Not that it will happen, but I would like to see what Marissa Mayer could do with MSFT.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
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Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#52Scott Guthrie for CEO!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Guthrie
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#53He'll be remembered as a terrible CEO. Ballmer took over as CEO in 2000. In the 13 years since then, Apple has experienced an unprecedented resurgence. Google and Facebook have gone from being obscure startups to giants. The tech industry went through the bubble, recovered, and today is stronger than ever. What happened to Microsoft? While the rest of the tech sector exploded and prospered, it stayed still. A MSFT sh…
Ballmer has always lacked the ability to see the future. Be it about him calling Zune the iPhone killer, or much prior to that claiming it in the media that no one would ever wan tto buy an iPhone. Also, really below par products.
> Ballmer has always lacked the ability to see the future.
Maybe you meant 'envision' the future? Outside of Nostradamus, who, by the way, predicted not only Hacker News, Steve Ballmer's downfall, but also this very thread on the same subject, not many people have the ability to see the future, although some are better than others at imagining how it could be.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#54He'll be remembered as a terrible CEO. Ballmer took over as CEO in 2000. In the 13 years since then, Apple has experienced an unprecedented resurgence. Google and Facebook have gone from being obscure startups to giants. The tech industry went through the bubble, recovered, and today is stronger than ever. What happened to Microsoft? While the rest of the tech sector exploded and prospered, it stayed still. A MSFT sh…
Ballmer has always lacked the ability to see the future. Be it about him calling Zune the iPhone killer, or much prior to that claiming it in the media that no one would ever wan tto buy an iPhone. Also, really below par products.
To be fair, one of the greatest "see the future" CEOs has said similar things. Just off the top of my head, I know that Steve Jobs said that no one would want a larger screen than the original iPhone had, and he said that 7" tablets didn't make any sense. Now Apple has a larger iPhone screen and 7" tablet.
That's not to say that Steve Jobs was wrong about the future, but he had to sell devices in the present which meant pretending that they were perfect even though they weren't. Ballmer may have been doing the same. It's likely that his failures occurred much earlier in the process, and then he had to try to sell doomed products which is where those silly statements come from.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#55Good news, bad news, who knows?
I don't know if current Microsoft issues are in their DNA or not. Personally I was bullish (yes I put my money where my mouth is) of MSFT but I mainly found the following obstacles to be more optimistic:
- The relationship with developers was deteriorating: I am a MSDN customer and tried to upgrade but they don't give me any discount in the first year of upgrade while keeping with my same subscription level I have discounts. In our company we also have issues with getting new keys (or using the existing ones) for their software and we need to talk to someone personally to receive them.
- Windows 8 / Office are in the middle of a transition but not there: I think having a hybrid mobile/desktop OS is a good idea. But I don't like to use my desktop in the way I use a mobile device (i.e: the famous start button) or the reverse. If they want to go mobile they must implement an Office that can be used with a new UI.
- The Microsoft web offerings like Microsoft 365 are slow, difficult to configure, buggy. If they just copy Google/Apple style they would benefit a lot.
Disclaimer: I love Visual Studio and C#.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#56Huge news! Let's see what happens to the stock today. It edged up a little at the end of the day, suggesting that perhaps news was getting out. It's up 8% in premarket trading. [1] One interesting thing to note from that chart is their Beta (a measure of link to market volatility) is less than 1, which is very low for a high tech stock. It basically means that the market views them as less volatile to market conditio…
Seems like a complex enough beast that finding an appropriate outsider would be difficult too.
I think they said the same thing right before Lou Gerstner went to IBM, and that turned out very well, at least from an investor's point of view. Obviously IBM was in a lot more trouble business-wise then than Microsoft is today, but I expect a similar degree of transformation out of a successful new CEO.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#57Huge news! Let's see what happens to the stock today. It edged up a little at the end of the day, suggesting that perhaps news was getting out. It's up 8% in premarket trading. [1] One interesting thing to note from that chart is their Beta (a measure of link to market volatility) is less than 1, which is very low for a high tech stock. It basically means that the market views them as less volatile to market conditio…
I'm not sure your description of Beta is accurate. Correctly if I'm wrong, but Beta is a measure of volatility in correlation with the broader market, not a measure of volatility in of itself. There are plenty of stocks that have beta Having a low beta simply means its price isn't as correlated with the overall market. An example, Netflix has a beta < 1 but is extremely volatile.
Correct. However, beta<1 still means that the company's outlook and success does not depend that much on the state of the economy, for example.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#58My biggest hope from all of this would be for Microsoft to enhance its current products. They have been trying to get into too many fields while at the same time forgetting to make their main priority products perfect.
Considering the rising impact Linux has been having over the past few years, I'd only be glad to see Microsoft try to come up with a superior operating system.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#59About time. He should have retired earlier.
I would not wait twelve months; just pretend he died, and move on.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#60It will be interesting to see if Microsoft follows a Yahoo like trajectory - and if Apple follows Microsoft's trajectory after a few years of Tim Cook.