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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

#351

Post by ghshephard »

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. "

When doing this type of calculation, please adjust for Dividends, which have been substantial from Microsoft, and only recently started from Apple.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#353

Post by scj »

the_bear wrote: post #54
anuragramdasan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me…

Ever watch Steve Jobs promote Mac OS 8 or 9? Rumour is, he didn't use either (he used NextStep until Mac OS X). He also spoke negatively about video being on iPods while it was being developed.

Ultimately, you have to remember that he had an agenda, and if he wasn't selling it that day, then he would probably say something negative about the idea or implementation (of a competitor's product).

Here's a page that has more examples: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/steve-jobs/

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#354

Post by nailer »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #283
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>>>>>He will be remembered for missing mobile Windows 7 and 8 were the first mobile OS that didn't completely rip off Apple, had the first original interface since Apple's iphone and you're saying they missed the target? Seriously? WP 8 has some incredibly original features my Android and Apple friends swoon over. Not to mention the platform is completely wide open for developers. It's not completely crowded out like…

> Windows 7 and 8 were the first mobile OS that didn't completely rip off Apple, had the first original interface since Apple's iPhone and you're saying they missed the target? Seriously?

Personally I think WP8 is an excellent OS. But it's a distant third in market share.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#355

Post by marcofloriano »

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…

Microsoft is a good company, it´s just not "cool".

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#356

Post by mathattack »

d4nt wrote: post #331
jasonlotito wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud market? You mean Azure, which I last heard held 20% of the market. Is that what you mean?

Yes, Azure. It's developed into a good offering and I'm pleased for them that they're doing well. But, there was a time when Microsoft entering a market would send all the existing players running for the hills. They used their OS dominance to control what software OEMs installed and killed off every desktop software competitor they ever had. Your best hope was to sell your company to them. But they couldn't do that…

Their dominance over Netscape scared a lot of people. "What if Microsoft comes in and gives everything away for free to keep the OS monopoly?" was a legit fear. Gates was simultaneously a product master, and very competitive. Sometime between then and now people stopped fearing them.

Maybe it was the delays in getting products out? Or false starts? Or that they just started playing nicer?

Nobody is close to unseating them on the desktop, but the excitement is everywhere else.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#359

Post by Pxtl »

hybridweb wrote: post #218
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that .NET was being developed some time before Ballmer ascended to the CEO throne. Gates probably had more to do with it than him. Ballmer is/was probably a good CEO for a conservative, old school company, which can derive profits from a stable and well used product line. But that's not what MS is/was advertised as being about. In that circumstance, Ballmer is the wrong type of CEO.

And it's worth noticing that many parts of the .NET framework have gone through horrible hiccups. I mean, while the C# language is great, it feels like every framework built around a .NET seems to be implemented and then dropped without substantial improvements about 3 years later. As a developer, nothing ever seems to get fixed. They get replaced, and the replacements bring a new learning curve and a suite of new bugs and problems, and these bugs can never be fixed for backwards-compatibility reasons.

So we get a constant barrage of misstep boondoggles like Web Forms, Click Once Installers, Linq2SQL getting deprecated almost as soon as it was launched, etc. And with every step a larger pile of configuration and attributes that need to be added to get things to play nice with the OS.

Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months

#360

Post by nailer »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #321
shawkinaw wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on market share Windows Phone is a disaster, so yeah that's a miss.

A disaster that was released in 2012? In the fourth quarter of 2012 Windows 8 phones had sold around 6 million handsets. http://www.neowin.net/news/gartner-windows-phone-sales-incre... I'm sure you must have been saying the same thing about Android then huh? By comparison they only sold around 640K handsets in 2008 (their first year of release) then sold around 6 million in 2009. http://digithoughts.com/post/21428797…

Yep. WP should have been released much earlier.
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