22 ms·
Now the question is, whoever will be next at the helm, will he / she be able to reverse directions and steer Microsoft into more relevant and fruitful territori
by terhechte 13y ago
Now the question is, whoever will be next at the helm, will he / she be able to reverse directions and steer Microsoft into more relevant and fruitful territories.
Ballmer's Microsoft was always late to the party, overseeing important technology trends and society transformations out of, I'd call it a mix of ignorance and arrogance; maybe they were also too blended by their previous successes. The way he dismissed iPhones, iPads, the way they developed their OS. Or the Zune, or Bing, there has been much criticism over the years. I don't know which moves would have been better (except for seeing the mobile future and the suckyness that was Windows Mobile 6 in time), but Ballmer was always more of a numbers guy I hear, and less of a visionary. I hope their next big guy is going to have more vision.
This may be a good day to buy their stock, if you like 50/50 games.
- ojbyrne 13y agoOnce upon a time, "late to the party" aka "fast following" was their strategy, and it served them very well.
- Ensorceled 13y agoAgreed. But they've been doing that pretty poorly recently as well, they keep trying to "innovate" instead of bringing their "copied from xxxx but integrated into MS stuff" solution.
- c2prods 13y agoI'm skeptical about Microsoft recovering. They clearly missed the mobile revolution. But let's hope they'll be able to tackle directly the next challenges (wearable computing, etc.)
- rom16384 13y agoThey also clearly missed the internet revolution, but managed to recover. Big companies have trouble adapting to new paradigms, but it's not impossible for them to do it, especially when they have so many resources at their disposal.
- twoodfin 13y agoI don't think Microsoft's response to the web is comparable to their failures in mobile. billg's "Internet Tidal Wave" memo went out in 1995, long before the web had become ubiquitous. They still had plenty of time to (legally or otherwise!) ride the .com tidal wave to dominant marketshare and huge profitability. A similar memo would have done the most good in 2005, when it was becoming clear that we'd soon all have access to pretty decent wireless networks and high performance pocket computers, but also clear that WinCE and the PocketPC were lousy ways to take advantage of those facts.
- c2prods 13y agoI don't think missing the Internet revolution was their biggest mistake. If you look at Apple they focused on hardware. What Microsoft could have done too. Instead, they just tried to continue this Windows monopoly and overlooked everything else.
- twoodfin 13y agoMy point was they didn't miss the Internet revolution. In fact, they picked up on it faster than most of the '80's tech companies and radically shifted strategy because billg knew that by, say, 1997, it might have been too late. I agree that trying to remake the PC space in the PDA and phone worlds was a strategic blunder for Microsoft. OEMs competing to build low-margin devices for a common OS worked for Google because they could afford to give Android away for free and the carriers and handset makers were terrified of Apple. On hardware, Microsoft had a model to follow: XBox. Imagine if they'd built an "XPhone" in 2005 instead of playing me-too to Apple with the Zune.
- flippyhead 13y agoI feel like I've heard this said before about Microsoft.
- JonnieCache 13y ago>overseeing The word you want is "overlooking." To oversee is to supervise. That was more what apple did. (Also BTW overseer has historical connotations of slavery, so it's generally a word best avoided.) Sorry if this is pedantic, just trying to help non-native speakers.