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...)
Change is good (Score:5, Interesting)
And making typewriters and mainframes propelled IBM to success in the 60s.
Re:What a surprise. (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with the board here (Score:5, Interesting)
There's no reason MS couldn't have taken the route Google has with branding phones (eg. the Nexus 4, actually made by LG or Asus or I don't remember). I don't think buying Nokia is going to look like a good decision down the road.
Overall, MS's continuous doubling down on mobile has succeeded only in poisoning their other products.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft was trying to push smartphone before it was popular, but no one wanted or wants what they were or are selling. They have never really had the kind of charismatic salesman that Apple had in Jobs, so they weren't able to create convince people to buy this new thing and create a market. Now that the market's set, and Microsoft essentially isn't part of it, they're done. Just copying Apple or Samsung are doing by having hardware isn't going to make people want Windows Mobile (or whatever they're calling it these days) anymore than they did previously. The Nokia purchase is a huge waste of money. Most people aren't going to buy Microsoft phones. Microsoft needs to spend its resources building something cool (that isn't a phone) and a separate brand for it. That's the kind of gamble that big companies don't take though. There's too much to risk, and it takes a long term vision and commitment that investors don't have.
Microsoft still has a chance... (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft still has a chance...
They need to make Windows Free, maybe even open source (ok, that's a pipe dream)
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)
Basically everything Microsoft is currently doing is wrong. They are digging their own grave and anyone with any tech savvy at all knows it.
Re:Microsoft just doesn't get it. (Score:3, Interesting)
They also didn't have the discipline which Jobs imposed to not market a product until the technological infrastructure was in-place to support it:
- Apple waited on the iPod until there were enough machines w/ FireWire so that it could synch in a reasonable timeframe and they had sufficient content deals lined up to make it work --- Microsoft released the Zune before they could find a compelling reason for people to buy them.
- Apple deferred on the iPad, instead first releasing the iPhone 'cause battery technology wasn't adequate to all-day usage, and processors made the machine larger than seemed reasonable --- Microsoft instead jumped on the bandwagon w/ Windows for Pen Computing (competing w/ Go Corporation's PenPoint)
Re:What a surprise. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think his history in the company was what went horribly wrong, and if Gates were still around, the same mistakes would have been made. Microsoft operated under the old adage "don't change your horses in midstream", and that meant hanging on to Ballmer even as everyone saw the titanic shifts in the marketplace.
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.
In the meantime, RIM comes along and recreates the mobile computing industry, and then Apple, and a little later Google, take the initiative and basically create the computer marketplace we see today. Maybe Microsoft could have done something earlier, but the way I look at the chronology of smartphones, I don't see where Microsoft had a lot of room to take the initiative. I mean, who would have thought in the mid-00s that the smart device would become the pre-eminent consumer computing platform in less than a decade?
Where Ballmer screwed up, if you can call it that, was in the vain attempt to basically buy Microsoft a market; with the Surface tablet line and the Nokia purchase, and even worse, to try to force a homogeneous GUI on everyone from Windows Server customers to Surface RT users. Metro is the real Ballmer fuck up, the one that spread Microsoft's mobile weakness across its entire product line.
Ballmer is supposed to be a nice guy (Score:4, Interesting)
I think Ballmer inherited a very large unwieldy and nearly ungovernable organization. All the real genii had either cashed out, burnt out or were pushed out. Near monopoly status meant every one is producing huge torrents of revenue and it was difficult to cull out the wheat from the chaff. Those who remained and got promoted were the third or fourth echelon of talent who excelled in office politics and political intrigue. Much of the credit the media heaped on him in the early were undeserved and so is most of the scorn heaped on him.
Re:What a surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
"I mean, who would have thought in the mid-00s that the smart device would become the pre-eminent consumer computing platform in less than a decade?"
You mean other than Apple and the other people who helped make it happen?
Microsoft's problem moving off of the desktop has always been that they want a very similar experience on the desk and in the hand. This was a bad idea when they tried to emulate the Windows experience in WinCE, and is a bad idea going the other direction with Metro.
Re:What a surprise. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not clear here. Why should I use Start button replacement of dubious merits to replace functionality that was present prior to Windows 8. I'm in an enterprise environment, where GPOs rule the roost, and your suggestion is that I use a third party tool that likely won't integrate into that environment in any meaningful way.
You seem to be of the opinion that the world should bend to Metro. Pretty much every organization I deal with does not want it, will not use it, and wants it completely hidden. Most plan on using their Windows 7 licences until that becomes nonviable for security reasons.
And if you think, by 2020, there won't be challengers to Microsoft Office, then you're deluded. If Metro isn't invisible by 2020, we will be moving to other platforms. Period.