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Former Microsoft executive says Ballmer culls internal rivals to retain power

uk.reuters.com

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Re: Former Microsoft executive says Ballmer culls internal rivals to retain power

#31

Post by laumars »

sek wrote: post #12
f055 wrote: post #6

Ballmer probably knows it's his last executive position he'll ever get in this industry. So he's squeezing as much out of it as he can. Or he's just a fanboy of the "old Microsoft."

Ballmer is so rich and so old, he couldn't event spend it if he wanted to. This is really unlikely. Have you seen his office, it's not about the money. It's an ego thing. Edit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20121009/us-executi...

    > it's not about the money. It's an ego thing.
The two things are not always mutually exclusive. Society generally associates money with success. Thus money is the benchmark for ones ego.

Not just with CEOs as either. I often read online comments from warring zealots who proclaim "I get paid a i to do this stuff!", as if it somehow validates their claims.

Re: Former Microsoft executive says Ballmer culls internal rivals to retain power

#32

Post by huxley »

bhousel wrote: post #28
meaty wrote: post #8

Probably throws chairs at them... To be serious, this is normal in most corporates. It starts when you let the MBA* with the personality disorder in, you're fucked. I've watched three companies fall at the hands of such people. * This is not true of all MBAs, but I seem to see a trend where there are more borderline psychopaths.

Steve Ballmer does not have an MBA.

To be exact, he dropped out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA program to join Microsoft.

Re: Former Microsoft executive says Ballmer culls internal rivals to retain power

#33

Post by masklinn »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #19

Is Microsoft the last big company? They had to grow to that size to handle the marketing and distribution globally - their most obvious successor is Google who operate at a similar reach but something like 1/10 of people It might be an inevitability - or it might be that giant companies are just of their time and giant will now be in the thousands not the hundreds of thousands Anyway it's not news.

> Is Microsoft the last big company? They had to grow to that size to handle the marketing and distribution globally - their most obvious successor is Google who operate at a similar reach but something like 1/10 of people

Er... Google has about half MSFT's employees, Apple and Amazon have about 75%, Intel has slightly more employees than MSFT. And they're not huge companies in terms of employees headcount: retail groups are in the multiple hundred thousands (Walmart 2m, Tesco and Carrefour 500k), Automotive groups are also up there (VW 500k, Toyota 300k, GM and Daimler >250k), etc...

Re: Former Microsoft executive says Ballmer culls internal rivals to retain power

#34

Post by arethuza »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #26
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #19

Is Microsoft the last big company? They had to grow to that size to handle the marketing and distribution globally - their most obvious successor is Google who operate at a similar reach but something like 1/10 of people It might be an inevitability - or it might be that giant companies are just of their time and giant will now be in the thousands not the hundreds of thousands Anyway it's not news.

There are many companies that are much larger than Microsoft in terms of number of employees. Microsoft employs 94,420 people worldwide [1], but by this measure it isn't even in the top 100 of the Inc 5000 according to [2]. [1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/inside_ms.aspx#Employmen... [2] http://www.inc.com/inc5000/list/top/employee-count

Probably worth looking at the Fortune Global 500 to see lists of really large companies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Global_500

e.g. Walmart has 2.2 million employees

Re: Former Microsoft executive says Ballmer culls internal rivals to retain power

#36

Post by glass- »

chris_wot wrote: post #2

There does seem to be a lot of own goals going on at Microsoft at the moment. But then again, some of the "talent" that has left is still making those own-goals. Stephen Elop went to Nokia, and instead of using the one thing that I believe could have competed in the market - Maemo and then Meego - was dropped in favour of Microsoft's operating system. That's an own goal, if ever I've seen one. So IMO, it's not really…

> instead of using the one thing that I believe could have competed in the market - Maemo and then Meego

I owned an N900 and I liked it, because it had a full terminal and could run a Debian desktop on it if I really wanted to, but normal people don't care about any of that.

If Nokia had stuck with Maemo and Meego they would be in the same position as they are now, except their "ecosystem" would have less apps, less Microsoft-marketing dollars behind it, and Nokia wouldn't be getting $250 million cheques from Microsoft every quarter.

Re: Former Microsoft executive says Ballmer culls internal rivals to retain power

#37

Post by h2s »

mynameishere wrote: post #20
Tyrant505 wrote: post #3

M$ is a festering money hub of individuals with indy goals reeking to create beyond the bounds.

Goddammit. I accidentally pressed the uparrow on this noise and there's no way of undoing it. Damn that is a big flaw in this software.

Careful now! You wouldn't want to get caught thinking bad thoughts about HN and get hellbanned to the cornfield! Happy thoughts!

Re: Former Microsoft executive says Ballmer culls internal rivals to retain power

#38

Post by [deleted] »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #26
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #19

Is Microsoft the last big company? They had to grow to that size to handle the marketing and distribution globally - their most obvious successor is Google who operate at a similar reach but something like 1/10 of people It might be an inevitability - or it might be that giant companies are just of their time and giant will now be in the thousands not the hundreds of thousands Anyway it's not news.

There are many companies that are much larger than Microsoft in terms of number of employees. Microsoft employs 94,420 people worldwide [1], but by this measure it isn't even in the top 100 of the Inc 5000 according to [2]. [1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/inside_ms.aspx#Employmen... [2] http://www.inc.com/inc5000/list/top/employee-count

[deleted]

Re: Former Microsoft executive says Ballmer culls internal rivals to retain power

#39

Post by mossplix »

mossplix wrote: post #13

CEOs hardly matter in big corporations . I don't see hiring a 35-40 yr old CEO moving Microsoft in a new direction.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/giovannirodriguez/2012/08/15/do-...

http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/20/magazines/fortune/stats_CEO_...

for the down votters

Re: Former Microsoft executive says Ballmer culls internal rivals to retain power

#40

Post by WhaleBiologist »

chris_wot wrote: post #25
rpm4321 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, Larry Page is on record recently talking about the possibility of Google scaling up to a million employees: http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Lar...

... and thus causing massive destabilization in whole economies. No thanks! Think about it. If a corporation employs 1 million employees, and that company fails, then the economy will most definitely take a hit. On top of this, that company would hold far too much power and could use the power of the number of people working for it to force governments into doing things that it wouldn't do for the greater good. It ha…

Banks got retarded amounts of taxpayer money because of "too big to fail"
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