Ballmer Bites the Bullet

_Puma_

Microsoft stock up nearly 9% on the announcement. Gates on Committee to choose successor. What next for Microsoft?

Personally delighted with the news, the decline at Microsoft is in my opinion attributed to having a salesperson at the helm. Question is will the new CEO be an innovator or will it be one of Ballmers yes men?

PaulieC

_Puma_ wrote: »

Microsoft stock up nearly 9% on the announcement. Gates on Committee to choose successor. What next for Microsoft?

Personally delighted with the news, the decline at Microsoft is in my opinion attributed to having a salesperson at the helm. Question is will the new CEO be an innovator or will it be one of Ballmers yes men?

The decline ? You mean the many, many, many quarters of growth and record profits ?
I do agree though, the execution on a lot of things could have been better

_Puma_

Probably more accurate to say the recent decline aka Surface/Win8 failures and the latest quartely figures.. Microsoft was only going one way when Ballmer took over with the monopoly they commanded in the sector

PaulieC

Revisionism if I ever saw it. He has been CEO for 14 years now and has grown in almost every quarter since, including the latest one.
Surface has been a failure so far, but Win8 hardly is with 100m licenses sold in a year.

_Puma_

I am not arguing that Microsoft has been successful financially under Ballmer, In fact I opened saying Ballmer was a salesperson and it is quiet clear that he excelled in monatanising everything Microsoft, but there has been very little innovation from them under his leadership and it shows with them becoming less and less relevant in Business and personal computing.

As for Win8, negligible business adoption and hardware manufactures blaming Win8 for the sharp decline in PC/laptop sales then ya Id call Win8 a failure. The fact that they cant even push the OS with Surface Pro(Which is a decent bit of hardware) is typical of its failure.

Torqay

PaulieC wrote: »

Surface has been a failure so far, but Win8 hardly is with 100m licenses sold in a year.

Windows 8 market performance is a story of steady decline, no comparison to Windows 7.

GreenWolfe

PaulieC wrote: »

Revisionism if I ever saw it. He has been CEO for 14 years now and has grown in almost every quarter since, including the latest one.
Surface has been a failure so far, but Win8 hardly is with 100m licenses sold in a year.

Don't forget to add Kin, Zune, Windows Phone, Games for Windows Live and Windows Vista to that list.

The insane cost of Skype, the failed integration of Danger and aQuantive.

Let's face it, it's only because Microsoft is so dominant in home and business computing that it was able to survive those mistakes. Any one of those would have took down a company that doesn't have two cash cows (Windows and Office).

coylemj

EarthlyPangaea wrote: »

Let's face it, it's only because Microsoft is so dominant in home and business computing that it was able to survive those mistakes. Any one of those would have took down a company that doesn't have two cash cows (Windows and Office).

+1 Nobody else could have survived so many failed attempts to gatecrash into the mobile market. When you consider that Palm, Nokia and RIM have more or less come and gone since MS started trying to get into the mobile platform, you have to wonder how much money and brainpower they've burned in the process.

I helped my sister setup her new laptop with Windows8, I just could not believe that it was let out the door. I've been using PCs since before the original version of Windows and I have never seen a less intuitive user interface.

RainyDay

PaulieC wrote: »

Revisionism if I ever saw it. He has been CEO for 14 years now and has grown in almost every quarter since, including the latest one.
Surface has been a failure so far, but Win8 hardly is with 100m licenses sold in a year.

The share price has been in pretty steady decline from the day he took over, no growth in the shares in 14 years - a terrible record. He's been milking the cash cows, but done nothing to beat Google or Apple or the other innovators;

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=MSFT#symbol=msft;range=my;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;

Torqay

_Puma_ wrote: »

Gates on Committee to choose successor. What next for Microsoft?

Would like to see Mark Russinovich in management. Without a doubt one of the brightest heads they have acquired in recent years. He's got talent and vision. And writes pretty good novels too... ;()

PaulieC

_Puma_ wrote: »

I am not arguing that Microsoft has been successful financially under Ballmer, In fact I opened saying Ballmer was a salesperson and it is quiet clear that he excelled in monatanising everything Microsoft, but there has been very little innovation from them under his leadership and it shows with them becoming less and less relevant in Business and personal computing.

As for Win8, negligible business adoption and hardware manufactures blaming Win8 for the sharp decline in PC/laptop sales then ya Id call Win8 a failure. The fact that they cant even push the OS with Surface Pro(Which is a decent bit of hardware) is typical of its failure.

Less relevant in business computing ? Can you back that personal opinion up with actual facts ? Ballmer's tenure has seen several individual products become billion dollar businesses in their own right e.g. Project, Sharepoint, SQL Server, Azure, Windows Server etc. I doubt that these all sold to consumers.

As for the PC makers, they are hardly going to blame themselves are they. Unimaginative form factors and living in the past would be more my guess. Look at Lenovo, they are making new and useful machines that utilise Win8 properly and they are growing.

Sure, he's made a lot of mistakes, but he's also taken the company from $25 billion annually to $75 billion. That's not too shabby. As for who takes over, I'd like to see Ray Ozzie come back. He was shamefully under utilised when he was there.

excollier

Greed is good. Yes?

miralize

Hopefully now they can start tailoring their new software to things that matter and things that people use.

They continuously talked about no compromises with Windows, but in doing so they compromised the experience of the OS. Windows 8 should have never made it to tablets, no OEM has successfully made something that doesn't suck using it, nor does the Windows Design Language work on desktops. The mouse gestures are ridiculous. Yes, you can use 3rd party tools to change some things, but it should have never made it that far.

Windows RT should have been a separate entity or they should've used Windows mobile, because they really got consumer confused with Win 8, Win 8 RT, and WP 8.

Aesthetically, they've never been better, but the implementation left much to desire, hopefully the new guy/gal coming in can steer it in the right direction.