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The Ballmer Days Are Over

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Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over

#81

Post by sunchild »

melling wrote: post #5

The world will be a little better off with a decline of Microsoft. 90% desktop market share is too much. More diversity will be healthier. Chromebooks should take some market share. Microsoft can own 50-70% market share and still be very profitable. They might even be more innovative in other areas.

Enterprise IT is being slowly but surely replaced by online services. The desktop OS ecosystem lock-in that Microsoft enjoyed for so long is definitely on its way out. It will take a long time, since every big company painted itself into a corner with vendor lock-in solutions like Windows, Blackberry, SAP, Oracle, etc, and there are a LOT of people whose job is entirely devoted to maintaining that lock-in. I think we're looking forward to a bloodbath in Enterprise IT in the coming years. I see it every day in my job: big companies are serious about getting off the desktop right now.

If you're in enterprise IT and you disagree with me, remember this: unless you're the CIO, you'll be the last to know.

Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over

#82

Post by sunchild »

ryanlchan wrote: post #72
fleitz wrote: post #2

"just for the sake of others not owning it." Perhaps this is why it's worth $8.5 billion to MSFT and not to others. It's pretty silly to say someone got a bad deal a week after they bought it. If Ballmer has some awesome plan for it that will require a year or two to implement it would behoove him to disclose this so that others could move competitively to destroy the value from such a purpose.

I think Microsoft has a master plan. Skype and VoIP in general have all kinds of potential synergies with current MSFT products, difficult to materialize as they may be. Remember that they just put out an incredibly powerful 3D camera called the Kinect. With Skype on Xbox, we could see the beginnings of accessible 3D teleconferencing. Even if it's just Skype, its inclusion further cements Xbox's place in a living roo…

Skype on Xbox? 3D conferencing? Setting aside the horrendous culture on Xbox Live, does anybody want "3D conferencing"? Most people don't even use Skype for video conferencing today.

Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over

#83

Post by hvs »

larrik wrote: post #68
siglesias wrote: post #64

>> In fact, the acquisition by most accounts sounded more like a move by Ballmer to buy something that others may have wanted to own — just for the sake of others not owning it. This struck me because I'm presently reading Stephen Levy's In the Plex , in which he reports at great lengths about why Google decided not to purchase Skype when eBay had it up for sale: mainly owing to Skype's peer-to-peer technology not be…

If you look at Microsoft's words and actions in regards to their competitors, they are clearly completely clueless. In fact, "Microsoft people" are often completely blind to everything not made by Microsoft. Reading HN you may never know, but if you've met actual .NET stack developers, or MSCE's or anyone else similar, and you'll find people who make websites and don't know what apache is. Or they'll dismiss open sou…

Way to paint all .NET developers with the same brush. Have you ever actually met any .NET developers outside of your fevered imagination?

Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over

#84

Post by cosgroveb »

ry0ohki wrote: post #55
brown9-2 wrote: post #47

Windows Mobile 6.5 was a powerhouse of a product. Pre-2007 most U.S. buyers of smart phones chose between BlackBerry and Windows Mobile 6.5. Both were small screened devices with a hardware keyboard — with exception to the few HTC devices with stylus based touch screens. Palm was struggling at the time and Windows Mobile was the dominate player in consumer minds, BlackBerry was the beast in boardrooms. This seems off…

You had to be one of the rare consumers who were purchasing a "smart phone". I remember writing software for the platform because it seemed like it was really going to take off, especially when things like the Dell Axim were starting to sell. Side note: Anyone want a Dell Axim?

I remember how badly I wanted a Motorola Q or a Samsung Blackjack when they came out but I had just started a contract... Luckily for me my contract was up just in time to get an iPhone.

Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over

#85

Post by headbiznatch »

I would guess they are mainly purchasing entrenched users of an already-implemented service. This same outcry (largely inspired by the sheer magnitude of the numbers involved) accompanied the MySpace acquisition and then YouTube. One failed miserably, the other is still playing out and might actually have made sense. The prognosticating is, at the very least, as desperate a flailing as the purchase itself. It's a serious business gamble. If you think you know with certainty at this point in time whether or not it will pay off, I submit that you are really into yourself or just really nervous. Skype has millions of users who couldn't care less who owns Skype. We just cannot say at this point that this is a disastrous business decision.

P.S. I have been following Skype for a long time and worked for a company that sought to partner with them in their early days (fudge - just dated myself). Beyond the old school "acquire eyeballs" angle, in my humble opinion, their technology is very legit. The algorithms/techniques/architecture/infrastructure they use for audio compression and transmission (and now video) are very finely tuned and if you think it is easy to recreate that just because you have thousands of developers at your disposal, you should reconsider your position.

Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over

#86

Post by ikono »

Groxx wrote: post #41

Particularly heinous for the Skype purchase: it's amazingly buggy. It's gotten shinier over the years, but they still payed 8.5 billion for a POS.

That's definitely overstating it. They are better than everyone else in the consumer space. Not enough to be worth 8.5 billion for but the core underlying technology is good(They suck at client development though). People underestimate how hard VOIP is because it sounds so simple.

Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over

#87

Post by Splines »

larrik wrote: post #68
siglesias wrote: post #64

>> In fact, the acquisition by most accounts sounded more like a move by Ballmer to buy something that others may have wanted to own — just for the sake of others not owning it. This struck me because I'm presently reading Stephen Levy's In the Plex , in which he reports at great lengths about why Google decided not to purchase Skype when eBay had it up for sale: mainly owing to Skype's peer-to-peer technology not be…

If you look at Microsoft's words and actions in regards to their competitors, they are clearly completely clueless. In fact, "Microsoft people" are often completely blind to everything not made by Microsoft. Reading HN you may never know, but if you've met actual .NET stack developers, or MSCE's or anyone else similar, and you'll find people who make websites and don't know what apache is. Or they'll dismiss open sou…

There are certainly company men in the, ahem, company, but one of the problems is that MS makes so many tools that are good enough that using open source tools is really hard to do.

Internally, we're told to use MS technology whenever possible. Using open source tools is also a nightmare from a legal perspective, and there are some non-trivial process because of that. It's not hard, but it requires due diligence on our part to ensure we don't expose the company to liability.

For the above reasons, it's frowned upon in company culture. I'm facing an internal side-project and am tempted to take a swing at it with nginx, apache and RoR for learning purposes, but the last thing I want is my manager to demo it and get a non-IIS error message along the way.

Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over

#88

Post by 9999 »

larrik wrote: post #68
siglesias wrote: post #64

>> In fact, the acquisition by most accounts sounded more like a move by Ballmer to buy something that others may have wanted to own — just for the sake of others not owning it. This struck me because I'm presently reading Stephen Levy's In the Plex , in which he reports at great lengths about why Google decided not to purchase Skype when eBay had it up for sale: mainly owing to Skype's peer-to-peer technology not be…

If you look at Microsoft's words and actions in regards to their competitors, they are clearly completely clueless. In fact, "Microsoft people" are often completely blind to everything not made by Microsoft. Reading HN you may never know, but if you've met actual .NET stack developers, or MSCE's or anyone else similar, and you'll find people who make websites and don't know what apache is. Or they'll dismiss open sou…

I wish an outsider would write a blog about these bizarre worlds (the IBM mainframe and the all .Net stack guys). As a guy that rarely ever touches any MS products, it would be really freakish and odd.

Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over

#89

Post by nandemo »

jakarta wrote: post #8
fleitz wrote: post #2

"just for the sake of others not owning it." Perhaps this is why it's worth $8.5 billion to MSFT and not to others. It's pretty silly to say someone got a bad deal a week after they bought it. If Ballmer has some awesome plan for it that will require a year or two to implement it would behoove him to disclose this so that others could move competitively to destroy the value from such a purpose.

Why's it silly? He's buying a commodity business (thats what VOIP is) for 32x earnings. There's a reason M&A is often referred to as a winner's curse -- because winning the bidding typically means overpaying. The synergies execs often talk about almost -always- fail to be realized. Shareholders of Microsoft would have been much better off if the company just bought back $8.5bn in stock. A dividend would have been out…

Do you have a source for "32x earnings"? I suspect it's even worse than that. In other HN thread someone mentioned the price was about 300x earnings, and via google I could find this:

Skype's revenues for the first six months of 2010 were $406 million, with a net income of only $13 million.

Re: The Ballmer Days Are Over

#90

Post by bonch »

asr wrote: post #31

I'm sorry, he lost me at comparing Microsoft stock to Apple and Google over the past 10 years. In retrospect, those are two of the most successful publicly traded tech companies of the period--not a fair comparison. Not to mention those were small companies in 2000. For Microsoft stock to have increased 1200% (as Google's did) it would have probably had to grow into some very significant portion of the world economy.…

> I'm sorry, he lost me at comparing Microsoft stock to Apple and Google over the past 10 years. In retrospect, those are two of the most successful publicly traded tech companies of the period--not a fair comparison.

Apple and Google are Microsoft's biggest competitors. Is he not supposed to compare Microsoft to its direct rivals?

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