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I 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?
To witness one of the most deadly attacks in American history, and then, with gravitas, say "you know what's more important than connecting with our community and people and reach them now in a time of bloody and violent uncertainty? making sure MSFT makes more money" sounds like a real peach of a leader. truly inspiring.
What does it mean to connect with their community? What should Microsoft have done? Be specific.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> who dragged down Microsoft Did he?
By being unable to use his warchest on a changing market. As an example: missing the smartphone boat twice (once with Windows Mobile vs Symbian, and once with Windows Phone vs iOS/Android). Another example: Microsoft search / Bing. Microsoft kept Office relevant though, made Azure relevant, and are reinventing themselves from a proprietary to a data company (like Google, Facebook, and Amazon) who also do a lot of ope…
He raises a good point about the law of large numbers. When your core business is doing $75b and has 95% market share, it's near impossible to find other lines of business to complement that core in a meaningful way. I'd go as far as to say it's illogical to expect crazy growth or innovation at such a point.
That bit had me scratching my head. To me the law of large numbers had to do with stats. But apparently, MBAs have come up with their own completely unrelated "law".
Excerpts 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 writte…
Take a look at the chart. Ballmer was CEO from January 2000 to February 2014.
This 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,…
Yes, and the funny thing is the author even didn't get the correct take-away from this event. Ballmer looked at the bottom line, was surprised by the number he saw and then started looking at the math that produced that number in detail. It has nothing to do with being a math wizz. The lesson here is that good executives ignore noise (the speaker) and focus on importance (numbers). Balmer isn't a superhuman who can l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bing has proved to be one of the best investments that Microsoft ever made. Ballmer's failure as it related to Bing was trying to build an advertising platform to compete with Google and failing.
Genuine question - how is Bing a good investment? Isn't it essentially a non-factor in the search market?
"A leader falls on his sword for his team if and when needed." I like this. It also reminded me of a lesson I learned when reading Maj. Richard Winters' memoirs: a good leader leads from the front. First one in, last one out.
But Ballmer didn't fall on his sword; he just apologised, to people who had no ability to punish him for the mistake which he claimed as his. If you receive an apology from someone several levels above where the mistake was made, I don't think it means much. You end up with no reassurance that anything is being done to stop it happening again.
The bank could have abandoned Microsoft products. They could have sued Microsoft. Blaming one's underlings is a sign of weakness. Blaming the customer would be a disaster.
This 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,…
I am not impressed by this exploit, because there are some chance he had studied the document before the presentation, or even asked someone to verify it. He was flawed on many aspects, for example trying to attract developers by dancing and chanting "developers, dev...". His successors put Linux in Windows, open sourced .NET and this seems more efficient... without even harming Windows market share.
That video was from Microsoft's _internal_ company-wide meeting held annually to rally their staff, so your assertion is invalid.
Moreover, it's a bad example to begin with; Ballmer was and still is absolutely correct. What makes the FOSS software ecosystem so successful? That's right: developers, developers, developers. Somebody has to write all that code and it isn't going to be the end-users. When developers get pissed off at a platform, they abandon or fork it, which is why it makes sense to keep developers happy.
Those of us who were around in the '80s-'90s remember that Microsoft's rise to dominance was partly powered by the fact that they offered relatively cheap and good compilers and dev tools and solid documentation to make it easy to develop software for their platform. Contrast that with the workstation vendors back then that charged much more than MS did just to get a compiler.