49 ms·

I agree that he will probably not be remembered for having more than doubled revenue and almost tripled profits. He will not be remembered for transforming Micr

I agree that he will probably not be remembered for having more than doubled revenue and almost tripled profits. He will not be remembered for transforming Microsoft into one of the most important enterprise software companies. Not for introducing .NET, C# or Kinect either. All of that will be forgotten. He will be remembered for missing mobile. He will also be remembered for caring a lot about developers and about developers and about developers as well. The VB6 folks will still hate him ;-)

eykanal 13y ago
And for missing search. And for missing social. And for insulting OEMs. And for his failed Windows Vista launch, and Windows 7, and Windows 8. For one man, he sure has a lot of failures on his plate.
- fauigerzigerk 13y ago
  So has Steve Jobs missed social and search as well? No. All companies need not do the exact same thing. Missing mobile is relevant because it is eating into Microsoft's PC revenues, but social and search is a whole new business that Microsoft didn't need to get involved in at all. In my view, Ballmer's mistake is to not go after Oracle and SAP much more than chasing Apple and Google.
  - film42 13y ago
    Microsoft saw social and search and thought, "we must create our own!" While apple saw social and search, and said, "that's not our market, let's have google handle that for us." Edit: Apple did acquire ping, but that was social music, which is a bit different. They also introduced siri, which simply plugged in to preexisting search services (Google in iOS 6, Bing in iOS7) so it really is agnostic on that front.
    - JulieCompt 13y ago
      Apple tried social and search* with Ping and Siri. It flopped. But nobody holds it against Jobs
      - publicfig 13y ago
        Did Siri flop?
        tuananh 13y ago
        yes it did. I tried Google Now the other day. It blew my mind. Google Now understands every single words I said (Asian accent); As for Siri, 50% is kinda optimistic.
        selter01 13y ago
        Is that what determines a flop, though? Siri is definitely known, and added value to the iphone and the apple brand overall. While I use Google Now and think it is superior, I'm not sure if performance would be enough to label Siri as a flop. Bing on the other hand, not so much.
        tuananh 13y ago
        Probably the differences are only noticeable for non-native English speakers like me only. It's way too good that it makes me feel Siri is such a failure. Native speakers might not see a huge difference though.
        hnal943 13y ago
        I am a native English speaker and Siri constantly misunderstands me. Siri has become a punchline and certainly does not have the usual Apple Cool Factor.
        untog 13y ago
        It's probably still to early to tell. But I don't see how anyone can dispute that Google Now is basically what Siri tried to do, but significantly better. I'm yet to see Apple's response to that.
    - jasonlotito 13y ago
      Ping?
      - acoleman616 13y ago
        Exactly.
    - ant512 13y ago
      I think that's one of Microsoft's main failings. "Google are making baked beans? Why aren't we in the baked bean market? Let's make beans!" "What? Now Facebook are making Facebook Soda? We need to make Microsoft Soda!" Every time a tech company produces something new MS have to muscle in on the market, despite having a) no prior experience, b) no aptitude, c) existing products that could use their attention.
      - 001sky 13y ago
        windows, Xbox and Explorer from the 90's...all mimic plays
      - leetrout 13y ago
        It does feel like MS just shows up like that. Azure did (and does) give that impression; Zune, as well. And Surface tablets are also a clear response to the iPad (whether MS ever had anything in R&D previously or not, they certainly didn't ship). But I think Google is much more prone to jump in to a market with force, they just seem to execute "better" (I leave that open to interpretation). FB comes out and MS buys in whereas Google makes their own social network. Apple makes the iPhone and Google makes Android. Only much later (as the ship has already left port) does Microsoft come in with Windows Phone (I'm only considering 7 & 8). Somewhat related, I feel like MS and Dell were on target with the Axim from a product idea standpoint but Apple really capitalized on combining the functionality of a phone and forward thinking hardware and software design with iOS devices.
        smacktoward 13y ago
        That's because that has been Microsoft's strategy from the beginning: let someone else take the risk of proving whether a market for something exists, and then, if it does, get in there quick with their own offering. They got into the PC OS business with MS-DOS after the Apple II; into the GUI business with Windows after the Mac; into the word-processor business with Word after WordPerfect; into the browser business with IE after Netscape, etc. This is an established enough business strategy there's a name for it: "fast follower." (See http://www.businessinsider.com/youre-better-off-being-a-fast-follower-than-an-originator-2010-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/youre-better-off-being-a-fast...).
    - leaffig 13y ago
      What social property did Microsoft push heavily like Google does G+? Also MS was into search before Google was.
      - protomyth 13y ago
        Microsoft bought into Facebook.
      - alpha001 13y ago
        MSN (Live) spaces were somewhat popular at the time.
  - logicallee 13y ago
    >So has Steve Jobs missed social and search as well? Yes, but at least for the past two years Jobs has had a really good excuse.
  - zanny 13y ago
    What about Bing? Microsoft didn't get into social because that is entirely outside their market. The limit of it seemed to be something like msn messenger, which had business use cases as much as social ones. I mean, its not like MS didn't try the search thing, but search is something Google will own until they fuck it up, not from anyone entering to compete with them, because free & good enough are hard to break. Albeit, Google has been doing a good job fucking up their search in the last several years.
    - jcheng 13y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Spaces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Spaces
    - alpha001 13y ago
      http://www.so.cl/ http://www.so.cl/
- hvs 13y ago
  Windows 7 was hardly a failure.
  - LarryMade2 13y ago
    I think the bad pat about windows 7 is that they put out Windows 8 way too quickly. There are a lot of people that would be OK with being dragged into upgrading if Windows 7 was an easily available option. Bu now, MS is pushing manufacturers into pre-installing 8, which is NOT a good transition path from XP as Windows 7 was.
    - localhost 13y ago
      Windows 8 shipped 3 years after Windows 7. That's a very typical upgrade cycle.
      - tuananh 13y ago
        People get used to "Windows XP's style" upgrade cycle, I guess.
      - jaredmcateer 13y ago
        The problem was that it was a complete pivot on an operating system people finally saw as the true successor to Windows XP. It's what Vista should have been, a nice polished and professional OS that generally was out of your face, yet extremely useful. Then there was windows 8, not horrible, there were some under the hood improvements but the horrible hybrid metro/desktop interaction alienated the desktop market and no clear incentive to upgrade.
    - ams6110 13y ago
      The bad part about every Windows since Windows 2000 is that it didn't really offer any new value. A bit more bling in the GUI, yes, and security, yes, but fundamentally Windows 2000 is just as good as Windows 7 from a productivity standpoint. So a lot of people saw that, and decided to just stay with XP until they are forced to do something different.
  - 13y ago
- venomsnake 13y ago
  How exactly Windows 7 was failure?
- altcognito 13y ago
  Nope, he screwed up even bigger than that. As recently 2005, IE's browser share was well into the 90's. Now, it's hovering roughly 40% depending on whose stats you trust. This on the desktop, to say nothing of mobile which would make the comparison between years even worse. This is after Microsoft recognized that the web was their big challenge, after the so called Tidal Wave memo.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    He allowed IE6 to languish while the competition was growing. To me, Ballmer is symbolic of Microsoft-with-ADD. They ignore things until they become urgent, and then shovel money into the furnace until victory comes. Look at Windows Phone - microsoft had a mobile offering when iOS came on the scene, but took years to move on with WP7. Desktops languished on IE6 for far, far too long. And Vista's long death-march process and lackluster result is another point.
  - harigov 13y ago
    It's a business decision - web makes all the OS platforms equal. It is against Microsoft's interests to do that. They wanted to keep the status quo as long as possible.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  I'm no fan of Ballmer, but I think "insulting OEMs" is one of the good things he did. The OEMs carry a great deal of blame for the collapse of Windows. While Apple was shipping beautiful metal enclosures with great convenient features like MagSafe and magnetic latches, OEMs like Dell were shitting all over the Windows brand with plasticky (and still expensive!), heavy, unreliable, loud-as-shit laptops with terrible screens. The same thing happened with WinPhone. MSFT spent a lot of time developing an honestly pretty decent OS, only to have its launch lineup filled with unimaginative, plasticky bullshit phones from Samsung and LG. I for one think Microsoft's messy divorce from OEMs is a great thing, my only disappointment was that they didn't throw the OEMs under the bus at supersonic speed.
  - axelf 13y ago
    not to mention loading up the OS with a ton of crapware and free trials.
    - braker 13y ago
      This is honestly the worst of it IMO. Apple does have better hardware, yes, but the difference in speed out of the box is stunning when bloatware is involved. Microsoft didn't have a chance to keep up with OSX.
      - corresation 13y ago
        Apple does have better hardware, yes, but the difference in speed out of the box is stunning when bloatware is involved Aside from the odd "Apple has better hardware" bit (they use the same binned devices that other OEMs like Dell do, so not sure where that comes from), you've benchmarked this purported speed difference? Because most of the crapware that companies like Dell, HP, and others put on, while irritating, consumes exactly 0% of processor or I/O time, and has zero impact on performance of the device, beyond the hysterical, easily-convinced responses of the placebo effect. The vast majority is nothing more than trials. It's irritating, and wastes users time if you want to clean up your desktop and app lists, but the commonly stated impact is just not at all supported. And then there's the issue of what exactly is crapware and what isn't. Buy a pure Windows device and you'll be pestered endlessly for Skydrive, Hotmail, Bing, photo backups, Xbox coupling, active your Office trial, etc (just as if you buy an xbox 360 and then pay for the privilege of using it online, in return you get ads and sponsored placements on your dashboard). Apple is predominately a hardware vendor that has made enormous bank on that (pivoting their MP3 player market into a smartphone market into a tablet market into a bonafide desktop market). Microsoft is predominately a software vendor. Everyone told Microsoft that they should mirror Apple: it got them a billion dollar+ write down so far, and offended all of their prior allies to start grouping behind alternatives. This "Microsoft should be like Apple" plan isn't really paying dividends.
- runjake 13y ago
  > For one man, he sure has a lot of failures on his plate. As do all successful people. If success were easy, everyone would be doing it. For all the ways I disagree with Ballmer, this seems like a poor choice to point out.
  - epo 13y ago
    OK, name his successes. How has Microsoft improved on his watch? Failures are acceptable if there is ultimate success, what is Ballmer's success? Retiring rich? (Most of which was accomplished on Gate's stewardship.) Perhaps his name could become a unit for excess inventory. The "Ballmer", 500 cubic metres of unsold goods. EDIT: or perhaps the name of a new airplane seat, "The Ballmer" the only chair to fly in!
    - niuzeta 13y ago
      .NET, C#, the enterprise share, xbox are the ones that come to my mind.
    - encoderer 13y ago
      Huge increases in revenue. Huge increases in profit. Consistent dividend yield.
- untog 13y ago
  Did MS miss social? They are a huge investor in Facebook.
- Aaronontheweb 13y ago
  Failed Windows 7 launch? What the hell are you smoking? Has a lot of failures on his plate for one man? Please hand this comment an award for middlebrow remark of the year. Let's put Steve Ballmer's accomplishments in perspective: Have you tripled a multi-billion dollar company's revenue over ten years? Did you launch the Xbox? Did you launch Windows Phone (10% marketshare in 3 years)? Did you launch Bing (growing faster than the search market)? Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world? Did you grow the Windows Server business out of nothing compared to where it was 15 years ago? Did you turn Visual Studio into the gold standard for IDEs? Didn't think so. Ballmer will be remembered for one great mistake, and that's denying Microsoft's culture and employees a strong technical visionary over the course of his tenure. Ballmer is a COO, kind of like the guy running Apple these days - neither Ballmer nor Tim Cook have a strong ability to anticipate changes in the way technology is consumed compared to their predecessors. And this is largely what's responsible for Microsoft's big whiffs - they missed the mark multiple times on the consumerization of technology. People are already starting to grumble many of the same criticisms of Tim Cook's innovation that they did about Steve Ballmer, and who can blame them? Over the past three years all Apple has shipped are the same products they had before but with different screen sizes. However, that doesn't mean that Tim Cook won't be successful in growing Apple's business, nor does it mean that Steve Ballmer was a failure. As an ex-Microsoftie, I could not be happier to see Steve go. The company needs a technical visionary in order to stop having to play from behind every time there's a change in the market. But to call Steve a failure is utter nonsense and requires overlooking all of the successes that he and Microsoft had during his tenure.
  - acchow 13y ago
    > Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world? More than iOS and Android SDKs?
    - roel_v 13y ago
      I'm not sure if this is sarcasm? Are you seriously suggesting those two are even of the same magnitude?
hybridweb 13y ago
I think that .NET was being developed some time before Ballmer ascended to the CEO throne. Gates probably had more to do with it than him. Ballmer is/was probably a good CEO for a conservative, old school company, which can derive profits from a stable and well used product line. But that's not what MS is/was advertised as being about. In that circumstance, Ballmer is the wrong type of CEO.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  And it's worth noticing that many parts of the .NET framework have gone through horrible hiccups. I mean, while the C# language is great, it feels like every framework built around a .NET seems to be implemented and then dropped without substantial improvements about 3 years later. As a developer, nothing ever seems to get fixed. They get replaced, and the replacements bring a new learning curve and a suite of new bugs and problems, and these bugs can never be fixed for backwards-compatibility reasons. So we get a constant barrage of misstep boondoggles like Web Forms, Click Once Installers, Linq2SQL getting deprecated almost as soon as it was launched, etc. And with every step a larger pile of configuration and attributes that need to be added to get things to play nice with the OS.
  - Roboprog 13y ago
    I hate Microsoft, but... there are crappy frameworks in Java-land, too. I don't know that Oracle is going to do any better with future Java frameworks.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Yuioup 13y ago
.NET and C# are the brainchild of Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of Delphi who moved from Boland to Microsoft. Kinect was invented by an Israeli company before being bought out by Microsoft. Your point still stands though :-)
- tanzam75 13y ago
  > Kinect was invented by an Israeli company before being bought out by Microsoft. No. The sensor was developed by PrimeSense. However, the key part of Kinect is the software, which was based on machine learning work done at Microsoft Research. MSR is somewhat infamous for developing all sorts of whiz-bang prototypes that never make it to market. Kinect was an exception. As for who convinced Anders Hejlsberg to jump ship, that was Bill Gates. He was still CEO of Microsoft in 1996.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  C# yes, but claiming .NET (aka COM+ Runtime, the CLR, Project 7, all that stuff) is his is a slight overstatement. Generics, one of the CLR's major distinguishing features over the JVM, came entirely from MSR, at considerable resistance from MS Corp.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    Just a minor correction: Mads Torgesen was never in MSR.
nether 13y ago
A CEO gets to take credit for anything good that happens during his tenure? MSFT succeeded in areas where it already had a foothold through inertia, in spite of Ballmer, not because of him. Meanwhile, it completely failed in areas like mobile where it was initiating its presence. As recently as 2011, Wall Street was calling for him to be replaced [1], and I imagine now they're all breathing a cautious sigh of relief. [1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20075745-75/microsofts-ballmer-responds-to-calls-for-his-ouster/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20075745-75/microsofts-bal... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-27/einhorn-adds-to-drumbeat-for-ceo-exits-with-call-to-oust-ballmer.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-27/einhorn-adds-to-dru...
- tanzam75 13y ago
  > A CEO gets to take credit for anything good that happens during his tenure? Yeah, but a CEO also gets blamed for everything bad that happens during his tenure.
nailer 13y ago
> He will not be remembered for transforming Microsoft into one of the most important enterprise software companies. Windows NT/2000 and Exchange had already killed the established leaders in their fields, and SQL server was pretty close to #2 database already, in 2001.
at-fates-hands 13y ago
>>>>>He will be remembered for missing mobile Windows 7 and 8 were the first mobile OS that didn't completely rip off Apple, had the first original interface since Apple's iphone and you're saying they missed the target? Seriously? WP 8 has some incredibly original features my Android and Apple friends swoon over. Not to mention the platform is completely wide open for developers. It's not completely crowded out like the android and apple markets are.
- shawkinaw 13y ago
  Based on market share Windows Phone is a disaster, so yeah that's a miss.
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    A disaster that was released in 2012? In the fourth quarter of 2012 Windows 8 phones had sold around 6 million handsets. http://www.neowin.net/news/gartner-windows-phone-sales-increased-1242-percent-in-q4-2102 http://www.neowin.net/news/gartner-windows-phone-sales-incre... I'm sure you must have been saying the same thing about Android then huh? By comparison they only sold around 640K handsets in 2008 (their first year of release) then sold around 6 million in 2009. http://digithoughts.com/post/21428797724/android-and-apple-smartphone-sales-2007-2012-by http://digithoughts.com/post/21428797724/android-and-apple-s...
    - nailer 13y ago
      Yep. WP should have been released much earlier.
    - incongruity 13y ago
      Not a valid comparison - the smartphone market was much smaller in 2008. The percentages would be more interesting/valid, but that's exactly the problem - the market is getting closer to saturation/more mature now and so Windows Phone has more trouble getting elbow room because of it.
    - gnaffle 13y ago
bengrunfeld 13y ago
I feel that many people dislike the idea of him, without exactly knowing what he did during his time as CEO, because the Windows platforms are known as being notoriously buggy and unsecure. XP was a nightmare that caused SysAdmins to cry themselves to sleep until the expansion pack 3 came out, Windows Vista was an unmitigated disaster, Windows 7 was surprisingly decent, and Windows 8 has been hailed as a terrible idea that should have died in its crib. In the last 13 years, we've all seen the rise of Microsoft, and are now seeing the beginning of it's fall. Ballmer was an extremely important figure in the tech world. I just wish the Operating Systems that came out during his time didn't suck so much.
- bencollier49 13y ago
  On the contrary. I'd characterise the fall of Microsoft as beginning around 2000, and I suspect that interesting / good things might be about to happen. I used to hate MS. Now I feel sorry for them, I hope they can make a go of it in the future. The people who came after them in market dominance were so much worse..
  - bengrunfeld 13y ago
    Are you talking about their fall in the idealogical sense, that happened in 2000? I seem to remember at least 10 years after that where their software dominated every office I walked into. Even today as far as private cloud goes, they are a major player. Again, this references my point of Microsoft getting a bad name for releasing buggy and insecure OS's.
- yuhong 13y ago
  >"expansion pack 3" You mean SP2? Reminds me of "Feature Packs".
  - bengrunfeld 13y ago
    hehehehe... sorry, my terminology is a bit rusty. For memory, it was service pack 3 (SP3) that fixed most of the security holes that were destroying networks running XP.
alttag 13y ago
Given his newly announced re-org [1], the timing is a bit weird. Don't get me wrong, I think MSFT will be better served with a different CEO, but I wonder whether the two are connected. Certainly, the re-org will struggle without strong leadership to hold it together. 1: https://http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jul13/07-11OneMicrosoft.aspx https://http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jul13...
- Nelson69 13y ago
  I've been pondering that too. You know what makes sense to me? MS is only broken according to engineers inside and people in the SV echochamber. They've got piles of cash, they generate piles of cash, they pay a dividend... Other than equity prices, they look pretty good. They were late to search but bing has carved out a niche, late to mobile but they've got a niche, late to games but they look like they are doing just fine there. Vista, Windows 8, RT and Surface seem to be missteps but they are still shipping numbers that most companies would be envious of. If they were or are bothered by the flat equity prices, why did it take so long? And to be very honest, the engineers I've spoke to that have mentioned "problems" within the company generally have options that have been underwater, FWIW. I think Ballmer and upper management think they are doing just fine, they think there is a competitive landscape but they are still making tons of money and leading a few sectors. He reorged them for what he sees as the next 10 years or something and he's going to find a replacement that sees his vision. They won't pull an outsider and probably don't see the need as there isn't anything "broken" that needs to be "changed." I predict no big changes.
Pxtl 13y ago
Yes, but with C# we got ASP.Net web-forms. Holy crap what a technological boondoggle. In general, MS seems to have serious ADD under Ballmer. They introduce massive thundering huge frameworks every other year as some spectacularly big deal, and then drop them soon after. You ever noticed how every Office and Visual Studio version has a completely new suite of program icons? Are they deliberately trying to hurt the usability of their programs?
- mratzloff 13y ago
  That's a result of how Microsoft evaluates employees. People are disproportionately recognized for new initiatives, not refinements.
- RyanMcGreal 13y ago
  Joel Spolsky's classic 2004 essay on Microsoft resonates as strongly as ever. He contrasts what he calls the Raymond Chan camp, i.e. maintain the integrity of the API at all costs, with what he calls the MSDN Magazine camp: > The MSDN Magazine Camp is always trying to convince you to use new and complicated external technology like COM+, MSMQ, MSDE, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and its components, MSXML, DirectX (the very latest version, please), Windows Media Player, and Sharepoint... Sharepoint! which nobody has; a veritable panoply of external dependencies each one of which is going to be a huge headache when you ship your application to a paying customer and it doesn't work right. The technical name for this is DLL Hell. It works here: why doesn't it work there? > The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don't make things any worse, let's just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html Spolsky concludes, "Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle." Incidentally, .NET was what finally convinced me to jump ship from the Microsoft world, and I've never looked back.
nl 13y ago
It's hard to disagree with sarcasm on the internet. But in this case you are absolutely correct. Microsoft used to control the future of computing. Now they are yet another enterprise software company with no apparent mission except to make money. The lay somewhere on a continuum with IBM, Oracle, SAP all the way through to companies like CA. At one end of that spectrum they do research and produce software that people use to do their job 0.5% better than they used to. At the other end they may as well be accounting companies for all the impact they have on the future. Yes, they make money. And yes, I admit they try to compete with consumer oriented technology companies and have some interesting products. But you are 100% correct - Microsoft is now primarily an enterprise software company. Meanwhile Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc look toward the future.
- umsm 13y ago
  We tend to forget that Microsoft ALREADY did what these "startups" did. MSFT already pushed the envelope and changed the way we use technology in our day to day lives. There is (probably) only so much change one company / person can do. Even if there is additional potential, in the end companies will seek profit and stability.
  - nl 13y ago
    This may well be true. That doesn't make it any less sad.
    - nakedrobot2 13y ago
      No sadness here - Microsoft has been a stain on the last decade of the computing industry. The only sadness is that their trajectory of circling of the toilet might change, with a new CEO. But I doubt it.
      - lotso 13y ago
        >Microsoft has been a stain on the last decade of the computing industry Pretty easy to make bold claims without expanding on them.
PallarelCoedr 13y ago
.NET folks don't particularly like him either.
jahewson 13y ago
.NET started as COM2 back in 1998 along with a predecessor of C#, so I'm disinclined to give ballmer credit for it. Likewise, Kinect was brought to Microsoft by an Israil R&D firm, it was not home grown. Kudos for executing, but the vision thing was always missing with Ballmer. He didn't just miss mobile, he laughed at it. He will be remembered for Windows Vista.
- bskap 13y ago
  Kinect was home-grown, then halfway through they realized an Israeli company did it cheaper so they used that instead. The far more accurate version of Kinect releasing with the Xbox One doesn't use any of PrimeSense's tech.
skue 13y ago
> He will be remembered for missing mobile. Wait, what? That's like saying RIM missed mobile. Microsoft was doing mobile years before Apple or Google ever entered the market[1]. My guess is that Microsoft and Ballmer's real-world experience in mobile actually constrained their imaginations. Their failure to see how mobile could be reinvented was due more to hubris than naivete. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Windows_CE_Timeline.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Windows_...
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Saying RIM missed mobile would be like saying the Wright Company missed aviation. ...that is to say, it is a fairly reasonable thing to say. They just "missed it" in the opposite direction from how companies usually miss things. They came and went too soon. They sold smartphones and airplanes before everybody was buying them.
  - aceperry 13y ago
    I remember a friend who owned a MS phone (winphone?) around the time that iphone began. He was really happy that he could integrate exchange, use excel and word and do lots of other things with windows. After a month of living with the phone, he told me, "you won't believe how much I hate this thing." It kept crashing, freezing, and locking up on him and he returned it 3 times already. He said that if he had to return it again, he was going to get something else. Now he uses an Android phone and loves it.
    - tanzam75 13y ago
      > I remember a friend who owned a MS phone (winphone?) around the time that iphone began. ... It kept crashing, freezing, and locking up on him and he returned it 3 times already. The problems with your friend's phone were probably caused by non-Microsoft code. And just like bluescreens on XP, Microsoft got all of the blame. Around 2006, I had a Windows Mobile phone that was freezing up almost every other day, as it came configured from Cingular. After resetting to a clean copy of Windows Mobile, the phone would easily run for two months between reboots. This could be done using a little-known trick: Hard-reset the phone, and wait for it to reflash with the OS. When "Installing customizations ..." comes up, immediately press the reset button. This cancelled the installation of all the "value added" components from the carrier. You ended up with a completely clean copy of Windows Mobile, as it was developed by Microsoft (plus OEM drivers and utilities). It was essentially the phone equivalent of reinstalling Windows on a PC to eliminate all the OEM preloaded crap. The only difference was that it was the carriers who dictated the preloads on Windows Mobile -- whereas the OEM utilities were reasonably reliable.
gregors 13y ago
.Net and C# are prime examples of Microsoft waiting until someone else invented something (Java) and then doing it again. The problem is that it seemed that was the strategy for everything! Very little innovation mostly just copying and one upping.
- mkautzm 13y ago
  That's not really true. C# and Java do look the same, but the use cases for them are totally and completely different. Java is a cross-platform language used when you don't want to write code more than once for more than 1 platform. C# is a Windows-exclusive deal that gives you access to WFs and other Windows-centric things, including some low level shit that would be a pain to deal with otherwise. Despite the languages looking really similar, they don't fill the same slot.
- RWeaver 13y ago
  Remember MS-Java? As I recall it was a superset of Java. So you could migrate your java programs effortlessly towards MS, but couldn't get away! I'm glad they lost that lawsuit
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
kailuowang 13y ago
> he will probably not be remembered for having more than doubled revenue and almost tripled profits. He won't be remembered for that also because he inherited a monopoly company. But he should be remembered for transforming Microsoft into an enterprise software company, which will extend its monopoly status there for a long time, as long as the mediocre class of IT workforce remains, which is probably going to be a very long time. He is not good at making technology innovation decisions, everybody knows that, especially himself. That as a given, he set out to make the best business strategic decisions for the company. How did it go? It might be easier to tell when Tim Cook reaches his 10 year anniversary taking over Apple.
metaphorm 13y ago
Before Ballmer, Microsoft was a company that had accomplished the incredible, world-changing feat of democratizing computing, bringing a PC into every household and on every office desk, and generally changing the way people think about using computers in their daily lives. After Ballmer, Microsoft is yet another directionless corporate shitshow that has found out that selling enterprise shlockware to enterprise clients is a good short term revenue model. This is exactly what Microsoft did to IBM 25 years ago. In this round however, Microsoft is playing the role of IBM.
mbreese 13y ago
Regardless of how much profits have gone up, Balmer will be remembered in the business world for one number: $35. It doesn't matter how much they sold, what investors care about is the stock price. And during his tenure, it has remained stagnant.
Thiz 13y ago
Napoleon won over a hundred battles and is remembered for the one he lost. Fuck Ballmer.
CamperBob2 13y ago
I agree that he will probably not be remembered for having more than doubled revenue and almost tripled profits Those are irrelevant metrics unless you plot them against the growth of the industry as a whole. The results speak for themselves.
dllthomas 13y ago
Also, chairs.
Eliezer 13y ago
Did the size of the market more than double over the same time period, for reasons not caused by Microsoft? If so, it is not quite so praiseworthy to have doubled revenue. GP: Talking about MSFT share prices instead of MSFT market cap makes the Market Economics Fairy cry. Even if you talk market cap, she wants to know about dividends and share repurchases, then adjust for inflation.
scholia 13y ago
Actually, he tripled revenues ($23 billion to $74 billion) and almost doubled profits. Along with "what have the Romans ever done for us", Ballmer can also be forgotten for some billion-dollar business such as SharePoint and for making Microsoft a serious player in cloud computing ;-)
Nekorosu 13y ago
Sorry, winking doesn't help here.

eykanal 13y ago

And for missing search. And for missing social. And for insulting OEMs. And for his failed Windows Vista launch, and Windows 7, and Windows 8. For one man, he sure has a lot of failures on his plate.

fauigerzigerk 13y ago
So has Steve Jobs missed social and search as well? No. All companies need not do the exact same thing. Missing mobile is relevant because it is eating into Microsoft's PC revenues, but social and search is a whole new business that Microsoft didn't need to get involved in at all. In my view, Ballmer's mistake is to not go after Oracle and SAP much more than chasing Apple and Google.
- film42 13y ago
  Microsoft saw social and search and thought, "we must create our own!" While apple saw social and search, and said, "that's not our market, let's have google handle that for us." Edit: Apple did acquire ping, but that was social music, which is a bit different. They also introduced siri, which simply plugged in to preexisting search services (Google in iOS 6, Bing in iOS7) so it really is agnostic on that front.
  - JulieCompt 13y ago
    Apple tried social and search* with Ping and Siri. It flopped. But nobody holds it against Jobs
    - publicfig 13y ago
      Did Siri flop?
      - tuananh 13y ago
        yes it did. I tried Google Now the other day. It blew my mind. Google Now understands every single words I said (Asian accent); As for Siri, 50% is kinda optimistic.
        selter01 13y ago
        Is that what determines a flop, though? Siri is definitely known, and added value to the iphone and the apple brand overall. While I use Google Now and think it is superior, I'm not sure if performance would be enough to label Siri as a flop. Bing on the other hand, not so much.
        tuananh 13y ago
        Probably the differences are only noticeable for non-native English speakers like me only. It's way too good that it makes me feel Siri is such a failure. Native speakers might not see a huge difference though.
        hnal943 13y ago
        I am a native English speaker and Siri constantly misunderstands me. Siri has become a punchline and certainly does not have the usual Apple Cool Factor.
      - untog 13y ago
        It's probably still to early to tell. But I don't see how anyone can dispute that Google Now is basically what Siri tried to do, but significantly better. I'm yet to see Apple's response to that.
  - jasonlotito 13y ago
    Ping?
    - acoleman616 13y ago
      Exactly.
  - ant512 13y ago
    I think that's one of Microsoft's main failings. "Google are making baked beans? Why aren't we in the baked bean market? Let's make beans!" "What? Now Facebook are making Facebook Soda? We need to make Microsoft Soda!" Every time a tech company produces something new MS have to muscle in on the market, despite having a) no prior experience, b) no aptitude, c) existing products that could use their attention.
    - 001sky 13y ago
      windows, Xbox and Explorer from the 90's...all mimic plays
    - leetrout 13y ago
      It does feel like MS just shows up like that. Azure did (and does) give that impression; Zune, as well. And Surface tablets are also a clear response to the iPad (whether MS ever had anything in R&D previously or not, they certainly didn't ship). But I think Google is much more prone to jump in to a market with force, they just seem to execute "better" (I leave that open to interpretation). FB comes out and MS buys in whereas Google makes their own social network. Apple makes the iPhone and Google makes Android. Only much later (as the ship has already left port) does Microsoft come in with Windows Phone (I'm only considering 7 & 8). Somewhat related, I feel like MS and Dell were on target with the Axim from a product idea standpoint but Apple really capitalized on combining the functionality of a phone and forward thinking hardware and software design with iOS devices.
      - smacktoward 13y ago
        That's because that has been Microsoft's strategy from the beginning: let someone else take the risk of proving whether a market for something exists, and then, if it does, get in there quick with their own offering. They got into the PC OS business with MS-DOS after the Apple II; into the GUI business with Windows after the Mac; into the word-processor business with Word after WordPerfect; into the browser business with IE after Netscape, etc. This is an established enough business strategy there's a name for it: "fast follower." (See http://www.businessinsider.com/youre-better-off-being-a-fast-follower-than-an-originator-2010-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/youre-better-off-being-a-fast...).
  - leaffig 13y ago
    What social property did Microsoft push heavily like Google does G+? Also MS was into search before Google was.
    - protomyth 13y ago
      Microsoft bought into Facebook.
    - alpha001 13y ago
      MSN (Live) spaces were somewhat popular at the time.
- logicallee 13y ago
  >So has Steve Jobs missed social and search as well? Yes, but at least for the past two years Jobs has had a really good excuse.
- zanny 13y ago
  What about Bing? Microsoft didn't get into social because that is entirely outside their market. The limit of it seemed to be something like msn messenger, which had business use cases as much as social ones. I mean, its not like MS didn't try the search thing, but search is something Google will own until they fuck it up, not from anyone entering to compete with them, because free & good enough are hard to break. Albeit, Google has been doing a good job fucking up their search in the last several years.
  - jcheng 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Spaces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Spaces
  - alpha001 13y ago
    http://www.so.cl/ http://www.so.cl/
hvs 13y ago
Windows 7 was hardly a failure.
- LarryMade2 13y ago
  I think the bad pat about windows 7 is that they put out Windows 8 way too quickly. There are a lot of people that would be OK with being dragged into upgrading if Windows 7 was an easily available option. Bu now, MS is pushing manufacturers into pre-installing 8, which is NOT a good transition path from XP as Windows 7 was.
  - localhost 13y ago
    Windows 8 shipped 3 years after Windows 7. That's a very typical upgrade cycle.
    - tuananh 13y ago
      People get used to "Windows XP's style" upgrade cycle, I guess.
    - jaredmcateer 13y ago
      The problem was that it was a complete pivot on an operating system people finally saw as the true successor to Windows XP. It's what Vista should have been, a nice polished and professional OS that generally was out of your face, yet extremely useful. Then there was windows 8, not horrible, there were some under the hood improvements but the horrible hybrid metro/desktop interaction alienated the desktop market and no clear incentive to upgrade.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    The bad part about every Windows since Windows 2000 is that it didn't really offer any new value. A bit more bling in the GUI, yes, and security, yes, but fundamentally Windows 2000 is just as good as Windows 7 from a productivity standpoint. So a lot of people saw that, and decided to just stay with XP until they are forced to do something different.
- 13y ago
venomsnake 13y ago
How exactly Windows 7 was failure?
altcognito 13y ago
Nope, he screwed up even bigger than that. As recently 2005, IE's browser share was well into the 90's. Now, it's hovering roughly 40% depending on whose stats you trust. This on the desktop, to say nothing of mobile which would make the comparison between years even worse. This is after Microsoft recognized that the web was their big challenge, after the so called Tidal Wave memo.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  He allowed IE6 to languish while the competition was growing. To me, Ballmer is symbolic of Microsoft-with-ADD. They ignore things until they become urgent, and then shovel money into the furnace until victory comes. Look at Windows Phone - microsoft had a mobile offering when iOS came on the scene, but took years to move on with WP7. Desktops languished on IE6 for far, far too long. And Vista's long death-march process and lackluster result is another point.
- harigov 13y ago
  It's a business decision - web makes all the OS platforms equal. It is against Microsoft's interests to do that. They wanted to keep the status quo as long as possible.
potatolicious 13y ago
I'm no fan of Ballmer, but I think "insulting OEMs" is one of the good things he did. The OEMs carry a great deal of blame for the collapse of Windows. While Apple was shipping beautiful metal enclosures with great convenient features like MagSafe and magnetic latches, OEMs like Dell were shitting all over the Windows brand with plasticky (and still expensive!), heavy, unreliable, loud-as-shit laptops with terrible screens. The same thing happened with WinPhone. MSFT spent a lot of time developing an honestly pretty decent OS, only to have its launch lineup filled with unimaginative, plasticky bullshit phones from Samsung and LG. I for one think Microsoft's messy divorce from OEMs is a great thing, my only disappointment was that they didn't throw the OEMs under the bus at supersonic speed.
- axelf 13y ago
  not to mention loading up the OS with a ton of crapware and free trials.
  - braker 13y ago
    This is honestly the worst of it IMO. Apple does have better hardware, yes, but the difference in speed out of the box is stunning when bloatware is involved. Microsoft didn't have a chance to keep up with OSX.
    - corresation 13y ago
      Apple does have better hardware, yes, but the difference in speed out of the box is stunning when bloatware is involved Aside from the odd "Apple has better hardware" bit (they use the same binned devices that other OEMs like Dell do, so not sure where that comes from), you've benchmarked this purported speed difference? Because most of the crapware that companies like Dell, HP, and others put on, while irritating, consumes exactly 0% of processor or I/O time, and has zero impact on performance of the device, beyond the hysterical, easily-convinced responses of the placebo effect. The vast majority is nothing more than trials. It's irritating, and wastes users time if you want to clean up your desktop and app lists, but the commonly stated impact is just not at all supported. And then there's the issue of what exactly is crapware and what isn't. Buy a pure Windows device and you'll be pestered endlessly for Skydrive, Hotmail, Bing, photo backups, Xbox coupling, active your Office trial, etc (just as if you buy an xbox 360 and then pay for the privilege of using it online, in return you get ads and sponsored placements on your dashboard). Apple is predominately a hardware vendor that has made enormous bank on that (pivoting their MP3 player market into a smartphone market into a tablet market into a bonafide desktop market). Microsoft is predominately a software vendor. Everyone told Microsoft that they should mirror Apple: it got them a billion dollar+ write down so far, and offended all of their prior allies to start grouping behind alternatives. This "Microsoft should be like Apple" plan isn't really paying dividends.
runjake 13y ago
> For one man, he sure has a lot of failures on his plate. As do all successful people. If success were easy, everyone would be doing it. For all the ways I disagree with Ballmer, this seems like a poor choice to point out.
- epo 13y ago
  OK, name his successes. How has Microsoft improved on his watch? Failures are acceptable if there is ultimate success, what is Ballmer's success? Retiring rich? (Most of which was accomplished on Gate's stewardship.) Perhaps his name could become a unit for excess inventory. The "Ballmer", 500 cubic metres of unsold goods. EDIT: or perhaps the name of a new airplane seat, "The Ballmer" the only chair to fly in!
  - niuzeta 13y ago
    .NET, C#, the enterprise share, xbox are the ones that come to my mind.
  - encoderer 13y ago
    Huge increases in revenue. Huge increases in profit. Consistent dividend yield.
untog 13y ago
Did MS miss social? They are a huge investor in Facebook.
Aaronontheweb 13y ago
Failed Windows 7 launch? What the hell are you smoking? Has a lot of failures on his plate for one man? Please hand this comment an award for middlebrow remark of the year. Let's put Steve Ballmer's accomplishments in perspective: Have you tripled a multi-billion dollar company's revenue over ten years? Did you launch the Xbox? Did you launch Windows Phone (10% marketshare in 3 years)? Did you launch Bing (growing faster than the search market)? Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world? Did you grow the Windows Server business out of nothing compared to where it was 15 years ago? Did you turn Visual Studio into the gold standard for IDEs? Didn't think so. Ballmer will be remembered for one great mistake, and that's denying Microsoft's culture and employees a strong technical visionary over the course of his tenure. Ballmer is a COO, kind of like the guy running Apple these days - neither Ballmer nor Tim Cook have a strong ability to anticipate changes in the way technology is consumed compared to their predecessors. And this is largely what's responsible for Microsoft's big whiffs - they missed the mark multiple times on the consumerization of technology. People are already starting to grumble many of the same criticisms of Tim Cook's innovation that they did about Steve Ballmer, and who can blame them? Over the past three years all Apple has shipped are the same products they had before but with different screen sizes. However, that doesn't mean that Tim Cook won't be successful in growing Apple's business, nor does it mean that Steve Ballmer was a failure. As an ex-Microsoftie, I could not be happier to see Steve go. The company needs a technical visionary in order to stop having to play from behind every time there's a change in the market. But to call Steve a failure is utter nonsense and requires overlooking all of the successes that he and Microsoft had during his tenure.
- acchow 13y ago
  > Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world? More than iOS and Android SDKs?
  - roel_v 13y ago
    I'm not sure if this is sarcasm? Are you seriously suggesting those two are even of the same magnitude?

hybridweb 13y ago

I think that .NET was being developed some time before Ballmer ascended to the CEO throne. Gates probably had more to do with it than him. Ballmer is/was probably a good CEO for a conservative, old school company, which can derive profits from a stable and well used product line. But that's not what MS is/was advertised as being about. In that circumstance, Ballmer is the wrong type of CEO.

Pxtl 13y ago
And it's worth noticing that many parts of the .NET framework have gone through horrible hiccups. I mean, while the C# language is great, it feels like every framework built around a .NET seems to be implemented and then dropped without substantial improvements about 3 years later. As a developer, nothing ever seems to get fixed. They get replaced, and the replacements bring a new learning curve and a suite of new bugs and problems, and these bugs can never be fixed for backwards-compatibility reasons. So we get a constant barrage of misstep boondoggles like Web Forms, Click Once Installers, Linq2SQL getting deprecated almost as soon as it was launched, etc. And with every step a larger pile of configuration and attributes that need to be added to get things to play nice with the OS.
- Roboprog 13y ago
  I hate Microsoft, but... there are crappy frameworks in Java-land, too. I don't know that Oracle is going to do any better with future Java frameworks.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Yuioup 13y ago

.NET and C# are the brainchild of Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of Delphi who moved from Boland to Microsoft. Kinect was invented by an Israeli company before being bought out by Microsoft. Your point still stands though :-)

tanzam75 13y ago
> Kinect was invented by an Israeli company before being bought out by Microsoft. No. The sensor was developed by PrimeSense. However, the key part of Kinect is the software, which was based on machine learning work done at Microsoft Research. MSR is somewhat infamous for developing all sorts of whiz-bang prototypes that never make it to market. Kinect was an exception. As for who convinced Anders Hejlsberg to jump ship, that was Bill Gates. He was still CEO of Microsoft in 1996.
MichaelGG 13y ago
C# yes, but claiming .NET (aka COM+ Runtime, the CLR, Project 7, all that stuff) is his is a slight overstatement. Generics, one of the CLR's major distinguishing features over the JVM, came entirely from MSR, at considerable resistance from MS Corp.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Just a minor correction: Mads Torgesen was never in MSR.

nether 13y ago

A CEO gets to take credit for anything good that happens during his tenure? MSFT succeeded in areas where it already had a foothold through inertia, in spite of Ballmer, not because of him. Meanwhile, it completely failed in areas like mobile where it was initiating its presence. As recently as 2011, Wall Street was calling for him to be replaced [1], and I imagine now they're all breathing a cautious sigh of relief. [1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20075745-75/microsofts-ballmer-responds-to-calls-for-his-ouster/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20075745-75/microsofts-bal... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-27/einhorn-adds-to-drumbeat-for-ceo-exits-with-call-to-oust-ballmer.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-27/einhorn-adds-to-dru...

tanzam75 13y ago
> A CEO gets to take credit for anything good that happens during his tenure? Yeah, but a CEO also gets blamed for everything bad that happens during his tenure.

nailer 13y ago

> He will not be remembered for transforming Microsoft into one of the most important enterprise software companies. Windows NT/2000 and Exchange had already killed the established leaders in their fields, and SQL server was pretty close to #2 database already, in 2001.

at-fates-hands 13y ago

>>>>>He will be remembered for missing mobile Windows 7 and 8 were the first mobile OS that didn't completely rip off Apple, had the first original interface since Apple's iphone and you're saying they missed the target? Seriously? WP 8 has some incredibly original features my Android and Apple friends swoon over. Not to mention the platform is completely wide open for developers. It's not completely crowded out like the android and apple markets are.

shawkinaw 13y ago
Based on market share Windows Phone is a disaster, so yeah that's a miss.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  A disaster that was released in 2012? In the fourth quarter of 2012 Windows 8 phones had sold around 6 million handsets. http://www.neowin.net/news/gartner-windows-phone-sales-increased-1242-percent-in-q4-2102 http://www.neowin.net/news/gartner-windows-phone-sales-incre... I'm sure you must have been saying the same thing about Android then huh? By comparison they only sold around 640K handsets in 2008 (their first year of release) then sold around 6 million in 2009. http://digithoughts.com/post/21428797724/android-and-apple-smartphone-sales-2007-2012-by http://digithoughts.com/post/21428797724/android-and-apple-s...
  - nailer 13y ago
    Yep. WP should have been released much earlier.
  - incongruity 13y ago
    Not a valid comparison - the smartphone market was much smaller in 2008. The percentages would be more interesting/valid, but that's exactly the problem - the market is getting closer to saturation/more mature now and so Windows Phone has more trouble getting elbow room because of it.
  - gnaffle 13y ago

bengrunfeld 13y ago

I feel that many people dislike the idea of him, without exactly knowing what he did during his time as CEO, because the Windows platforms are known as being notoriously buggy and unsecure. XP was a nightmare that caused SysAdmins to cry themselves to sleep until the expansion pack 3 came out, Windows Vista was an unmitigated disaster, Windows 7 was surprisingly decent, and Windows 8 has been hailed as a terrible idea that should have died in its crib. In the last 13 years, we've all seen the rise of Microsoft, and are now seeing the beginning of it's fall. Ballmer was an extremely important figure in the tech world. I just wish the Operating Systems that came out during his time didn't suck so much.

bencollier49 13y ago
On the contrary. I'd characterise the fall of Microsoft as beginning around 2000, and I suspect that interesting / good things might be about to happen. I used to hate MS. Now I feel sorry for them, I hope they can make a go of it in the future. The people who came after them in market dominance were so much worse..
- bengrunfeld 13y ago
  Are you talking about their fall in the idealogical sense, that happened in 2000? I seem to remember at least 10 years after that where their software dominated every office I walked into. Even today as far as private cloud goes, they are a major player. Again, this references my point of Microsoft getting a bad name for releasing buggy and insecure OS's.
yuhong 13y ago
>"expansion pack 3" You mean SP2? Reminds me of "Feature Packs".
- bengrunfeld 13y ago
  hehehehe... sorry, my terminology is a bit rusty. For memory, it was service pack 3 (SP3) that fixed most of the security holes that were destroying networks running XP.

alttag 13y ago

Given his newly announced re-org [1], the timing is a bit weird. Don't get me wrong, I think MSFT will be better served with a different CEO, but I wonder whether the two are connected. Certainly, the re-org will struggle without strong leadership to hold it together. 1: https://http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jul13/07-11OneMicrosoft.aspx https://http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jul13...

Nelson69 13y ago
I've been pondering that too. You know what makes sense to me? MS is only broken according to engineers inside and people in the SV echochamber. They've got piles of cash, they generate piles of cash, they pay a dividend... Other than equity prices, they look pretty good. They were late to search but bing has carved out a niche, late to mobile but they've got a niche, late to games but they look like they are doing just fine there. Vista, Windows 8, RT and Surface seem to be missteps but they are still shipping numbers that most companies would be envious of. If they were or are bothered by the flat equity prices, why did it take so long? And to be very honest, the engineers I've spoke to that have mentioned "problems" within the company generally have options that have been underwater, FWIW. I think Ballmer and upper management think they are doing just fine, they think there is a competitive landscape but they are still making tons of money and leading a few sectors. He reorged them for what he sees as the next 10 years or something and he's going to find a replacement that sees his vision. They won't pull an outsider and probably don't see the need as there isn't anything "broken" that needs to be "changed." I predict no big changes.

Pxtl 13y ago

Yes, but with C# we got ASP.Net web-forms. Holy crap what a technological boondoggle. In general, MS seems to have serious ADD under Ballmer. They introduce massive thundering huge frameworks every other year as some spectacularly big deal, and then drop them soon after. You ever noticed how every Office and Visual Studio version has a completely new suite of program icons? Are they deliberately trying to hurt the usability of their programs?

mratzloff 13y ago
That's a result of how Microsoft evaluates employees. People are disproportionately recognized for new initiatives, not refinements.
RyanMcGreal 13y ago
Joel Spolsky's classic 2004 essay on Microsoft resonates as strongly as ever. He contrasts what he calls the Raymond Chan camp, i.e. maintain the integrity of the API at all costs, with what he calls the MSDN Magazine camp: > The MSDN Magazine Camp is always trying to convince you to use new and complicated external technology like COM+, MSMQ, MSDE, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and its components, MSXML, DirectX (the very latest version, please), Windows Media Player, and Sharepoint... Sharepoint! which nobody has; a veritable panoply of external dependencies each one of which is going to be a huge headache when you ship your application to a paying customer and it doesn't work right. The technical name for this is DLL Hell. It works here: why doesn't it work there? > The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don't make things any worse, let's just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html Spolsky concludes, "Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle." Incidentally, .NET was what finally convinced me to jump ship from the Microsoft world, and I've never looked back.

nl 13y ago

It's hard to disagree with sarcasm on the internet. But in this case you are absolutely correct. Microsoft used to control the future of computing. Now they are yet another enterprise software company with no apparent mission except to make money. The lay somewhere on a continuum with IBM, Oracle, SAP all the way through to companies like CA. At one end of that spectrum they do research and produce software that people use to do their job 0.5% better than they used to. At the other end they may as well be accounting companies for all the impact they have on the future. Yes, they make money. And yes, I admit they try to compete with consumer oriented technology companies and have some interesting products. But you are 100% correct - Microsoft is now primarily an enterprise software company. Meanwhile Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc look toward the future.

umsm 13y ago
We tend to forget that Microsoft ALREADY did what these "startups" did. MSFT already pushed the envelope and changed the way we use technology in our day to day lives. There is (probably) only so much change one company / person can do. Even if there is additional potential, in the end companies will seek profit and stability.
- nl 13y ago
  This may well be true. That doesn't make it any less sad.
  - nakedrobot2 13y ago
    No sadness here - Microsoft has been a stain on the last decade of the computing industry. The only sadness is that their trajectory of circling of the toilet might change, with a new CEO. But I doubt it.
    - lotso 13y ago
      >Microsoft has been a stain on the last decade of the computing industry Pretty easy to make bold claims without expanding on them.

PallarelCoedr 13y ago

.NET folks don't particularly like him either.

jahewson 13y ago

.NET started as COM2 back in 1998 along with a predecessor of C#, so I'm disinclined to give ballmer credit for it. Likewise, Kinect was brought to Microsoft by an Israil R&D firm, it was not home grown. Kudos for executing, but the vision thing was always missing with Ballmer. He didn't just miss mobile, he laughed at it. He will be remembered for Windows Vista.

bskap 13y ago
Kinect was home-grown, then halfway through they realized an Israeli company did it cheaper so they used that instead. The far more accurate version of Kinect releasing with the Xbox One doesn't use any of PrimeSense's tech.

skue 13y ago

> He will be remembered for missing mobile. Wait, what? That's like saying RIM missed mobile. Microsoft was doing mobile years before Apple or Google ever entered the market[1]. My guess is that Microsoft and Ballmer's real-world experience in mobile actually constrained their imaginations. Their failure to see how mobile could be reinvented was due more to hubris than naivete. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Windows_CE_Timeline.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Windows_...

jlgreco 13y ago
Saying RIM missed mobile would be like saying the Wright Company missed aviation. ...that is to say, it is a fairly reasonable thing to say. They just "missed it" in the opposite direction from how companies usually miss things. They came and went too soon. They sold smartphones and airplanes before everybody was buying them.
- aceperry 13y ago
  I remember a friend who owned a MS phone (winphone?) around the time that iphone began. He was really happy that he could integrate exchange, use excel and word and do lots of other things with windows. After a month of living with the phone, he told me, "you won't believe how much I hate this thing." It kept crashing, freezing, and locking up on him and he returned it 3 times already. He said that if he had to return it again, he was going to get something else. Now he uses an Android phone and loves it.
  - tanzam75 13y ago
    > I remember a friend who owned a MS phone (winphone?) around the time that iphone began. ... It kept crashing, freezing, and locking up on him and he returned it 3 times already. The problems with your friend's phone were probably caused by non-Microsoft code. And just like bluescreens on XP, Microsoft got all of the blame. Around 2006, I had a Windows Mobile phone that was freezing up almost every other day, as it came configured from Cingular. After resetting to a clean copy of Windows Mobile, the phone would easily run for two months between reboots. This could be done using a little-known trick: Hard-reset the phone, and wait for it to reflash with the OS. When "Installing customizations ..." comes up, immediately press the reset button. This cancelled the installation of all the "value added" components from the carrier. You ended up with a completely clean copy of Windows Mobile, as it was developed by Microsoft (plus OEM drivers and utilities). It was essentially the phone equivalent of reinstalling Windows on a PC to eliminate all the OEM preloaded crap. The only difference was that it was the carriers who dictated the preloads on Windows Mobile -- whereas the OEM utilities were reasonably reliable.

gregors 13y ago

.Net and C# are prime examples of Microsoft waiting until someone else invented something (Java) and then doing it again. The problem is that it seemed that was the strategy for everything! Very little innovation mostly just copying and one upping.

mkautzm 13y ago
That's not really true. C# and Java do look the same, but the use cases for them are totally and completely different. Java is a cross-platform language used when you don't want to write code more than once for more than 1 platform. C# is a Windows-exclusive deal that gives you access to WFs and other Windows-centric things, including some low level shit that would be a pain to deal with otherwise. Despite the languages looking really similar, they don't fill the same slot.
RWeaver 13y ago
Remember MS-Java? As I recall it was a superset of Java. So you could migrate your java programs effortlessly towards MS, but couldn't get away! I'm glad they lost that lawsuit

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

kailuowang 13y ago

> he will probably not be remembered for having more than doubled revenue and almost tripled profits. He won't be remembered for that also because he inherited a monopoly company. But he should be remembered for transforming Microsoft into an enterprise software company, which will extend its monopoly status there for a long time, as long as the mediocre class of IT workforce remains, which is probably going to be a very long time. He is not good at making technology innovation decisions, everybody knows that, especially himself. That as a given, he set out to make the best business strategic decisions for the company. How did it go? It might be easier to tell when Tim Cook reaches his 10 year anniversary taking over Apple.

metaphorm 13y ago

Before Ballmer, Microsoft was a company that had accomplished the incredible, world-changing feat of democratizing computing, bringing a PC into every household and on every office desk, and generally changing the way people think about using computers in their daily lives. After Ballmer, Microsoft is yet another directionless corporate shitshow that has found out that selling enterprise shlockware to enterprise clients is a good short term revenue model. This is exactly what Microsoft did to IBM 25 years ago. In this round however, Microsoft is playing the role of IBM.

mbreese 13y ago

Regardless of how much profits have gone up, Balmer will be remembered in the business world for one number: $35. It doesn't matter how much they sold, what investors care about is the stock price. And during his tenure, it has remained stagnant.

Thiz 13y ago

Napoleon won over a hundred battles and is remembered for the one he lost. Fuck Ballmer.

CamperBob2 13y ago

I agree that he will probably not be remembered for having more than doubled revenue and almost tripled profits Those are irrelevant metrics unless you plot them against the growth of the industry as a whole. The results speak for themselves.

dllthomas 13y ago

Also, chairs.

Eliezer 13y ago

Did the size of the market more than double over the same time period, for reasons not caused by Microsoft? If so, it is not quite so praiseworthy to have doubled revenue. GP: Talking about MSFT share prices instead of MSFT market cap makes the Market Economics Fairy cry. Even if you talk market cap, she wants to know about dividends and share repurchases, then adjust for inflation.

scholia 13y ago

Actually, he tripled revenues ($23 billion to $74 billion) and almost doubled profits. Along with "what have the Romans ever done for us", Ballmer can also be forgotten for some billion-dollar business such as SharePoint and for making Microsoft a serious player in cloud computing ;-)

Nekorosu 13y ago

Sorry, winking doesn't help here.