Steve Ballmer's Head On the Block? 410
mix77 writes "Influential hedge fund manager David Einhorn has called for Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer to step down, saying the world's largest software company's long-time leader is stuck in the past."
Finally... (Score:3)
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Funny)
Geez, the guy ain't THAT out of shape.
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Maybe not physically - but his personality is in the elephant category.
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Maybe not physically - but his personality is in the elephant category.
Please stop insulting elephants.
Re:Finally... (Score:4, Insightful)
From what little I've seen and heard, his biggest problem is his temper. I can imagine the crappy ideas he's railroaded through by yelling at people, instead of getting them through on merit.
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Time to do an Apple and bring back Gates?
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He wasn't much better.
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The most successful IT CEO in history "not much better." Interesting.
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Successful in terms of bringing in large amounts of cash - probably if Apple doesn't surpass them in the next couple of years. Successful in terms of bringing in talent, new ideas, worthwhile products... not so much. Microsoft made it big because others made big mistakes themselves marketing products that were very good, stable and ahead of the curve but for such an immature market (in the '90's) overpriced (WordPerfect, between-Jobs Apple, BeOS, OS/2, Sun, SGI)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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To be fair, the GP was claiming that money is a reasonable measure of someone's success in the world of business. I would agree that _personal_ wealth may be a little misleading as an indicator of how good someone is a their job - some people give to charity (as Gates is now doing), and some hoard their money. Happiness is not really the issue, here, is it?
Also, I don't agree that no-one could spend billions in their lifetime, even on material goods. So long as those goods include islands, spaceships, and i
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Personal wealth is absolutely the wrong way to measure how a good a CEO is; the way to measure that is how they affected their company. Steve Jobs is probably the best CEO in that regard, as he took a company that was on the edge of ruin, and built it up to be more valuable than Microsoft is now. In that same time span, what has Ballmer done? MS has gone down in value in the past decade from what I've read. BillG wasn't much better; he built up MS a lot during the early years, but during the later years
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Re:Finally... (Score:4, Insightful)
Jobs has headed 3 companies to success: Apple (2 different occasions), Next and Pixar. Gates on the other hand is a one-trick pony.
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Re:Finally... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Ballmer is that he's a strictly corporate type, with no real vision of his own. All of his decisions are informed by corporate thinking, which means he looks at already established and emerging markets and reacts to them. Unfortunately, by the time MS has created a product in reaction to the market the market is already dominated by someone else and/or the public rejects the MS product due to the perception of MS being uncool.
MS has had very little forward-thinking tech make it to the mainstream in the past 20 years considering the size and and intellectual resources at its disposal, and I believe this is what Einhorn is addressing. What MS needs is a leader who can leverage the best and brightest in the company and allow the best ideas (and there's a lot of great ideas floating around in their labs) to see daylight and be marketed properly.
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somebody with brains & imagination needs to step up to the plate and kick Apple's ass for a change...
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Actually, most of what Apple has brought to market with a little i in front of it is their own locked down version of something somebody else has invented.
Creative beat Apple to market with the media player, Sandisk had some really nice offerings in the early days as well that easily competed with the early iPods. Palm beat Apple to market with the smart phone. Microsoft beat Apple to market with the idea of a media-center PC (which they were copying from programs available in Linux).... the list goes on.
Ap
Re:Finally... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Innovative in ease of use and hardware design, perhaps, but even today there are things you could do on a PalmOS PDA that you still can't do on an iPhone (although the iPhone has had copy and paste and HTTP download for a while, good for them!). Running an alternate browser, a compiler/custom written app, port scanner or tethering client, for instance. I also used to have a proof-of-concept true multitasking app, although PalmOS only really supported "fast app switching with saved states" like iOS today.
Tec
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Apple frankly sucks at innovation. They are reasonably good at improving something somebody else has already invented, but where they truly excel is at marketing.
Granted, Apple does position itself as the premium product... They market and price their goods appropriately... But it really isn't just about marketing.
Apple takes a holistic approach to product development that very few technology companies do. Sure, lots of folks had MP3 players out there before the iPod... But Apple provided a player with a very simple, approachable interface, and provided a simple piece of software for both syncing the MP3 player and purchasing music. Apple may not have been the
Re:Finally... (Score:4, Insightful)
If Apple's only real strength was marketing then they would have failed long ago. Apple's modus operandi since Jobs came back isn't rocket science. Take geek gadget. Polish and refine it so that average consumers don't need to refer to a manual to use it then sell as many as they can.
Marketing isn't MS only problem. The Kin was a buggy dumb phone with smart phone prices. This was at the estimated cost of over a $1 billion before they killed it. The Zune was decent but was always behind the iPod and didn't offer many compelling reasons to switch. Again a few billion dollars down the drain. The Xbox has great market share but it has a long way to recover the billions it lost in the first years of its existence.
MS still makes tons of profit on OS and Office. Their expansions into other markets have not been financially successful. Investors want growth.
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Who gives a shit who had the idea first, that means nothing if you cant capitalize on it. The tech highway is littered with carcasses of shitty companies like Palm and Sandisk and Creative who had a good idea and had no idea how to market it to the masses and dominate the market. Love them or not, you have to give Jobs credit for having an amazing team of visionary designers and engineers who can take someones poorly implemented idea and turn it into gold.
I dont care who first invented the hand-held m
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The "Apple never innovates" argument usually requires that you accept that a dozen or more companies over the past decade were sitting on goldmines of profit, and that they let it all slip away because maybe they invented something amazing, but they didn't patent it, didn't actually know what they had, and they had no vision for how people could use it. I just find this scenario very unlikely.
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The problem with such thinking is that it views innovation in terms of gadgets and standalone products rather than as interfaces to digital media systems. Ev
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somebody with brains & imagination needs to step up to the plate and kick Apple's ass for a change...
Google are already doing so with Android. Their business model isn't exactly sunshine and puppies, but they do make good products. But really it isn't any one tech company that is doing us good (though I'd give bonus points to Mozilla, Ubuntu and Google for their contributions in the 00s). Given a monopoly they would eventually screw us over out of laziness, or greed. The great thing is having everyone try to outdo each other.
Re:Finally... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why so many people fail to grasp the difference between "first to do X" and "first to do X well" I will never understand. Yes, they innovate by taking concepts that others have thought of (tables, mp3 players, etc.) and merge them with a true forward-thinking vision to make something that people want.
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from The Free Dictionnary [thefreedictionary.com] (0-click info at duckduckgo for the search terms "definition innovate")
innovate (n-vt)
v. innovated, innovating, innovates
v.tr. To begin or introduce (something new) for or as if for the first time.
v.intr.
To begin or introduce something new.
ergo, you are wrong, all the others are right, and Apple very seldom innovate anything. They merely adapt existing ideas
You're welcome
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You're welcome
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Re:Finally... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with Ballmer is that he's a strictly corporate type, with no real vision of his own. All of his decisions are informed by corporate thinking, which means he looks at already established and emerging markets and reacts to them. Unfortunately, by the time MS has created a product in reaction to the market the market is already dominated by someone else and/or the public rejects the MS product due to the perception of MS being uncool.
MS has had very little forward-thinking tech make it to the mainstream in the past 20 years considering the size and and intellectual resources at its disposal, and I believe this is what Einhorn is addressing. What MS needs is a leader who can leverage the best and brightest in the company and allow the best ideas (and there's a lot of great ideas floating around in their labs) to see daylight and be marketed properly.
The problem is not a lack of vision -- the problem is a lack of a strong competent leader.
For example, a group within Microsoft developed a tablet before Apple came out with the iPad. When the head of the division went to Ballmer for funding to bring the product to market Ballmer killed it. Why? Because the tablet ran a version of Windows and Microsoft's Windows group complained that the tablet group was infringing on "their territory". It's this type of thinking and management incompetence that has caused Microsoft's problems.
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I think the timing of the tablet was also important. You needed smart phones to get people used to idea of touch devices being used more like general computing platforms. Before iOS and Android, tablets were just not seen as useful devices. Nobody could place them. They were marketed as laptop computers with no keyboard or mouse. Nobody wanted that. But a smart phone with a huge screen, on the other hand...
This, of course, highlights Microsoft's failure in the mobile arena. They keep trying to cram a desk
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I'd rather them try to cram a desktop experience into a mobile device instead of being like many others who are now trying to cram a mobile experience into a desktop device.
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You should be so lucky. With Android for example it's possible to have a whole Debian install on your phone, so you can have your GUI and ignore it too. Meanwhile, when you just want to bring up the browser, POW!
Linux distributions have been trying to make Linux easier to use forever. We've been demanding it all along. Now that some distributions are trying to make it actually happen everyone is screaming bloody murder.
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Linux distributions have been trying to make Linux easier to use forever. We've been demanding it all along. Now that some distributions are trying to make it actually happen everyone is screaming bloody murder.
There's a difference between not having to edit RC files directly and removing any feature that a moron can't understand. Linux used to be the OS for competent computer users, but the recent GUI changes have been aimed at making it the OS for people of no clue.
Re:Finally... (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has been behind the pack consistently over the last twenty years. Instead of innovation, it had market clout. It nearly missed the boat on the Internet, and its solution was to repackage the Windows for Workgroups TCP/IP package into Chicago/Win95, making possibly the worst TCP/IP stack in the history of networking. It only overcame WordPerfect in the office world because WP stumbled badly over its Windows version. The same applies to Lotus (although rumors still float about that Lotus's failure were hardly all Lotus's fault). The browser war it won by giving away IE, but even with near-total dominance in the browser world for a decade, it still couldn't get its various iterations of MSN web presence to catch on, and in fact, basically let its browser team almost wither and die and did nothing. Yes, it had its dominance with Office-Exchange, and certainly I give it credit for Active Directory (although its not that innovative, just a variant of LDAP with some automated registry alteration built into), but look at Exchange, it's a fucking behemoth, massively overlarge and difficult to maintain.
But the mobile/tablet world is killing it. It's so far behind the big players it really isn't worth mentioning. Apple and Google are kicking ass right left and centre. As to web presence, well, Google is still champion and Microsoft continues to flounder, which only adds to the disaster that it's facing in the home market. It still has its business/corporate market and there I suspect it will remain dominant, but now that smartphones, subnotebooks and tablets appear poised to gut a good chunk of the PC market (even Intel is figuring out it's got to start building chips here), Microsoft is about to lose a huge chunk of that linkage between PC, operating system and office software that has made it king since the 1980s.
Microsoft needs new leadership badly. It needs someone willing to decouple its business and development divisions from Windows, to port Outlook to ARM-based operating systems, and not just move Windows into a market that it has little enough ability to penetrate. It has to admit that the way that it became supreme 25 years ago is gone, rather than just smacking its head against the same old wall.
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ME, I'm waiting for the Linux light bulbs with the IPv6 addresses so I can control all the lighting in the house from a PC without having to do a fancy re-wiring job.
Yes, me too, but then who wants a $100 light bulb that burns +20% power, and 20W IDLE?
We'll get there, but the wait will be loooong.
Re:Finally... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with Ballmer is that he's a strictly corporate type, with no real vision of his own. All of his decisions are informed by corporate thinking, which means he looks at already established and emerging markets and reacts to them.
What the hell? That's all Microsoft has ever done. Copied DOS, copied Apple's copy of Xerox's work, copied Java, copied WordPerfect, copied that spreadsheet app ...
Their only problem was, they stopped copying the right products, or copied them too late.
Unfortunately, by the time MS has created a product in reaction to the market the market is already dominated by someone else and/or the public rejects the MS product due to the perception of MS being uncool.
No, MS has a great image. Not amongst techies, but that's nothing new. Microsoft is seen as great by most people in education, small business, big business, and government. Bing didn't suffer for being "uncool". It suffers for being 10 years late, and having no way to lock people in.
MS has had very little forward-thinking tech make it to the mainstream in the past 20 years considering the size and and intellectual resources at its disposal, and I believe this is what Einhorn is addressing. What MS needs is a leader who can leverage the best and brightest in the company and allow the best ideas (and there's a lot of great ideas floating around in their labs) to see daylight and be marketed properly.
MS has made a lot of innovative stuff. Problem is, it gets killed by cross-fighting from established products. How does it fit in with Windows and Office's plans? It doesn't? Bye bye.
They should just copy stuff, and not worry about synergies with their other knock-offs. Their main synergy is their stable of excellent engineers, testers, and managers; and their brand name.
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What the hell? That's all Microsoft has ever done. Copied DOS, copied Apple's copy of Xerox's work, copied Java, copied WordPerfect, copied that spreadsheet app ...
There's an interesting double standard (not necessarily held by the person I'm responding to) that when Microsoft copies someone else's work and improves on it it's copying or unoriginal, but when, say, Apple does it it's innovation.
Kinect (Score:2)
I don't know if ballmer was involved, and I am certainly no fan of microsoft, but the kinect really was innovative. I'm not sure I could attribute anything that novel to apple. They came out with a better smartphone after Nokia, I thought sony beat them to the music player, tablets existed before apple's. So apple does a great job of polishing. Granted, microsoft should have more innovation, but thought apple just passed them in stock value, so shouldn't they have many inventions where you think, oh, apple
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Then Microsoft needs a new CEO that has enough clout to bring every department in-line and give that rapid concept development team a chance and enough resources to make their goal
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FWIW, I still think he's a douche. It seems that Microsoft has actually improved since he left, and if you were in the top 10 richest people in the world, it wouldn't take much to do "incredible philanthropy efforts" while still having more money left over for yourself than you know what to do with.
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If you are a customer, having your money extracted and then used to fight malaria is, arguably, nicer than having it extracted and used to build a 15th mansion; but philanthropy and plutocratic excess are, equally, signals of money t
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but philanthropy and plutocratic excess are, equally, signals of money that isn't being invested in R&D or being left in customers' hands with lower prices...
Although I have no particular fondness for Bill Gates, it's fair to say that his money is his own, and he is entitled to do whatever he pleases with it. Neither the corporation he founded, nor its shareholders have any claim on it, and he is under no obligation to ask for your opinion on the matter.
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Time to do an Apple and bring back Gates?
Bring back the man who had to be begged by J. Allard to take the internet seriously? Gates has as much lack of vision as Ballmer.
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I hear Darl McBride is looking for a job.
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd really rather that they keep him indefinitely. He's doing an excellent job of running the company into the ground.
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Oh, it's stagnation alright. Have you looked at their stock price over the last decade?
Investors are right to call for his head, Ballmer has been MS' biggest problem for many years.
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The fact of the matter is that a big chunk of the computing market is moving over to a class of devices that Microsoft has at best only a tentative foot in the door. Yes, it's corporate dominance will likely remain for some time to come, but there's a big market that Microsoft is poised to become at best a bit player in, much as happened to it with its Web presence.
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Soon, a chair found stuck into Einhorn's head (Score:5, Funny)
Soon, a chair found stuck into Einhorn's head (dann, ein genauer Horn).
he's not stuck in the past (Score:2)
He's just clinging embarrassingly to others' visions of the future.
Hey, MS, you made it big with a smart desktop. Don't follow Google and return us to an era of dumb terminals for hire, please.
And not every one of us is taken in by Apple's overpriced shine. Work out why you have 90%+ desktop marketshare instead of turning your back on it to chase the remaining 10%.
Thanks.
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You seem to presume that 90% of PC owners are actually making a choice and selecting Windows.
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Similarly, you presume that they aren't.
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Personal Computing Speed/Price vs. Bandwidth/Price.
80's Mainframes with Dumb Terminals, 90's Desktops, 00's SaaS Servers with PCs running as thick terminals, 10's Mobile.
The Smart desktop had its time and it is not going to die but it will go where the mainframes are. Special Use systems, reserved medium/high computational computing. Laptops are still strong today and will have a decade or so to keep the smart desktop technology in a stable market. But will also soon fade out. Todays mobile devices "Shin
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Much of Microsoft's history is, arguably, a demonstration of how useful it is to have an exclusive platform large enough to lure developers, platform continuity long enough to allow people to get away with running almost whatever crap they want, and using people's dependence on one part of your product line to ext
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hey make good PC software (I know, that's not a popular opinion around here, but I said it, so there)
It's not that it's not popular opinion, it's that it's a retarded opinion for anyone who has ever had access to any of the alternatives at any point in MS's lifetime. Their dominance has generally been due to sheer momentum from their success in the 90s, not because anything they do is especially good. Their success in the 90s wasn't anything to do with being technically good either. Microsoft is good at business and marketing. They have the occasional product that could be called "good" (Xbox Live is looki
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Their dominance has generally been due to sheer momentum from their success in the 90s, not because anything they do is especially good. Their success in the 90s wasn't anything to do with being technically good either.
Through the 90s Windows offered the best bang for the buck of any operating system I ever worked with; today it's an also-ran security nightmare lumbered with supporting compatibility with thirty years of crappy old software, but for those who couldn't afford a Sun workstation even Windows 3.1 was a huge step up from DOS.
Sure, they could have bought an Amiga or something, but when I looked at them back then they cost significantly more than a PC and didn't run the old DOS software that most people had colle
Steve Ballmer's head on a pike (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Am I a geek if I just pictured someone photoshopping Ballmer's head onto Captain Christopher Pike's body?
Smells (Score:5, Interesting)
From TFA (emphasis mine):
So, this guy's company buys a bunch of Microsoft stock, then utters a (probably popular) opinion that the head of Microsoft should resign. Is Einhorn just pissed that the stock hasn't moved, or is he trying to manipulate the price through the media?
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His company is now a significant owner. He has the right to ask for such things. Nothing wrong with it at all.
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His company is now a significant owner. He has the right to ask for such things. Nothing wrong with it at all.
From TFA :
Greenlight currently holds about 9 million shares in Microsoft, or 0.11 percent of the company's outstanding shares, according to Thomson Reuters data.
I'd hardly call 0.11% being a significant owner. Doesn't mean he's not allowed to voice his opinion though.
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Is Einhorn just pissed that the stock hasn't moved, or is he trying to manipulate the price through the media?
Yes.
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or is he trying to manipulate the price through the media?
Two paragraphs above that:
Microsoft shares shot up 0.87 percent in after-hours trading, the most of any Dow Jones industrial average component.
So I'd say "yes", and add "successfully".
Heh (Score:2)
"...saying the world's largest software company's long-time leader is stuck in the past."
Heh. Speaking of Steve Ballmer and being stuck in the past, isn't it about time for a flying chair joke?
Growth vs Returns (Score:2, Insightful)
Long ago Microsoft pwnd the planets desktop ecosystem space. After that, until we make contact with ET growth is going to naturally be limited. Microsoft should have transitioned from growth mode to stable mode and started paying out dividends to stock holders. The attempts to levarage into other markets are going to a) cost a lot and b) come under anti-trust scrutiny.
There comes a point when a corporate giant should just be happy with what they have got and give up the raiding, and make their space the bes
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In general I think you're right. But in Microsoft's particular case they're stuck with very few profit centers (mostly Windows and Office). And those are potentially under attack, or at least stagnating. So I could see their strong desire to diversify.
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After all, they took their (abjectly sucky; but cheap) desktop OS, grew a bunch of marketshare during the desktop boom, and then had the momentum and resources to build essentially an entirely new OS(NT) and, through a mixture of interface familiarity and tie-ins to the desktop, begin assaults on both the server side and the handheld side(the former fairly effective, even
I think we can all agree on the "head stuck" part. (Score:4)
The only question is location...
Ballmer seems to be following the Gates tradition of "massive amounts of technology" combined with a complete, utter, lack of imagination and inability to accurately anticipate technological trends. Hopefully, there's someone who can do the latter that isn't just an "I've discovered smartphones!" kind of guy.
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It's not "massive amounts of technology" so much as "shady business practices" that Gates is well known for. This has changed significantly over the past ten or fifteen years, partly due to the anti-trust ruling. Once that has expired, Microsoft can go back to throwing their weight around in the industry again. I don't know if Ballmer is the same level of business genius that Gates was. But he's certainly not moving the company in any other direction though.
The lack of imagination and technological foresigh
has there ever been a situation (Score:5, Insightful)
MS following standard trajectory (Score:2)
The reason MS has been lagging on innovation is that they are still the dominant player in office apps and in consumer operating systems. MS executives and engineers are used to sleeping soundly at night. Google has innovated because they were a new company and need to come up with something fast. Apple innovated because if they kept on selling OS 9 on Motorola they would have gone out of business five years ago. IBM got out of the retail space and focused on being a computer science company.
There is not a
Fat Cat Syndrome (Score:2)
The reason MS has been lagging on innovation is that they are still the dominant player in office apps and in consumer operating systems. MS executives and engineers are used to sleeping soundly at night. Google has innovated because they were a new company and need to come up with something fast. Apple innovated because if they kept on selling OS 9 on Motorola they would have gone out of business five years ago. IBM got out of the retail space and focused on being a computer science company.
There is not a lot of room for growth or innovation at the top. Look at GM, AT&T, Disney, Boeing, PanAm and other former industry leaders. They get too comfortable to innovate. Suddenly new players are entering their markets and they are late to see that the competition is better. As for the hedge fund managers comments. I would take them with a grain of salt. He obviously has put a fair amount of his clients money in MS. Is he really long on MS, or just trying to stir up enough controversy that he can dislodge SB and make a few million on the bump?
If I had points, I'd mod you up. What you are describing is known in business terms as the "fat cat syndrome." Businesses become so successful that future products are evaluated not as to what they can do to benefit the company, but instead how they will cut into existing product lines. IBM was the biggest example of this back in the 70s and 80s.
For IBM, they purposely held down the PC because it was a threat to their mini computer and later small main frame business. The arrogantly made the statement t
Please don't tablify or mobilize Windows (Score:2)
I hope there isn't a movement within Microsoft to jump on the bandwagon of dumbing down and "simplifying" their desktop environment so that it looks like it would be right at home on a tablet, netbook, or other mobile devices.
If being stuck in the past means having a fully featured, straightforward desktop environment then consider me an old timer who refuses to change with the times.
I do not like Gnome Shell. I do not like Unity. I do not want Windows to move in that direction.
I think people are seriously
CHAPTER XXV (Score:2)
WHAT FORTUNE CAN EFFECT IN HUMAN AFFAIRS AND HOW TO
WITHSTAND HER
[...]
Changes in estate also issue from this, for if, to one who governs
himself with caution and patience, times and affairs converge in such a
way that his administration is successful, his fortune is made; but if
times and affairs change, he is ruined if he does not change his course
of action. But a man is not often found sufficiently circumspect to know
how to accommodate himself to the change, both because he cannot deviate
from what nature incl
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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I'll get the popcorn and sodas. I hope this is in 3D...
Given that Einhorn... (Score:2)
Says The Guy who Bought a Share in the Mets? (Score:3)
The only thing you need to know (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Bill Gates is Chairman of the Board of Directors
2. Bill Gates is Microsoft's largest shareholder
3. Steve Ballmer was Best Man at Bill Gates' wedding
Unless Steve Ballmer gets hit by a bus, he isn't going anywhere.
Laces out! (Score:3)
Don't worry...soon, Steve will reveal that Einhorn is Finkle.
press = suckers (Score:2)
I honestly don't know why people publish this stuff.
Now, thanks to the press, there will be a bump in MSFT prices, and the hedge fund manager is laughing all the way to the bank.
They suck at marketing - Ballmer's a marketing guy (Score:2)
You think that Ballmer's position grants him control over the behemoth, but I say he is riding atop a stubborn pachyderm trying to take credit for its good fortune in some times, while drawing attention away from its mistakes and flaws at others.
The internal politics between departments and projects, conflicts in "the mind" of Microsoft, are more of an issue than the jockey flogging the lumbering beast, IMO.
Now, a smaller company, or one with less in-fighting will respond better to their leader's comm
Give Him a Gold ZUNE ... (Score:2)
... and let him retire to share old war stories with Clippy..
Really? (Score:2)
It's like saying that Al Capone was bad at being a mobster.
Microsoft is pretty much defined as a company that started at monopoly position, produces technologically mediocre or plain inadequate products and maintains its control of the market by making those products so bad, interoperability with anything else is nearly impossible. Place a smart person at the helm of such organization, and it will destroy itself by losing this advantage. Gates and Ballmer are perfect people to run Microsoft -- first is driv
gambling (Score:3)
An investor who put $100,000 into Microsoft stock 10 years ago would now have about $69,000 worth.
Interesting. Anyone else feel like stocks are just glorified gambling? (Hint: the house always wins in the long run. Where do you think the now-missing $31k went?)
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Der der der denk
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That reminds me of HHGTTG: "Presidents don't have power, their purpose is to draw attention away from it."
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What about Steve Jobs? That would be hilarious. And scary.
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Kudos to AC for Reference of the Day. However, Microsoft is closer to Gecko than Teldar. Buying up competitors just to junk their offering, suing their own customers for piracy, vendor lock-in, EULA, anti-trust convictions, etc. - are these worse than what the finance houses get up to?
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Judging by how Oracle handles other products, I wouldn't worry about that.
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