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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

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Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#251

Post by ricardonunez »

sampo wrote: post #87
leokun wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think he'll be seen worse than the CEOs of AOL Time Warner, Enron, Worldcom, or Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, but sure you go on with your hyperbole. It's turning into a staple on HN. Really raising the bar there. Edit: parent comment used to say "worst CEO of modern history"

> parent comment used to say "worst CEO of modern history" What about Stephen Elop? "As of June 2013, Nokia's [...] stock value dropped by 85% since Elop's takeover." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop

Elop started with Nokia in a bad position compared to when Ballmer took over Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#252

Post by Yuioup »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #94
lbarrow wrote: post #23

He'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…

I agree that he will probably not be remembered for having more than doubled revenue and almost tripled profits. He will not be remembered for transforming Microsoft into one of the most important enterprise software companies. Not for introducing .NET, C# or Kinect either. All of that will be forgotten. He will be remembered for missing mobile. He will also be remembered for caring a lot about developers and about d…

.NET and C# are the brainchild of Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of Delphi who moved from Boland to Microsoft.

Kinect was invented by an Israeli company before being bought out by Microsoft.

Your point still stands though :-)

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#254

Post by betterunix »

mikeash wrote: post #179
sz4kerto wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an MSFT share was worth 35 when he took over (at the top of the bubble) and it's the same now then it does not mean (at all) that he was a crap CEO. MSFT still remains one of the most important tech companies ever, that's not a small feat. I don't think that he's an extremely brilliant CEO, but tech companies come and go, and MSFT is still close to the top. Even if everyone in the media is 100% focused on mobile n…

I think it depends on what you mean by "important". If you mean big in the industry and making products on which a lot of people depend, yes. If you mean influential in the future, then I think not. Microsoft is a railroad company in the early days of the automobile. They're a typewriter company in the early days of the microcomputer. They're a sailing-ship builder in the early days of steam. They're important curren…

What makes you think desktops and laptops are going to stop being relevant within our lifetimes? In reality, Microsoft is in a very safe position, only facing competition in markets they never had a strong hold on to begin with. In the markets Microsoft is really dominant in they are in almost no danger. Let's put it this way: top business-user reasons for virtualization on GNU/Linux are running Windows Server to run Exchange and running Windows to run stock market software. Try taking Office away from the big business customers who bring major income to Microsoft.

The comparison to railroads is apt. Railroads are still immensely important, even if people no longer romanticize them. Innovations in railroad technology are still very important. The financial difficulties railroads faced in the middle of the 20th century had more to do with the government promoting automobiles than with the superiority of cars and trucks. If Microsoft is the technology world's' equivalent of a railroad they are in a pretty good position -- they might not be the company everyone is talking about but they will be the company that everyone is dependent on.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#255

Post by kvb »

potatolicious wrote: post #191
bsullivan01 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"was gloriously good at extracting profits - out of existing, successful product divisions" If you forget that they now have 12 or so divisions with $billion plus in revenue.

Right, so they're doing fine now - and they will be doing fine for the near future. But no product lines last forever - even Windows is bleeding market share, and upgrade rates are dropping like a brick. It seems a lot of people are happy with Win7 (or even WinXP) and not moving. This strikes me as a Blackberry situation - market leader by a mile, but attempts to modernize and develop the Next Big Thing have all fail…

I think the point was, how many of those billion dollar businesses did he inherit? Doesn't the emergence of, say, SharePoint, show that he didn't just extract money from existing profitable businesses? Microsoft seems to have done pretty well at creating new profitable businesses under his tenure, but they're not the sexy consumer products that people like talking about.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#256

Post by bernardom »

mathattack wrote: post #104
chollida1 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Not really, Looking at my Bloomberg terminal shows that AAPL US Equity has a beta of .944, YHOO US Equity has a beta of .748 and GOGO US Equity has a beta of .894.

Interesting. I see IBM is less than 1 too. Facebook has a 3.29, LinkedIn is 1.81, Accenture is 1.4 and SAP is 1.5. Do you think this is based on revenue models? Size? The amount of cash on hand? Brand strength? Likelihood of needing to go to the public markets for money?

I would hesitate to try to put a narrative-based explanation to it.

As you pointed out, Beta is the correlation of a security's price history to the market's movement.

Approximately half of any group of equities will have a correlation below 1 against the group's weighted average performance. If the group is large enough, its movement will closely mirror the market, so for a large enough group of equities (chosen randomly) about half will have correlation below 1, and half above.

It merely means that Microsoft is reasonably closely tied to the market's movement, though slightly below.

You compared it against its sector, technology. The tech sector has a higher average beta than the utilites sector. That's just the nature of the sector.

Where it gets interesting is something like FB at 3.29. That's really high. But its price history is also short, having IPOd so recently... perhaps over time it will stabilize at a lower number.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#257

Post by panacea »

simonh wrote: post #193
jusben1369 wrote: post #169

I'm most interested with the "type" of CEO they replace him with. Broad categories: - Within Tech: They hire an Apple type key executive whose background is all around getting hardware/software/direct sales to work together. They want to move to be a super tight, integrated brand. - Outside of Tech: They hire from a GE type of company. This acknowledges that they're a sprawling behemoth and will stay that way. They n…

I want to live in a world where they hire Scott Forstall. It'll never happen, he's not an idiot, but oh boy would that be a ride!

"It'll never happen"

It would mean he needs to get out of his leather couch, but why not?

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#258

Post by kaolinite »

prawks wrote: post #99
the_bear wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me…

Also don't forget Apple has had it's share of failures under Jobs (MobileMe, arguably AppleTV, their desktop peripherals always sucked, plenty of failed products, etc.).

How on earth is Apple TV a failure? It's a product they don't really seem to care about and they have the majority marketshare[1] (in 2012) and have been selling millions of the things each year.

They have had failures though, of course. Ping was another, for example.

[1] http://9to5mac.com/2013/07/16/report-at-56-apple-tv-takes-ma...

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#259

Post by film42 »

wnevets wrote: post #215
lbarrow wrote: post #23

He'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…

why is stock price the only measure of a company and its CEO? Unless of course you're a share holder.

Stock price is his comparison. His point, is that, Balmer let apple and facebook overtake Microsoft when the market was equally fertile for any company to explode. But what did the aftermath look like for Microsoft? Positive enough to adjust for inflation -- an equal stock price.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#260

Post by kiriljakimovski »

lbarrow wrote: post #23

He'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…

"A MSFT share was worth about $35 dollars when Ballmer took over; it's worth about $35 now".

Actually, $35 from 2000 would be much more than $35 now. The stock value declined while he was CEO.

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