Maybe Steve Ballmer Doesn't Deserve the Hate 240
Nerval's Lobster writes "Who could forget Steve Ballmer's defining moment, that infamous 'Developers! Developers! Developers!' rant that became a YouTube hit? Or the reports of frighteningly accurate chair-throwing? Who could miss the tech media and investors blaming him for everything from Microsoft's largely stagnant stock price over the past decade to its inability to get in front of trends such as mobile devices? But tech columnist (and Kernel editor-in-chief) Milo Yiannopoulos talked to a bunch of Ballmer's friends and colleagues, picked through Microsoft's history, and came away with the argument that the man deserves a second look as an effective leader. 'He stands accused of running one of the greatest companies in American history into the ground, even as its stock price remains remarkably resilient and the company continues to turn a healthy profit,' he writes. 'The mature verdict on Steve Ballmer is that he has made only one major strategic error: not combining his own brilliance for sales and detail with a visionary product leader who has the authority to create bold new revenue streams for the company.' Do you agree? Or does Ballmer deserve his reputation as a bad CEO?"
The company you keep (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to judge leaders by those they choose to surround themselves with. Delegating is one of the most important tasks any leader or executive has, and choosing to whom you will be doing so is the most vital decision they can make.
Therefore, I refuse to judge Ballmer as a leader, since I haven't really examined who he keeps company with. However, I still generally dislike Microsoft's products and strategies.
Re:Hard to argue with regular quarterly profits (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot, where Microsoft is Satan, Google is Evil, Apple is the Devil and open-source projects are pointless because thousands of programmers pulling in different directions.
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
. 'The mature verdict on Steve Ballmer is that he has made only one major strategic error: not combining his own brilliance for sales and detail with a visionary product leader who has the authority to create bold new revenue streams for the company.'
I don't know a thing about Ballmer - I don't follow corporate politics. But if you dig through all the marketing-speak there, didn't that just say "Ballmer's one major error as a CEO was not doing that thing that CEOs should be doing"?
Re:About your Thesis... (Score:0, Insightful)
He's a jackass even for a CEO.
On his watch (Score:5, Insightful)
It all happened on his watch. The buck has to stop somewhere--at the top. That's how it works. If some VP was causing problems, it was his responsibility to get rid of that VP. If it was a particularly bad market for tech, that's not his fault; but it wasn't a particularly bad market. Other companies innovated and grew. They didn't. The whole strategy became, "let's make lame Apple clones that will piss off people who prefer the traditional Windows way, and won't convert people who prefer the Apple way".
I just don't see how the man at the top can escape responsibility for all that.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone needs to patch up the holes, find a pump, and build a rudder. I just don't see Ballmer doing any of those things.
Biased, much? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is pure Microsoft talking points.
Given the most recent revelations about Microsoft, the author should be reconsidering that claim to Microsoft's virtue.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
And given that Microsoft has an 80%+ marketshare, a "largely stagnant stock price" could have been pretty much achieved by doing absolutely nothing, which, when you look at the company over the last decade, isn't far from the truth.
So it begs the question: what in the world are they paying him for?
Re:The company you keep (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at his right-hand man, Kevin Turner. Human waste on legs.
Look who he ran off, before anointing Turner: Kevin Johnston. Actually decent.
Balmer also flushed good guys like Allchin and Maritz, or drove them away. While toadies live Valentine were perked.
The best of the remaining lot hangs out a tier away from the stink. God bless Bill Laing. Actual good human being, and a pleasure to work with.
For those of us who DON'T passionately follow the minutia of Microsoft's internal management and political issues and who generally tend to glaze over news about their VPs/middle managers as if they WEREN'T the most fascinating people with the most compelling stories to tell, what you did there was throw up a bunch of generic names that very, very few people could possibly recognize or care about. Would you please provide more detail as to who these people are, what they did, and why we should care, all while keeping in mind that the fact that we don't currently care about any of them means we're not at all compelled to waste our time justifying your personal corporate obsessions by Googling their names?
Microsoft could have been more (Score:5, Insightful)
So many times in the last 15 years, you could tell that Microsoft was really really close to getting it right. Just a few more revisions and they would have done it.
* Smartphones: really an outgrowth of PDAs. WinCE (version 3 and later) bested Palm OS. Palm was crushed and what did Microsoft do? Sit there for 5 years with minimal investment in WinCE. WinMo 2003 was barely an upgrade to the previous version. I had the Jornado, HP iPaq, and the HP hw6515 (I think) smartphone. It even had GPS well before the iPhone.
* Tablets: Bill Gates was right, we all will have a tablet in the future. It's just not running Windows. I bought the HP TX tablet/convertible. And you can tell that even with Vista, it was potentially a great device. Handwriting recognition, touch support, pressure sensitivity and decent weight. But terrible bloat in the initial Vista release made the tablet boot up in about 2 minutes on a good day and put out heat like a nuclear reactor.
* GPS/media players: Remember all those Magellan and Garmin GPS units, and portable media players from China? They were likely running WinCE.
* Email: Hotmail was there early on and they sat there while Google took over. I remember the 4MB account limit.
Re:The company you keep (Score:2, Insightful)
the only company he keeps for keeps is bill - or rather bill keeps him. that's why you haven't examined who he keeps company with, because he doesn't.
"I love him! but don't mention my name on the article!" smells, you know. it smells of poo. if a guy needs a orientation session for every meeting, you can guess why he doesn't sleep much and has to work constantly despite not having a hand in the actual work... and if he really combs everything with a fine tooth then fuck him, fuck him for nsa, fuck him for death of sidewinder ff pro, fuck him for letting FASA games decline, fuck him for pushing kinect for steel battalion and fuck him for windows 8 - and praise for the keyboards and mice(not the arc, that things a kick in the nuts).
oh and triple fuck him for not fixing windows phone in so fucking many years and fuck him for not killing zune and turning it into winfucks phone and then lying that he didn't.
yeah, that's the problem with him as CEO. more than half the stuff MS has done in the past decade has been real fuck bombs and the good stuff would have happened without him doing anything. sure, he could have fucked up a lot more too. sure as a human being he might fart roses and give ample support for his employees but the fuck do I care since I don't work for him, I just need to use his products and would gladly pay for better products.
oh and real classy not judging him as a ceo but saying that you dislike what he does as a ceo(product decisions and strategy).
Re:The company you keep (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The company you keep (Score:4, Insightful)
> If you don't own a fair amount of MSFT stock or make million-dollar IT contract purchases? Why should you then care?
This is the upper leadership of Microsoft, whose products have an impact on your day to day life whether you use the products yourself or not.
captcha: restrict
Re:About your Thesis... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just that, but the company has been largely coasting since Bill left. The reorganization is well over due.
Ultimately, they had a winner with 7, and chucked all the gains that they made with 8. Considering how important Windows still is to their bottom line, they should have been more mindful to evolve the product rather than chucking everything out.
They've also been doing abysmally at entering new markets since sometime in the mid '90s, and probably before that. Which hasn't improved under his watch. The XBox was the last successful entrance that they've made into a new arena. The Zune, windows phones and their other attempts haven't gone very well.
The share price itself is largely a reflection of the fact that they're still hugely profitable, albeit heavily dependent upon one or two product lines which are likely to be in trouble in the future if they can't enter new areas.
Re:The company you keep (Score:2, Insightful)
PENIS