What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
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What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
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Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#2Excerpts from infamous mini-msft blog (in 2005 another msft employee venting anonymously):
"I mean, what has he done or not done that is impacting the stock?"
- along with Gates, made decisions that resulted in the company being found guilty of breaking the law twice(and counting)resulting in fines, restrictions...
- along with Gates, invested over $10B of cash in failed telecom investments that ended up being written off
- failed to make any meaningful investments at the bottom of the market crash when numerous companies were available for cheap..
- invested $10B's in various "emerging" businesses that even years later represent only about 10% of MSFT's revenue, aren't growing at even 10%..
- approved the onerous Licensing 6 program when many companies were hurting economically thereby pissing off a good portion of our customers and fueling the move to Open Source.
- has been at the helm as MSFT failed to take security seriously and then has had to drop everything to play catch up, missed the paid search move and had to play catch up, missed the move to web services and had to play catch up, missed the portable music wave and had to play catch up, let IE stagnate and had to play catch up, and now seemingly can't ship any major product on time even stripped of formerly core features (can you say Longhorn, CRM, SQL, VS, etc. etc. etc?).
Continued...
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/03/old-school-competencies...
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#3Very interesting read!
He might've made some big mistakes during his tenure, but if Microsoft's still there it's also his merit
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#4This strikes me as "odd":
>Then he looked up, waited for a pause in the presentation, and said in a soft voice: “This number is wrong!”
>...
>Any other executive would have assumed his finance people could write Excel formulas and delegated the task.
All the (successful) executives I ever dealt with have a sort of "sense" for numbers, and surely do not really-really trust their finance people writing Excel formulas, or - better - they trust them as long as the results are reasonable and don't raise this "number sense" alarm.
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#5Very interesting read! He might've made some big mistakes during his tenure, but if Microsoft's still there it's also his merit
Yep, a lot of techies fail to appreciate the extent to which this is true. For those who disagree and were around in 2000, where is Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Yahoo, AOL, and Netscape today?
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#6I can't wait for Ballmer to become the lovable, goofy NBA owner instead of be remembered as the guy who dragged down Microsoft.
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#7I can't wait for Ballmer to become the lovable, goofy NBA owner instead of be remembered as the guy who dragged down Microsoft.
Looking back, the whole "Developers, Developers, Developers..." bit was just what we saw publicly, I hope he was on fewer drugs when doing day to day management, but perhaps that is part of why Microsoft found itself in a dying segment of an industry it once monopolized.
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#8I can't wait for Ballmer to become the lovable, goofy NBA owner instead of be remembered as the guy who dragged down Microsoft.
> who dragged down Microsoft
Did he?
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#9This strikes me as "odd": >Then he looked up, waited for a pause in the presentation, and said in a soft voice: “This number is wrong!” >... >Any other executive would have assumed his finance people could write Excel formulas and delegated the task. All the (successful) executives I ever dealt with have a sort of "sense" for numbers, and surely do not really-really trust their finance people writing Excel formulas,…
Also, if the math was that wrong that it made the entire deal not make sense financially given it was a very large deal in monetary terms (which he stated) what were those 30 people doing? Most M&A deals make sense strategically first and then at a price second - rather than for a price first (especially if that price was very high).
Re: What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
#10Very interesting read! He might've made some big mistakes during his tenure, but if Microsoft's still there it's also his merit
Yep, a lot of techies fail to appreciate the extent to which this is true. For those who disagree and were around in 2000, where is Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Yahoo, AOL, and Netscape today?
They were all acquired or merged for a lot of money - and they were all highly profitable companies. None of those businesses failed. That is just natural business evolution for successful businesses.