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Steve Ballmer, worst CEO

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Microsoft could have been a 750 billion dollar company if the right CEO was at the helm during the lost decade of Ballmer.
 
Hugo Drax said:
Microsoft could have been a 750 billion dollar company if the right CEO was at the helm during the lost decade of Ballmer.
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Ridiculous. Lost decade...if you don't count Xbox, Xbox 360, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Azure, Kinect, the insane success of the corporate side (office, sql server, visual studio, etc)...the list goes on. Have there been missteps? Sure. But, hard as this may be to believe, there is more to the world than mobile, and Microsoft has done extremely well in many of those arenas under Ballmer.

Investors never liked him, but the fact is their profits went up, and up, and up over his tenure. They easily weathered the .com bust, along with 2008, which many technology companies did not.

I'm sure the anti Microsoft crowd will kick and scream about the iPhone (possibly trotting out a video they love to show, but never actually listen to), they might point at the stock price, but all of that is irrelevant to the fact that Microsoft has done very well under Ballmer, even if it hurts them to hear it.
 
Deeko said:
Ridiculous. Lost decade...if you don't count Xbox, Xbox 360, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Azure, Kinect, the insane success of the corporate side (office, sql server, visual studio, etc)...the list goes on. Have there been missteps? Sure. But, hard as this may be to believe, there is more to the world than mobile, and Microsoft has done extremely well in many of those arenas under Ballmer.

Investors never liked him, but the fact is their profits went up, and up, and up over his tenure. They easily weathered the .com bust, along with 2008, which many technology companies did not.

I'm sure the anti Microsoft crowd will kick and scream about the iPhone (possibly trotting out a video they love to show, but never actually listen to), they might point at the stock price, but all of that is irrelevant to the fact that Microsoft has done very well under Ballmer, even if it hurts them to hear it.
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Profits went up because PC sales went up. He was a mediocre CEO at the right place at the right time. Microsoft could have been a 750 billion dollar company today if they had a proper CEO at the helm. Not a mediocre CEO who pretty much got lucky to be sitting in the chair as the PC revolution exploded and people started buying PCs left and right.


Let me simplify this for you.

Bill and Allen were smart enough to find the locations of Oil reserves and decided to drill and build lots of oil fields in anticipation of the Automobile revolution. 10 years later just as the cusp of the revolution, Bill retires and hands the company the Ballmer. Ballmer sits back as the Automobile and expressways explode and revenues increase. Does this make Ballmer a genius? Of course not.
 
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mafia said:
http://youtu.be/eywi0h_Y5_U Remember this? Forbes is right.
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A lot of the stuff Ballmer said is right. Having no keyboard really does impair the ability to type messages. I hate typing messages because there's no feel to the keys. Businesses still have not adopted iphones, just as he predicted. Blackberry phones are still the standard, but that will eventually change.

I don't know much about phones. Can anyone explain why Windows mobile failed? My friend had one of those Motorola Q phones Ballmer mentioned and it seemed to work ok at the time. My friend only got rid of it because he accidentally broke the phone. It wasn't a case of rage quitting or wanting to upgrade.
(edit, nevermind, I think someone answered it already)

I don't think the tablet screwup was Ballmer's fault. Look at the ipad as an example. Do people get excited because it has a certain operating system or do they get excited because of the device itself? It's because of the device. That would put more of the blame on device makers like HP. As much as I hate on Apple for ripping people off, their products are generally good. HP on the other hand..... their stuff is cheap and it sucks. It's hard to get excited about an HP tablet when you know that every other HP product is garbage regardless of what operating system it uses.
 
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BladeVenom said:
worldwide_totals.png

Wii won. The 360 started a year ahead of the PS3. On a per year basis, the PS3 has been outselling the 360.

Microsoft has practically abandoned Windows gaming. All the PC gaming studios were converted to console studios or shutdown. They shutdown Microsoft Gaming Zone, and Games for Windows Live is horribly awful.
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Wow, Xbox sure got obliterated by the 3DS.
 
Equally a different CEO could have screwed the company up and resulted in them not growing anywhere near as much.
So did he do as well as there was a theoretical potential to do IN HINDSIGHT? No.
Did he do anything which negatively impacted the company overall? Well, since revenue and profits grew, you would say generally no.

There is no way anyone can say that anyone else would have done a better job in the areas Ballmer missed, because they could have missed them too, or they could have messed up the current areas of the business that have grown.
It's all hypotheticals what a different CEO could/would have done, and the fact is MS is still going and has grown over the last decade.

Nokia? Struggling in Mobile.
Blackberry, very dead.
Palm, deader than dead.
Motorola? Dying, then got taken over.

So you say that someone else would have managed to make MS successful in mobile, despite 4 established mobile companies missing out against Apple/Samsung.
How does that work? What makes this hypothetical not-Ballmer better in mobile than 4 actual mobile phone companies?

Seriously people, get a grip. it's easy to say in hindsight he messed up, but currently MS is #3 in smartphone operating systems. That means they have done better than Blackberry and Palm and Nokia, all of whom are/were mobile phone companies.
 
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As a 95% MS shop...and I make the purchasing decisions...the last few years have left me as somewhat of a loss.

Granted, we aren't some Fortune 500 outfit, but I imagine there are many people like myself that approve the invoices yet wonder on the direction they are heading.

Are they still profitable? Of course.

From my 10,000 ft view they neglect and discontinue their best products. Between that and the constant VL fiascos they put themselves in makes it difficult to deal with.

After they released Exchange 2013 which couldn't co-exist in the same domain as a 2010 Exchange server I was about ready to throw in the towel. Fortunately they fixed that issue. But it is just another nail in the coffin for a lot of people that look for stability of products.
 
biostud said:
I was also wondering who all these persons using bing were. That's one of my biggest gripes with Windows Phone, the stupid bing search button.

The only reason Ask.com is even on, is the stupid java install.
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The only reason I am worried about getting a windows phone is all the tie-in stuff. I don't want to use their browser, their search, and I don't care about integrated Xbox crap. I just want a phone.
 
Malak said:
The only reason I am worried about getting a windows phone is all the tie-in stuff. I don't want to use their browser, their search, and I don't care about integrated Xbox crap. I just want a phone.
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Then don't buy their phone...not pike its windows phone or nothing
 
cmdrdredd said:
Then don't buy their phone...not pike its windows phone or nothing
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If I had $600 to drop on a phone then I'd get whatever, but I don't and the cheapest smart phone is a windows phone. Apparently nobody makes decent dumb phones any more.
 
ROI on the Xbox Division has been terrible....they still haven't made up all those years of losses they suffered on it.
 
evident said:
how many years have been declared "the year of the linux desktop"?

nothing comes close to windows for day to day use.
Click to expand...

Actually, I find myself going back to Linux after using Windows to do something. The only time I really want to use Windows is when
a) I need to program my harmony remote
b) If I need to play a game

Other than that, I really prefer Linux. I have 2 30" monitors sharing a 5120x1600 resolution which works very well for me. It's also very easy to install programs on Linux since almost everything out there has a deb/rpm package out there.

Oh and I don't really care about MS Office. I find that everything that I'd like to do, I can do with libreoffice or google docs. I create presentations with online presentation tools anyway so don't really need powerpoint either.
 
Deeko said:
Ridiculous. Lost decade...if you don't count Xbox, Xbox 360, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Azure, Kinect, the insane success of the corporate side (office, sql server, visual studio, etc)...the list goes on. Have there been missteps? Sure. But, hard as this may be to believe, there is more to the world than mobile, and Microsoft has done extremely well in many of those arenas under Ballmer.

Investors never liked him, but the fact is their profits went up, and up, and up over his tenure. They easily weathered the .com bust, along with 2008, which many technology companies did not.

I'm sure the anti Microsoft crowd will kick and scream about the iPhone (possibly trotting out a video they love to show, but never actually listen to), they might point at the stock price, but all of that is irrelevant to the fact that Microsoft has done very well under Ballmer, even if it hurts them to hear it.
Click to expand...

If the goal is to grow the company then Mobile is where it is at. Microsoft's core products still rake in a lot of money. But the problem is the future. Nobody knows how the advance of the mobile and ultra mobile market will affect Microsofts bottom line in the near or long term future. And as a stock hold there isnt much to like in Ballmer. He has eroded their market cap by hundreds of billions since he took over. Mainly because future growth is difficult to see in Microsoft.
 
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