Steve Ballmer Blew Up At the Microsoft Board Before Retiring 248
mrspoonsi writes with this excerpt from Business Insider on Steve Ballmer's final months as Microsoft CEO: "Ballmer decided to announce his retirement a few years before anyone expected him to. It all came to a head in one board meeting with Ballmer in June 2013. According to Businessweek, Ballmer got into a shouting match with Microsoft's board when directors said they didn't want to buy Nokia and start making smartphones. Ballmer told the board last June that if he didn't get what he wanted, he wouldn't be CEO any more. Businessweek said Ballmer's shouts could be heard in the hall outside the conference room. In the end, the board compromised with Ballmer. Ballmer wanted to buy both Nokia's handset business and its mapping platform called HERE. Instead, Microsoft ended up buying just the handset business for $7.2 billion and licensed HERE maps from Nokia."
Ballmer seems to be regretting not getting into hardware sooner (although given that not making hardware propelled them to success in the 90s...)
asshole (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry... is there a better word to describe this self-absorbed troll?
What a surprise. (Score:1, Insightful)
Ballmer just comes across as a big fat baby with all the charisma of a loose turd.
Will someone tell me why he was there in the first place?
Repeats aren't necessarily good... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Ballmer seems to be regretting not getting into hardware sooner (although given that not making hardware propelled them to success in the 90s...)"
That's because during the 90's there were dozens of people in hardware but only a few strong software people. By the time the 21st century got rolling, the tables had flipped, software as an industry was well developed and now it was all about miniaturization and portability, so the pendulum swung back to hardware being the profit driver. Just because something worked last decade doesn't mean it's going to work this decade.
Nokia blew it up ages ago .. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What a surprise. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft should have... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I agree with the board here (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Microsoft and Nokia, is that nobody really wants a Microsoft Phone, and Nokia was driven into the trash heap by going the Microsoft Route exclusively (among other notable awful choices).
Microsoft has been a "Windows Company" for so long, they don't know how to do anything else besides "Windows". And now, with the dawning of Google Apps and Libre/Open Office, and ChromeOS / Android / iOS as choices to compete, there is a huge problem for Microsoft Windows ... it isn't even a good choice any more, it is just another choice. Microsoft is stuck, being a Windows Company.
Anything they do now, is too little, too late. They needed to change 10 years ago (yes, 2004) when the tide started to change. I saw it then, and knew the end was near. Microsoft has no new products, no new vision. It is dead.
Re:What a surprise. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because he owned like 30% of the stock and was a cofounder of the company and a personal friend of bill gates who owns 40% of the company.
Re:What a surprise. (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolute bullshit.
CEOs are a cult of personality in modern society. It isn't about smarts, savvy, or any other jazz. It's a type of show business.
Go look at the "promotional photos" available for people like Carly Fiorina. She's not smart enough to run a hot dog stand, but boy can she take a good photograph. And the corporate worshipers eat it all up.
Re:What a surprise. (Score:2, Insightful)
Because he was the recipient of the "luckiest dorm room assignment in history". See http://www.washingtonspectator.org/index.php/Steve-Ballmer.html
Re:Microsoft still has a chance... (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft makes billions from selling Windows. The most popular consumer operating system ever made. You want them to forgo that revenue stream so they can become a more trendy 'open source' provider, in the hope that they might, potentially, maybe make more money in another way. Despite the fact that no company doing this makes money in this way.
Apple -> gives away software (kinda) -> makes money from hardware (and always has)
Google -> gives away software (kinda) -> makes money from ads (and always has)
Microsoft -> gives away software -> makes money from 'supported apps'
Do you really think you have any idea how to run one of the best companies in the world?
Astronomical arrogance.
Re:Microsoft still has a chance... (Score:2, Insightful)
Then they need to invent all kinds of stellar business apps that integrate with it flawlessly...
and license those apps to businesses. Businesses will pay for supported apps, because they like to be covered if something happens (thats how oracle makes money)
They already have that. It's a little-known suite of programs called "Microsoft Office"
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Missed Opportunity (Score:4, Insightful)
So Microsoft could have declined to buy Nokia's handset business, retained the $7b they would have spent on it, and have gotten rid of Ballmer sooner? That just has win all over it. And in classic fashion, they stumbled once again and made the completely wrong move. At this point, watching Microsoft implode is starting to transition from hilarious to slightly sad. After what they've done to the software industry, they deserve to suffer, but at some point they're going to need to start making smart moves if they want to continue providing serious competition.
Re:asshole (Score:5, Insightful)
I've always felt that "potty-mouthed, chair-throwing, murder-threatening, monkey dancer" was an adequate moniker.
Re:What a surprise. (Score:5, Insightful)
But it isn't a natural conclusion. The workflows on mobile devices is entirely different than a PC. Metro was based on a false premise, and Microsoft is reaping the punishments of that false premise. Even Microsoft seems to know that, and Metro on the desktop has taken the first step towards becoming a gimicky new gadgets bar with Windows 8.1, and I'll wager by Windows 9 it will have completed that voyage.
Re:What a surprise. (Score:5, Insightful)
It would have made more sense to have the mobile GUI run as an application over a desktop system, and just give users the choice.
Agreed. But Microsoft got greedy. It wasn't just about getting into the mobile market, it was BEING a market. Metro is a vector for the Microsoft store, where they get to take a cut of every app sold. Bean-counters saw the revenue of Apple's App Store, and demanded that Microsoft get in on that racket by leveraging their market-share of the desktop.
They figure if Metro wasn't front-and-center on every desktop as a non-option, people would opt out and the Store might take too long to take off and generate the apps needed to persuade people to switch from iOS or Android. Trouble is, these things can't be forced.
Re:Repeats aren't necessarily good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a surprise. (Score:4, Insightful)
CEOs are a cult of personality in modern society. It isn't about smarts, savvy, or any other jazz. It's a type of show business.
It's not even in modern society, though. It's in a subset of modern society: movers and shakers, and their dick-riders. Only a tiny percentage of people would recognize a significant percentage of vulture capitalists, CEOs, or other wearers of golden parachutes.
Re:Microsoft still has a chance... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft still has a chance
Microsoft is a huge successful company, and is not going anywhere. If anything, they will have to scale back in a few sectors.
They need to make Windows Free, maybe even open source (ok, that's a pipe dream)
Absurd. The near monopoly of Windows gives them the muscle to keep better products off the market. They are also the only player in town when it comes to PC OSs (sorry Linux), and the Windows tax is not something that they would or should give away for free.
Then they need to invent all kinds of stellar business apps that integrate with it flawlessly...
and license those apps to businesses. Businesses will pay for supported apps, because they like to be covered if something happens (thats how oracle makes money)
That has never been their business model. Either buy the better app and rebrand it MS, or else crush the competition through their Windows monopoly, e.g. withholding parts of the API.
Basically everything Microsoft is currently doing is wrong. They are digging their own grave and anyone with any tech savvy at all knows it.
I really don't think that you speak for the "tech savvy."
Re:What a surprise. (Score:4, Insightful)
To my (admittedly untrained) eye, I'm not sure what Microsoft could have done differently. It had put forward mobile operating systems before; Windows Phone and Pen both had longstanding iterations. So while I think it's easy to blame Ballmer, it strikes me to some extent that Microsoft suffered a lot of bad luck. It's timing was wrong on some products, and after having won the PC wars it simply didn't know where to go.
It's not *what*, it's *how* and *what for*. Microsoft had everything they ever wanted - complete dominion of the computer industry at the time. At the dawn of the millennium, no one made a move if they weren't sure Microsoft wouldn't or couldn't compete in that arena. A few years earlier, a stray remark from Ballmer brought the tech market stocks down 5% in a single day. They have everything to lose, and nothing to gain.
Apple, Google, and RIM were *hungry*. They each had a vision that didn't necessarily involve dominating the market and instead was more customer focused. They cared about the finer points of their customer's issues. They iterated rapidly.
Microsoft's attempt to grow the computer industry ran into their real desire to simply dominate what existed. If they couldn't dominate it they wouldn't grow it. And that attitude persisted for over a decade, so they became incapable of competing - they didn't have to for years. They still don't have to in their core markets. It's just that those markets don't comprise "all of computing" anymore.
Really? I saw exactly where MS fucked up. (Score:5, Insightful)
When Jobs was on stage and first introduced the iPhone, he stated that he would be happy if they captured 3% of the smartphone market (which itself at the time represented only 1% of the overall mobile phone market).
Apple took a big gamble to create a product that at the time, was mostly a niche product, I don't think anyone was expecting the iPhone to be the staggering sensation it became. Yet, Apple spent millions to develop the hardware and the operating system, both of which were, at the time, quite revolutionary.
Apple didn't capture a segment of an existing market, they *created* their own market -- people that had never bought a smartphone before were buying this thing.
Now let's contrast to MS; They launched the Zune, hoping to capture some segment of the market that would have otherwise have purchased an iPod. When it failed to do that after 2 years, they dumped the entire thing. They launched a smartphone geared towards teens and canceled it after a week, if I recall.
For MS, the product has to be a huge hit or it's a disaster, and there's no in-between for them. That's their failure, which is they are looking for the kind of success Apple had, or they kill the product before it can even get a foothold.
Contrast to Google, who suffered through years of crappy Android releases before the OS became a serious contender to the iPhone. Google (fortunately) stuck with it, but MS don't play that game. They want instant success or the product is dead.
What they could have done differently is had an overall vision to tie their products together. What if the Zune's OS became a launchpad to a phone OS, and they had used their existing PDA experience from Windows CE to make a really good product and stuck with it, even if sales were initially slow, but they kept improving it?
But either due to incompetence or interoffice politics, no microsoft product works with any other microsoft product, and they never seem to learn from their past products what works and what doesn't -- and that's why their stuff fails.
Re:I agree with the board here (Score:3, Insightful)
Tasteful and profitable wins over open or closed.
OSX might have awful market share but Apple sells more than most Windows OEMs do and they make money on each unit sold.
That's winning. Not massive market share. Profit and sustainability. Only fools go after popularity.
Re:What a surprise. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not clear. Why is Metro the right thing for the staff of my company, who have basically been using the same GUI for the better part of 20 years now? What exactly does Metro offer my staff that they don't already have, and aren't already familiar with? Why should I spend my company's IT and training budgets on:
1. Teaching them a new GUI paradigm?
2. Investing in new technology like touch screens to actually use this GUI?
3. Invest even more money in new licensing costs to take advantage of the advantages you plan on specifying?
Here's what I think, if you want my 2 cents. Metro offers absolutely fuck all that wasn't already available, is a retard's GUI on a desktop, fucks up the kinds of multiasking that the taskbar makes easy, and has done fucking to sell Redmond's mobile offerings.
Here's what I want, if Microsoft ever wants to see me spend another fucking nickel on their operating systems. I want Metro if not outright removed, then made so that it can basically be ignored. I want the GUI that my staff have known for two decades back right in front where it fucking belongs.
Otherwise, we'll just keep using our Windows 7 licenses until January 14, 2020, by which time the last software that requires Internet Explorer will have been updated and discarded, and we can abandon Windows on the desktop.
You see, in the business world, conservatism tends to reign over "the latest fucky dunky dunky" GUI set that the Redmond developtment teams seem to masturbate to these days.
Re:asshole (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people cuss a lot. Others swear. Some use foul language.
But some are just potty-mouthed. Their attempts to sound tough are just so infantile.
Profanity is the resort of of those who have too weak a mind to formulate a good counter argument or biting riposte.
I'd say he was just too unimaginative -- fancy that for someone hailing from Marketing.
Re:asshole (Score:5, Insightful)
But the Board is just as worthless. They and Ballmer are why microsoft is second banana now.
"Developers developers developers"..... FUCK Developers.
Users, Users, Users and more importantly.... CORPERATE USERS. Windows 8 and 8.1 and from what I have seen 9 are worthless steaming turds. Whoever is in charge of the Windows OS division needs to be not only fired, but locked in stockades in front of the corporate entrance as a warning to the other executives.
The Dumb asses screwed things up so bad that most businesses are STILL on Windows XP in the corporate world and Server 2003-2007 Then the dipshit move with Office will break that lock on the market they had for decades.
Steve Ballmer destroyed Microsoft. Everything released in the past 3 years is complete crap, complete and utter crap and it is ALL his fault.
Re:Change is good (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has not been a "success." It's been a cancer eating away[...].
What is precisely the definition of "success" from the cancer point of view.