Windows NT OSes. With NT, Microsoft tried to learn how to make an OS via their JV with IBM on OS/2. History suggests that Microsoft's learning was...less than thorough.
Microsoft is better characterised as an IP licensing company which does some software development (and, under Ballmer, hardware development) as a promotional activity.
I totally agree about their employee review system, though. The flaws in that ought to be obvious to any non-autistic person, sociopath or not.
Re:Struggling with a near monopoly. (Score:5, Insightful)
See, the thing is, America, or rather the OECD in general, isn't interesting any more. PCs have penetrated everywhere they're going to, the population isn't growing any more, and all that's left is replacement. And there are all these annoying parasites and egg-robbers around (Google mail and docs, the various office apps for iPads, web-based workflow like Yammer, the BYOD wave, etc., etc.)
In the OECD, it's death by a million cuts for Microsoft. The slow decay back into the swamp. Not so slow, if they mess up Active Directory.
The computing market growth is in Asia. (To a lesser extent, also in Latin America, and Real Soon Now, Just You Watch, in Africa.)
And what are the Asians buying? They're buying el-cheapo 800x600 (or worse) TN panel 512MB RAM ARM-cored tablets running Android, made by Coolpad/Yulong and a million no-name backstreet factories on razor-thin margins.
Microsoft can't compete with that: its business model is high cost rent-seeking.
When Asians finally have high-enough incomes and want to go up-market, they won't want to buy something that's been perceived as a loser for the last couple of decades (as will be Microsoft's case by 2020), they'll want either what they already use (Android, or possibly Tizen by then), or new and shiny, and preferably made in their own country.
Re:Microsoft needs to be loved again (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, yes and no. Unix wasn't crap back then, but the Unix vendors were everything Microsoft is today. Outrageous software licensing terms and fees, incredibly expensive hardware, and a big business mentality. I was there too. Microsoft and the IBM PC / PC clones (one did not exist without the other) in the early '80s were like a Linux vendor is today--a breath of freedom for those who wanted to use these incredible new machines without onerous restrictions. I was one of the engineers at my company that made the decision to buy MS/PC, not Sun, at the time. As Luis says, you could do so much more with Microsoft and the PC, because the Microsoft ecosystem wasn't a walled garden in those days like the Unix systems were. Borland, AutoDesk, EA, etc. etc., would never have happened if Sun had 'won' the desktop.
Somewhere along the way, though, a funny thing happened. GNU/Linux opened up the Unix world (which was always the better development environment) while at the same time Microsoft slowly became the 800-lb gorilla that built the very same walls the old Unix vendors had erected in their day. Realistically, there is no compiler but VS for Windows today. No office suite but MS Office. Huge $$$$ MSDN subscription fees. Without competition, easy entry, and love from developers, innovation suffocates and dies. Happened to Unix then, and it's been happening to Microsoft for the past decade.
Personally, both Microsoft and the whole industry would have benefited from a Microsoft breakup a decade ago. It took a breakup of AT&T to get digital communications out of the 300 baud era, and AT&T is hardly the worse for it today. As long as Microsoft remains the large behemoth it is today it will never go anywhere, unless it lucks into the same kind of corporate leadership that IBM found when it totally re-invented itself.