14 ms·

Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

101 points by 6thSigma 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jug6ernaut 14y ago
No one involved in the transition from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone should be satisfied, it was a complete failure. At the time Windows Mobile pretty much owned the Smart Phone market(unless you consider BB at the time smart phones, they were close to but not just IMO. No where near the freedom as WM). But over Windows Mobiles life time it completely stagnated, but even with that had a large following. With there transition to Windows Phone they completely deserted there current user base opting for a more iphonesk ecosystem. That of restriction instead of freedom. Ironically Android is the true successor to Windows Mobile, and in a position Microsoft can only dream of right now.
- pedalpete 14y ago
  Though I agree with much of your comment, I think you're missing the timing a bit. I don't think it is the transition team specifically that is the issue, but rather the leadership did not recognize where the market was going, or didn't think the market was big enough to dedicate the right resources. Big mistake. They shouldn't have been responding to Apple and Android, they should have been leading it all. This is probably a good example of the innovators dilemma in action. I also disagree that Android is the 'true successor to Windows Mobile'. Sure it is somewhat more open than WP, but I don't think openness is what is a key part of Android's success.
- martinced 14y ago
  I was working in the mobile business before the iPhone came and owned everybody (waiting then for Android) and I recall things totally differently than you. The smartphone market was owned by Nokia and their Sxx series. That and the BlackBerries. We were working on mostly Nokia (either native or Java), Qualcomm BREW (C++) and, granted, we had some demand for Windows Mobile but they were pretty much a nobody in that pre-iPhone world. Just as they're still nobody. There was hardly any customer demand for Windows Mobile compared to Nokia and the others. There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones. It has always been an utter failure. Now of course you may your definition of a "pre-iPhone Smartphone" which appears to be: "Certainly not a BlackBerry and certainly not anything that wasn't running Windows Mobile". So then it becomes hard to argue ; )
  - jug6ernaut 14y ago
    I cant really argue with to much of what you say, but in my defense as i said in my original post i dont really consider BB to be smartphones, i would also extend this to Symbian. Though this is entirely my opinion, most of which i would probably say is as much my bias to WM as anything :). But at the same time if you look at the statistics here on market percentage [1], you see my main point to that windows has lost nearly all of its previous market share. [1]
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      But WM's marketshare of the overall mobile phone market was never that large, so ya, they lost half, but half of a small share. I don't see anything else Microsoft could have done with Windows Phone (disclosure: I'm a Microsoft employee but no inside info). I mean, the iPhone was pure disruption. Android then comes a long and destroys the market for OSes because they gave it away! So iPhone disrupts the high end, Android disrupts the low end, and Microsoft is put into an interesting non-trivial position.
  - macspoofing 14y ago
    >There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ... That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.
    - edderly 14y ago
      This is fairly illusory as a comparison. I don't believe the PDA market ever amounted to more than 12 million devices a year. Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million. Plus it didn't help that MS were trying to charge unrealistic prices for the OS, in 1999 they were asking for $80 per unit....
      - macspoofing 14y ago
- DenisM 14y ago
  You're mixing the time frames. When Widows Mobile Smartphone came out in 2003, it was the most advanced, most open, most app-friendly phone OS. However, there were not substantial improvements for the next 5 years - the product was in fact stillborn. The Windows Phone team was then brought in to bury the corpse, and start afresh, which is what they did. It wasn't their fault that the predecessor has died several years earlier.
  - dman 14y ago
    Microsoft invented their own troubles in this market. How many parallel mobility teams can one company reasonably sustain - a) Windows phone 6.5 b) Windows phone 7.x c) Windows phone 8.x d) Project Pink / Kin e) Danger f) Windows 8 RT g) Courier
    - mynameisvlad 14y ago
      To be fair, those teams were not parallel. 6.5 died with 7, which died with 8. Danger was a subsidiary, and they made Project Pink, so they're the same. Windows on ARM, yes, was a team, but not associated with Mobility. They're a Windows 8 team, not a Windows Phone team, so they're not actually competing with WP nor are they working on mobility-specific platforms. They simply deal with Windows on ARM processors. And finally, we don't know where the Courier team fit into the whole plan, since it was an incubation project. Therefore, we get: - Windows Phone - Windows on ARM - Danger/Pink And then some Courier Team, probably a MS Research team (so not part of an actual commercial team) which I wouldn't count as a team. Then, Danger was folded into Windows Phone, and Courier was killed off, leaving: - Windows Phone - Windows on ARM
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - RyJones 14y ago
        PMX wasn't Danger, and PMX did Pink/Kin. Danger was folded into PMX, true, but the history is way messier than you're letting on. Some of the survivors of the PMX fiasco / power grab went on to Courier. WoA did absorb some parts of WiMo (power management, for example). The whole thing makes me want to cry in frustration. The day the iPhone was announced, the halls of 116-117-118-119 were filled with shell shocked, demoralized, pissed off people.
- hugi 14y ago
  wut? I don't recall Windows mobile ever being usable, or "owning the smart phone market". Where are you located in the world?
- kabdib 14y ago
  The code base for WinMobile was a horrible, disgusting mess. The build system is one of the worst I've ever seen. MS let WinMobile rot internally for years, building up tons of technical debt, and they paid for it in market share. I was on a project that was repurposing pieces of the WM6 code, just cherry-picking drivers and stuff. We used to go rummaging through the source code on "Wait, you thought /that/ was bad..." sessions. The BSPs ("Board Support Packages") that provided drivers and and other low-level code for the various platforms that WM ran on were written by third parties, largely by contractors, largely by the /same/ contractors, and the code quality was again terrible. Don't ever let code quality and good system design take a back seat to politics, personal agendas or convenience. That kind of nonsense is at the core of why MS is not a major power in the mobile market today. Senior management at MS utterly dropped the ball; I like to think it's because the upper echelons don't really read code or look at designs any more.
  - pablasso 14y ago
    That's really insightful. The code ended up being that awful to maintain because of deadlines pressures or Microsoft inherited the code base from a buyout of another company?
    - kabdib 14y ago
      The code was awful because there was no accountability. No oversight. Nothing happened to you if you checked in junk, as long as it compiled. Q/A was happy if their tests ran and every function did mindless NULL checking on parameters.
taligent 14y ago
It seems pretty clear that Microsoft's problem isn't with their ability to innovate. It's in their complete inability to get to market quickly, take risks and work together. And that is directly related to their HR policies in particular their ranking system.
- kvb 14y ago
  None of what you wrote is obvious to me. Partly this is because Microsoft is big enough that I find descriptions that treat Microsoft as a monolithic entity unconvincing. After all, they got Kinect to market quickly. SharePoint seemed to come out of nowhere to dominate its market, too. Thankfully, I've never had to deal with stack ranking, but I find it unlikely that it's the explanation behind Microsoft's various failures.
  - bunderbunder 14y ago
    Microsoft's got a weird dual personality in that regard. There are plenty of smaller units within Microsoft that manage to do really great things. At the same time, oftentimes when the Mothership decides to try and get involved, what ensues frequently looks more like meddling than coordination. For example, look at how their mobile offering's .NET-based APIs and "WCF lite" GUI toolkit lasted for precisely one generation before someone got the bright idea of yanking it and replacing it with a whole new system based on a gussied-up version of COM. I have a really hard time believing that's an example of coordination. From the outside, it looks a lot more like someone from the Windows division becoming jealous of what folks from the other divisions were accomplishing, and deciding to horn in on that game while simultaneously reasserting the old Win32 technology base at the expense of newer technologies. It's also a spectacular waste of effort, and left a lot of us developers feeling like we just became collateral damage in an internal power struggle.
    - olefoo 14y ago
      > collateral damage in an internal power struggle Why I'm leery of Windows Azure, even though it seems to be doing mostly the right thng.
macspoofing 14y ago
No kidding. They missed the boat on almost every trend in the last decade.
quattrofan 14y ago
He should be very unsatisfied with the total abortion that is Win8. One of the single biggest mistakes MS have ever made IMHO.
- twodayslate 14y ago
  Bigger than Vista? Or the red rings of death?
  - quattrofan 14y ago
    IMHO certainly bigger than Vista dont know about RRD. Vista was not THAT bad and SP1 fixed most of the issue. W8 is wrong at a fundamental level, its an OS for a tablet scotchtaped onto a desktop OS. What made my mind up is trying to help a woman in the shop the other week who had unknowlingly bought a new PC with Win8 on and was totally confused. I tried to help her and even I was lost... its a mess.
  - quattrofan 14y ago
    http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/380044/windows-7-still-being-sold-on-up-to-93-of-british-pcs http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/380044/windows-7-still-being-sol...
NegativeK 14y ago
The title of this article bothers me and sticks out more than any of the actual content.
adam-f 14y ago
Well, that makes two of us.
- rbanffy 14y ago
  I'm, however, perfectly happy with how things are going. If all goes well, we'll get rid of them in a decade or so.
RexRollman 14y ago
I think the quotes on this title should have been around the word "innovations".
Datsundere 14y ago
Microsoft had been going downhill since steve ballmer took the Gate's position. They're loosing their empire that Bill built. But I have to give it to Bill, he knows how to control and take over. Letting others pirate your software just to let your empire grow is astounishing to me.
gesman 14y ago
Ways to boost MSFT stock in 1 hour: 1. Announce that Bill Gates is coming back. 2. Announce that Ballmer is leaving.
- mieses 14y ago
  Not really. Gates is still anti-web. He also doesn't absorb how culture has changed - both the culture of technology creation and the culture of technology consumption. Ballmer is not great but he probably has more daily exposure to the right arguments than Gates. Also, Ballmer's buffoon-psychopath persona seems to be a cover for a paranoia or fear. Gates seems genuinely more cocky, perhaps because he's more intelligent, while Ballmer seems more likely to listen to ideas he doesn't agree with. A contemporary Microsoft led by Gates would probably make some awesome but irrelevant products.
- cmccabe 14y ago
  Ways to boost MSFT stock in 1 hour... Announce that Ballmer is leaving. That would be the _real_ "Ballmer peak."
maeon3 14y ago
I think the most telling evidence of Bill Gates satisfaction level is on the following page: http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html 6-Feb-13 3,189,267 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.44 per share. (Proceeds of $87,513,486) 5-Feb-13 3,810,733 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.56 per share. (Proceeds of $105,023,801) 4-Feb-13 3,000,000 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.64 per share. (Proceeds of $82,920,000) 1-Feb-13 5,500,000 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.87 per share. (Proceeds of $153,285,000) 31-Jan-13 4,500,000 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.50 per share. (Proceeds of $123,750,000) We are in a world drowning in words, follow the money, it does not lie.
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  I think the most telling evidence of Bill Gates satisfaction level is on the following page: http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html Bill, IIRC, sells to give it to his foundation and his foundation sells to donate. Eric Schmidt is also selling about 50% of his holdings, but after a while it's accepted as estate planning or whatever, not as lacking confidence in the stock.
- fjarlq 14y ago
  You've omitted a lot of context. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7106589/ljbox/doc/MSFT-shares.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7106589/ljbox/doc/MSFT-shares.png Gates has been selling his stock at a steady pace for over a decade. Since Sept '01 he has sold an average of about 78.4 million shares per year. Using your link you can see that he sells 20 million shares quarterly, with each block of 20M selling within one week. So he did his usual 80 million in the past year. Since the rate of his selling has neither increased nor decreased significantly in at least 11.5 years, are you sure you can conclude something about his satisfaction level? What about the possibility that he is diversifying and funding his philanthropic goals? As of today he still owns about 421 million common shares of MSFT, worth $11.8 billion.
  - maeon3 14y ago
    You are right. I was not looking at the whole picture. But still, if Bill is putting that money into another growth vehicle, that means that he believes Microsoft isn't going to rise to superstar status again. It's not a place where his money will even retain it's base value. He wants to get it out as soon as possible without crushing the stock. A decade long opinion that Microsoft isn't going to get better with time.
dylangs1030 14y ago
This title is somewhat inappropriate. Technically it's true, but I think it gives the impression that Bill Gates is not happy with Microsoft's decisions. Really it's that Gates doesn't think Microsoft has reached the end of its innovations, and that he wants to improve smartphones.
jebblue 14y ago
Just one question, where is my Microsoft Linux? Give me that and a UI better than Unity (like Gnome 2) and I'll actually pay for it. Subscription. Seriously. I don't even need a "Visual Sudio for Linux", Eclipse works great but hey if you want to put C# apps on Linux I might go back to buying MSDN (for Linux) oh and this deal is only on if you don't take it all away in a year or two. You bet the farm on Linux Microsoft, and I'll bet the rest of my future on Microsoft and Linux. If you don't I bet IBM or HP will.
ekianjo 14y ago
It's not like Microsoft ever innovated much anyway. DOS was bought from a hobbyist and repackaged as MS-DOS in the early days, Windows was not the first OS with GUI (on the contrary, it was quite late in the game), the Xbox 1 was no more no less than a PC under the hood, DirectX was Microsoft's own library to copy OpenGL, etc... In that sense, what they are doing nowadays reflects their past history of poor innovation.
- jmduke 14y ago
  This level of dismissal could undermine any potential accomplishment. If you're talking 'innovation' like Marie Curie, then sure. But its willfully disingenuous to say that they weren't -- or aren't -- an innovative company, relative to so many others.
  - ekianjo 14y ago
    Well Microsoft had "I can do it too" kind of innovation, if you like, but rarely pushed for something very new on the market by themselves. I have rather known Bill Gates and his friends for his "innovative" market practices to crush competition than actual product innovation (having OEMs install Windows by default, and threatening the ones who would not do that to get the next versions of Windows later, and so on). I reckon that PocketPCs were probably an exception to that point, and there are here and there innovative parts in the company, but it feels more that it's "innovative DESPITE its roots" than anything else.
SlipperySlope 14y ago
Microsoft simply could not dictate to the telcos like they did to the PC manufacturers in the 1990s. The telcos decide what phones get sold to consumers. Kin, for example, was killed because no telco wanted it. Telcos like Android - its free and they can skin it. Microsoft has been arrogant and toxic to every one of the mobile phone manufactures that partnered with it. It is ironic that Android, with its free software Linux kernel, is crushing Microsoft worldwide in the most dominating fashion! If smartphones are true personal computers, then Microsoft is toast.
RDeckard 14y ago
Nice haircut.
Amanda_Panda 14y ago
Windows Mobile still goes strong in the PDA market with retailers and for POS devices. My company makes custom software for WinMo PDAs, and admittedly my opinion is colored by the fact that our software is also a POS (pun intended), but I can't really believe that WinMo once held a dominant market share. Or rather, I can believe it, and can believe that the iPhone had it for lunch.

101 points by 6thSigma 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

No one involved in the transition from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone should be satisfied, it was a complete failure. At the time Windows Mobile pretty much owned the Smart Phone market(unless you consider BB at the time smart phones, they were close to but not just IMO. No where near the freedom as WM). But over Windows Mobiles life time it completely stagnated, but even with that had a large following. With there transition to Windows Phone they completely deserted there current user base opting for a more iphonesk ecosystem. That of restriction instead of freedom. Ironically Android is the true successor to Windows Mobile, and in a position Microsoft can only dream of right now.

pedalpete 14y ago
Though I agree with much of your comment, I think you're missing the timing a bit. I don't think it is the transition team specifically that is the issue, but rather the leadership did not recognize where the market was going, or didn't think the market was big enough to dedicate the right resources. Big mistake. They shouldn't have been responding to Apple and Android, they should have been leading it all. This is probably a good example of the innovators dilemma in action. I also disagree that Android is the 'true successor to Windows Mobile'. Sure it is somewhat more open than WP, but I don't think openness is what is a key part of Android's success.
martinced 14y ago
I was working in the mobile business before the iPhone came and owned everybody (waiting then for Android) and I recall things totally differently than you. The smartphone market was owned by Nokia and their Sxx series. That and the BlackBerries. We were working on mostly Nokia (either native or Java), Qualcomm BREW (C++) and, granted, we had some demand for Windows Mobile but they were pretty much a nobody in that pre-iPhone world. Just as they're still nobody. There was hardly any customer demand for Windows Mobile compared to Nokia and the others. There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones. It has always been an utter failure. Now of course you may your definition of a "pre-iPhone Smartphone" which appears to be: "Certainly not a BlackBerry and certainly not anything that wasn't running Windows Mobile". So then it becomes hard to argue ; )
- jug6ernaut 14y ago
  I cant really argue with to much of what you say, but in my defense as i said in my original post i dont really consider BB to be smartphones, i would also extend this to Symbian. Though this is entirely my opinion, most of which i would probably say is as much my bias to WM as anything :). But at the same time if you look at the statistics here on market percentage [1], you see my main point to that windows has lost nearly all of its previous market share. [1]
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    But WM's marketshare of the overall mobile phone market was never that large, so ya, they lost half, but half of a small share. I don't see anything else Microsoft could have done with Windows Phone (disclosure: I'm a Microsoft employee but no inside info). I mean, the iPhone was pure disruption. Android then comes a long and destroys the market for OSes because they gave it away! So iPhone disrupts the high end, Android disrupts the low end, and Microsoft is put into an interesting non-trivial position.
- macspoofing 14y ago
  >There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ... That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.
  - edderly 14y ago
    This is fairly illusory as a comparison. I don't believe the PDA market ever amounted to more than 12 million devices a year. Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million. Plus it didn't help that MS were trying to charge unrealistic prices for the OS, in 1999 they were asking for $80 per unit....
    - macspoofing 14y ago
DenisM 14y ago
You're mixing the time frames. When Widows Mobile Smartphone came out in 2003, it was the most advanced, most open, most app-friendly phone OS. However, there were not substantial improvements for the next 5 years - the product was in fact stillborn. The Windows Phone team was then brought in to bury the corpse, and start afresh, which is what they did. It wasn't their fault that the predecessor has died several years earlier.
- dman 14y ago
  Microsoft invented their own troubles in this market. How many parallel mobility teams can one company reasonably sustain - a) Windows phone 6.5 b) Windows phone 7.x c) Windows phone 8.x d) Project Pink / Kin e) Danger f) Windows 8 RT g) Courier
  - mynameisvlad 14y ago
    To be fair, those teams were not parallel. 6.5 died with 7, which died with 8. Danger was a subsidiary, and they made Project Pink, so they're the same. Windows on ARM, yes, was a team, but not associated with Mobility. They're a Windows 8 team, not a Windows Phone team, so they're not actually competing with WP nor are they working on mobility-specific platforms. They simply deal with Windows on ARM processors. And finally, we don't know where the Courier team fit into the whole plan, since it was an incubation project. Therefore, we get: - Windows Phone - Windows on ARM - Danger/Pink And then some Courier Team, probably a MS Research team (so not part of an actual commercial team) which I wouldn't count as a team. Then, Danger was folded into Windows Phone, and Courier was killed off, leaving: - Windows Phone - Windows on ARM
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - RyJones 14y ago
      PMX wasn't Danger, and PMX did Pink/Kin. Danger was folded into PMX, true, but the history is way messier than you're letting on. Some of the survivors of the PMX fiasco / power grab went on to Courier. WoA did absorb some parts of WiMo (power management, for example). The whole thing makes me want to cry in frustration. The day the iPhone was announced, the halls of 116-117-118-119 were filled with shell shocked, demoralized, pissed off people.
hugi 14y ago
wut? I don't recall Windows mobile ever being usable, or "owning the smart phone market". Where are you located in the world?
kabdib 14y ago
The code base for WinMobile was a horrible, disgusting mess. The build system is one of the worst I've ever seen. MS let WinMobile rot internally for years, building up tons of technical debt, and they paid for it in market share. I was on a project that was repurposing pieces of the WM6 code, just cherry-picking drivers and stuff. We used to go rummaging through the source code on "Wait, you thought /that/ was bad..." sessions. The BSPs ("Board Support Packages") that provided drivers and and other low-level code for the various platforms that WM ran on were written by third parties, largely by contractors, largely by the /same/ contractors, and the code quality was again terrible. Don't ever let code quality and good system design take a back seat to politics, personal agendas or convenience. That kind of nonsense is at the core of why MS is not a major power in the mobile market today. Senior management at MS utterly dropped the ball; I like to think it's because the upper echelons don't really read code or look at designs any more.
- pablasso 14y ago
  That's really insightful. The code ended up being that awful to maintain because of deadlines pressures or Microsoft inherited the code base from a buyout of another company?
  - kabdib 14y ago
    The code was awful because there was no accountability. No oversight. Nothing happened to you if you checked in junk, as long as it compiled. Q/A was happy if their tests ran and every function did mindless NULL checking on parameters.

taligent 14y ago

It seems pretty clear that Microsoft's problem isn't with their ability to innovate. It's in their complete inability to get to market quickly, take risks and work together. And that is directly related to their HR policies in particular their ranking system.

kvb 14y ago
None of what you wrote is obvious to me. Partly this is because Microsoft is big enough that I find descriptions that treat Microsoft as a monolithic entity unconvincing. After all, they got Kinect to market quickly. SharePoint seemed to come out of nowhere to dominate its market, too. Thankfully, I've never had to deal with stack ranking, but I find it unlikely that it's the explanation behind Microsoft's various failures.
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  Microsoft's got a weird dual personality in that regard. There are plenty of smaller units within Microsoft that manage to do really great things. At the same time, oftentimes when the Mothership decides to try and get involved, what ensues frequently looks more like meddling than coordination. For example, look at how their mobile offering's .NET-based APIs and "WCF lite" GUI toolkit lasted for precisely one generation before someone got the bright idea of yanking it and replacing it with a whole new system based on a gussied-up version of COM. I have a really hard time believing that's an example of coordination. From the outside, it looks a lot more like someone from the Windows division becoming jealous of what folks from the other divisions were accomplishing, and deciding to horn in on that game while simultaneously reasserting the old Win32 technology base at the expense of newer technologies. It's also a spectacular waste of effort, and left a lot of us developers feeling like we just became collateral damage in an internal power struggle.
  - olefoo 14y ago
    > collateral damage in an internal power struggle Why I'm leery of Windows Azure, even though it seems to be doing mostly the right thng.

macspoofing 14y ago

No kidding. They missed the boat on almost every trend in the last decade.

quattrofan 14y ago

He should be very unsatisfied with the total abortion that is Win8. One of the single biggest mistakes MS have ever made IMHO.

twodayslate 14y ago
Bigger than Vista? Or the red rings of death?
- quattrofan 14y ago
  IMHO certainly bigger than Vista dont know about RRD. Vista was not THAT bad and SP1 fixed most of the issue. W8 is wrong at a fundamental level, its an OS for a tablet scotchtaped onto a desktop OS. What made my mind up is trying to help a woman in the shop the other week who had unknowlingly bought a new PC with Win8 on and was totally confused. I tried to help her and even I was lost... its a mess.
- quattrofan 14y ago
  http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/380044/windows-7-still-being-sold-on-up-to-93-of-british-pcs http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/380044/windows-7-still-being-sol...

NegativeK 14y ago

The title of this article bothers me and sticks out more than any of the actual content.

adam-f 14y ago

Well, that makes two of us.

rbanffy 14y ago
I'm, however, perfectly happy with how things are going. If all goes well, we'll get rid of them in a decade or so.

RexRollman 14y ago

I think the quotes on this title should have been around the word "innovations".

Datsundere 14y ago

Microsoft had been going downhill since steve ballmer took the Gate's position. They're loosing their empire that Bill built. But I have to give it to Bill, he knows how to control and take over. Letting others pirate your software just to let your empire grow is astounishing to me.

gesman 14y ago

Ways to boost MSFT stock in 1 hour: 1. Announce that Bill Gates is coming back. 2. Announce that Ballmer is leaving.

mieses 14y ago
Not really. Gates is still anti-web. He also doesn't absorb how culture has changed - both the culture of technology creation and the culture of technology consumption. Ballmer is not great but he probably has more daily exposure to the right arguments than Gates. Also, Ballmer's buffoon-psychopath persona seems to be a cover for a paranoia or fear. Gates seems genuinely more cocky, perhaps because he's more intelligent, while Ballmer seems more likely to listen to ideas he doesn't agree with. A contemporary Microsoft led by Gates would probably make some awesome but irrelevant products.
cmccabe 14y ago
Ways to boost MSFT stock in 1 hour... Announce that Ballmer is leaving. That would be the _real_ "Ballmer peak."

maeon3 14y ago

I think the most telling evidence of Bill Gates satisfaction level is on the following page: http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html 6-Feb-13 3,189,267 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.44 per share. (Proceeds of $87,513,486) 5-Feb-13 3,810,733 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.56 per share. (Proceeds of $105,023,801) 4-Feb-13 3,000,000 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.64 per share. (Proceeds of $82,920,000) 1-Feb-13 5,500,000 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.87 per share. (Proceeds of $153,285,000) 31-Jan-13 4,500,000 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.50 per share. (Proceeds of $123,750,000) We are in a world drowning in words, follow the money, it does not lie.

OGinparadise 14y ago
I think the most telling evidence of Bill Gates satisfaction level is on the following page: http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html Bill, IIRC, sells to give it to his foundation and his foundation sells to donate. Eric Schmidt is also selling about 50% of his holdings, but after a while it's accepted as estate planning or whatever, not as lacking confidence in the stock.
fjarlq 14y ago
You've omitted a lot of context. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7106589/ljbox/doc/MSFT-shares.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7106589/ljbox/doc/MSFT-shares.png Gates has been selling his stock at a steady pace for over a decade. Since Sept '01 he has sold an average of about 78.4 million shares per year. Using your link you can see that he sells 20 million shares quarterly, with each block of 20M selling within one week. So he did his usual 80 million in the past year. Since the rate of his selling has neither increased nor decreased significantly in at least 11.5 years, are you sure you can conclude something about his satisfaction level? What about the possibility that he is diversifying and funding his philanthropic goals? As of today he still owns about 421 million common shares of MSFT, worth $11.8 billion.
- maeon3 14y ago
  You are right. I was not looking at the whole picture. But still, if Bill is putting that money into another growth vehicle, that means that he believes Microsoft isn't going to rise to superstar status again. It's not a place where his money will even retain it's base value. He wants to get it out as soon as possible without crushing the stock. A decade long opinion that Microsoft isn't going to get better with time.

dylangs1030 14y ago

This title is somewhat inappropriate. Technically it's true, but I think it gives the impression that Bill Gates is not happy with Microsoft's decisions. Really it's that Gates doesn't think Microsoft has reached the end of its innovations, and that he wants to improve smartphones.

jebblue 14y ago

Just one question, where is my Microsoft Linux? Give me that and a UI better than Unity (like Gnome 2) and I'll actually pay for it. Subscription. Seriously. I don't even need a "Visual Sudio for Linux", Eclipse works great but hey if you want to put C# apps on Linux I might go back to buying MSDN (for Linux) oh and this deal is only on if you don't take it all away in a year or two. You bet the farm on Linux Microsoft, and I'll bet the rest of my future on Microsoft and Linux. If you don't I bet IBM or HP will.

ekianjo 14y ago

It's not like Microsoft ever innovated much anyway. DOS was bought from a hobbyist and repackaged as MS-DOS in the early days, Windows was not the first OS with GUI (on the contrary, it was quite late in the game), the Xbox 1 was no more no less than a PC under the hood, DirectX was Microsoft's own library to copy OpenGL, etc... In that sense, what they are doing nowadays reflects their past history of poor innovation.

jmduke 14y ago
This level of dismissal could undermine any potential accomplishment. If you're talking 'innovation' like Marie Curie, then sure. But its willfully disingenuous to say that they weren't -- or aren't -- an innovative company, relative to so many others.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  Well Microsoft had "I can do it too" kind of innovation, if you like, but rarely pushed for something very new on the market by themselves. I have rather known Bill Gates and his friends for his "innovative" market practices to crush competition than actual product innovation (having OEMs install Windows by default, and threatening the ones who would not do that to get the next versions of Windows later, and so on). I reckon that PocketPCs were probably an exception to that point, and there are here and there innovative parts in the company, but it feels more that it's "innovative DESPITE its roots" than anything else.

SlipperySlope 14y ago

Microsoft simply could not dictate to the telcos like they did to the PC manufacturers in the 1990s. The telcos decide what phones get sold to consumers. Kin, for example, was killed because no telco wanted it. Telcos like Android - its free and they can skin it. Microsoft has been arrogant and toxic to every one of the mobile phone manufactures that partnered with it. It is ironic that Android, with its free software Linux kernel, is crushing Microsoft worldwide in the most dominating fashion! If smartphones are true personal computers, then Microsoft is toast.

RDeckard 14y ago

Nice haircut.

Amanda_Panda 14y ago

Windows Mobile still goes strong in the PDA market with retailers and for POS devices. My company makes custom software for WinMo PDAs, and admittedly my opinion is colored by the fact that our software is also a POS (pun intended), but I can't really believe that WinMo once held a dominant market share. Or rather, I can believe it, and can believe that the iPhone had it for lunch.