8 ms·

If Steve Ballmer Ran Apple

87 points by greedo 13y ago

cnahr 13y ago
The premise is wrong. Ballmer grew Microsoft profits but he did not maximize profits for Microsoft shareholders. In fact MS share price was famously flat for far too long, and jumped 8% when Ballmer announced his resignation. It's Apple and not Microsoft which delivered amazing shareholder profits. Some basic fact checking before writing an article would be nice.
- gentlegiant 13y ago
  Are you thinking of capital gain? That's not profit per se.
  - cnahr 13y ago
    I'm thinking of what the article said, "doing a good job for Microsoft's shareholders" as Ballmer claimed. He did in fact not do that. Please look up the share price, it has been flat below $40 during his entire reign. And MS isn't issuing some amazing dividend either.
    - gentlegiant 13y ago
      I think the article does a pretty good job of elucidating why the traditional view that a manager's job is to generate the maximum profit for shareholders (narrow view or the Milton Friedman mantra) no longer works - yet the contemporary holy grail as taught in management schools that advancing a broad range of stakeholder interests and also pursuing corporate social responsibility agenda (broad view) does seem to work.
- hga 13y ago
  And a quick look at the charts indicates Amazon.com has been delivering respectable shareholder gain, despite it famously being managed for the long term. The author ignores that people price in their view of the future of a company, and Ballmer's Microsoft isn't viewed as having a great future. Very possibly not even a good future. In fact, if this parody of how Microsoft was being managed was correct, all these billion dollar new market effort flubs wouldn't be happening and the stock just might be doing better. At the very least the unprofitably invested money could have been returned to the stockholders.
- kevin_morrill 13y ago
  No, the premise is spot on. Steve Ballmer is possibly one of the worst CEOs ever, but one of the greatest employees in the history of the industry. He was the first product manager on Windows, and created one of the most profitable business franchises in history. The Windows empire was so important to economic activity that Thomas Friedman cited it as a major influence in globalization in his book The World is Flat. Throughout the 90s Ballmer led sales at Microsoft, as it became one of the fastest growing companies and took the lead in the software industry from Borland, Lotus and IBM. In 1998 he championed the cause of getting Microsoft into enterprise computing; few appreciate it today, but Microsoft was laughed out of the room in enterprise sales engagements at the time--today it's a multi-billion dollar market for them. The reason Bill Gates gave him the reigns as CEO is that besides Gates he's the person most singly responsible for Microsoft success. Circa 1998 they were the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of $500+ billion. Early in Ballmer's CEO tenure, they returned one of the largest dividends in history. It was an economic event so large that the Federal Reserve cited it as affecting the macro economy.
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andrewflnr 13y ago
So you want someone like Ballmer running a corporation's existing businesses, while you have a more "visionary" CEO who works on entering new businesses. Is that a lesson here?
- mwfunk 13y ago
  If there's a lesson, and there may not be, I think that it's that a company shouldn't get 100% into either mode of operation. A company that's totally focused on breaking into (or creating) new markets can get so wrapped up in chasing the next big thing that they neglect their existing customers, or they don't know what to do when a couple of years go by without some big huge new innovation. On the other hand, a company that's totally focused on maximizing profits from its existing products can eventually become a dead end too. It becomes very risk averse, and unwilling to cannibalize any of its existing products with newer, more innovative products. It becomes obsessed with the idea of using every product to sell every other product, such as the ubiquitous Windows branding that has pretty much killed every Microsoft product that wasn't Windows. Maybe there's a middle ground, but I fear there isn't. I think there's just a natural boom and bust cycle for tech companies, and the best they can hope for is to survive the next bust and get to the next boom. At the heart of a lot of this is are the forces that drive the stock market- in the tech industry at least, you can't just carve out a niche for yourself and constantly improve in that one area. You may make a ton of money, but tech investors only care about growth. It's like publicly owned companies have forces acting on them that make them grow and grow and grow until it kills them. It's not sustainable and it kind of sucks that it has to be that way.
ZeroGravitas 13y ago
Looks like someone's noticed that Apple no longer makes the most profit in smart phones and started planning the next era of Apple myth-making. Time to revisit this piece now that Samsung (and therefore Android) profit share has caught up with market share enough to overtake Apple: http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/winning http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/winning "The iPhone, on the other hand, currently accounts for two-thirds of the mobile phone industry’s total profit. Mobile carriers need the iPhone today. Computer stores did not need the Mac. It’s easy to pick and choose the numbers you want to back up the theory you prefer. So if you’re rooting for Android to dominate the industry, it is tempting to focus on unit sale market share, and to attribute Windows’s historical dominance to its massive unit sale market share. But you can flip that around, and argue that because I am rooting for the iPhone, I cherry pick the data to fit the story I want to see unfold — and so I say profit share is what matters, not unit sales, only because that’s the figure that puts Apple’s position in the best light. But I like the odds that I’ll be proven right. Money is how you keep score, because it’s the one thing whose value everyone agrees upon. That’s what money is."
- thedrbrian 13y ago
  If only we could get decent numbers from Samsung http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-dethroned-apple-in-mobile-profits http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-de...
- jaegerpicker 13y ago
  I don't believe that Samsung or any Android manufacturer has caught Apple in profits. All the numbers we have seen is from Samsung are dubious at best.
- engrenage 13y ago
  Samsung profit share has nowhere near caught up with Apple. http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-dethroned-apple-in-mobile-profits http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-de... Looks like you've been taken in by misinformation.
  - 13y ago
bridgeland 13y ago
An insightful and balanced article about Steve Ballmer. But the author goes seriously awry in the last paragraph: "Ballmer did exactly what our capitalist system dictate he do: he maximized profits to the benefit of Microsoft’s shareholders. The implications of suggesting he was a failure are far more profound than most of his many critics likely realize." Actually not at all. The best way to serve shareholders is to not focus on profits more than you absolutely must, and instead to focus on doing things insanely great. And there is a personal lesson as well. I like money as much as the next guy, maybe more. But I know from experience that my best work is when I don't think about money at all, when I think about pleasing clients, and creating great stuff, and changing the world.
MarcScott 13y ago
I think you could probably replace "Steve Ballmer" with "Tim Cook" here. From my perspective, Apple seems to be all about the profits. Wasn't it under Tim Cook that the first dividend in decades was paid out to share holders?
- MikeCapone 13y ago
  The money belongs to the shareholders. Piling it up and doing nothing with it isn't the best use, so returning some via buybacks and dividends makes perfect sense.
asperous 13y ago
> "Ballmer did exactly what our capitalist system dictate he do: he maximized profits to the benefit of Microsoft’s shareholders. The implications of suggesting he was a failure are far more profound than most of his many critics likely realize." I'm not sure I get this point. Are Apple and Amazon not also running successfully under a Capitalist Marketplace?
- hyperbovine 13y ago
  Apple of course prints money, far more of it than Microsoft, so I don't really see where this author is coming from. Amazon is more interesting; Amazon famously posts loss after loss, preferring to reinvest it all in R&D an infrastructure. It's on open question as to why their stock retains such a high valuation (see e.g. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/12/12/amazon_s_zero_profit_business_strategy_it_s_amazing_but_someday_we_may_all.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/12/12/amazon_s_zero...). I think the answer for most people (including myself) is that a) I don't want my Prime going anywhere and b) Jeff Bezos is a genius.
  - hga 13y ago
    A very good point, although in the table I was able to find (http://www.streetinsider.com/ec_earnings.php?q=amzn http://www.streetinsider.com/ec_earnings.php?q=amzn) they've actually only reported two losing quarters going back 2 years, plus one that was 1 cent per share. 6 estimate misses, though, as many times as they exceeded expectations. So it's clear they're not buying "traction" by grossly under pricing their offerings. So given that so many of us know for an absolute fact it's a well run company, and the obvious potential, if not likelyhood of becoming the next Sears and Roebuck (that was a good thing in my lifetime :-), well, they have a way above average story.
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    - hga 13y ago
      My goodness, it really has been that long. 18 years since they opened their website, and 17 and a bit less than 2 months since my first order, which they did not drop on the floor in the intervening years. Which by itself says a lot. And it's still very useful data, I'm still in the market for every sort of book I bought, every author ... although I hope to never program in C++ again ^_^. Anyone who's noticed that they didn't lose their old sales data like so many others will recognize yet another bit of their excellence.
puma1 13y ago
Let's see where Microsoft is vs where Apple is in 3 years. Apple has 0 innovation going on. OS X and IOS are stale as anything. They are riding on earlier success and eventually will fizzle out.
- czr80 13y ago
  Indeed, Apple is doomed.
  - greedo 13y ago
    Beleaguered is the preferred term.
- engrenage 13y ago
  Yeah - I'd like to see anyone name any improvements to iOS that have been made over the past 3 years. It hasn't changed at all.
- esusatyo 13y ago
  I'm not sure if you're trolling, but have you seen WWDC in the past year or two? The innovation in OS X and iOS is at an amazing rate.
  - puma1 13y ago
    Are you being sarcastic? Name one original feature implemented or introduced. Ios has introduced not 1 new truly original feature in years.
mindstab 13y ago
From everything I've heard I fear Google is next up on this Ballmer path. They are turning off R&D and looking to capitalize on what they have after a decade of crazy growth from new things that fell out of R&D. It's bizaar to watch them do this, but this at least explains their motivation. As to how they let this start happening to themselves... oh well. Slippery slope
- taliesinb 13y ago
  Perhaps their product R&D has slowed down a bit ("more wood behind fewer arrows"), but their academic research is still strong. Their collaborations with Hinton, Thrun, and Ng are just the most obvious and recent examples. On the other hand, Microsoft has for a long time made a serious investment in basic research, both on the programming language side and on algorithms, but that hasn't stopped them from misfiring in multiple product categories.
  - ProblemFactory 13y ago
    Microsoft Research is still one of the most influential and visible industry research labs in Computer Science, publishing more great papers than most top universities. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=publications http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=pu... However, this work rarely seems to make it into their consumer products. I suspect it's mostly an issue of the organisational structure of Microsoft, rather than the type of research, which makes it difficult to jump the gap from research to products.
    - taliesinb 13y ago
      A rather spectacular example of MSR's work making it into a very successful consumer product is the pose estimator used by Kinect: http://videolectures.net/ecmlpkdd2011_bishop_embracing/ http://videolectures.net/ecmlpkdd2011_bishop_embracing/
  - nl 13y ago
    Not arguing with Google's strategy, but has anyone ever really thought about the "more wood, fewer arrows" analogy? If you look at the battles that were won by archery (Crecy, Agincourt, Mongol domination of Chinese, Moslem & European armies) it was the volume of arrows that won them, not the weight of the arrows. There were some battles where arrow weight was mildly important (eg, at Agincourt where the French armour had advanced enough since Crecy that it gave some reasonable protection against arrows). But even in these battles the archers used heavier heads on the arrows (which were also shaped differently) - not more wood. Anyway - totally off topic, and like I said I think Google's strategy is good. But their analogy breaks down when we actually look at history.
systems 13y ago
there is a french proverb that goes like "with if, you can put paris in bottles" you can make anything happen in your imaginary 'if' world in this imaginary world, steve ballmer changed apple in my imaginary world, apple will change steve ballmer and ... well, you know how the rest of the story goes
fphhotchips 13y ago
I have to disagree with one of the final conclusions of the article. For me, at least, it's far easier to imagine life without Apple or Amazon than it is to imagine life without Microsoft. Say Amazon goes bankrupt tomorrow. All of their products stop working over night. Many people are upset because you can't get things as cheap, but for the most part they go to other online retailers, of which there are many. The Kindle is pretty easy to imagine life without, as are most of the other services. AWS going black would frustrate much of the web, but most of that could be taken up by the litany of providers in that space. Apple is a little trickier, but to my knowledge (take with a whole shaker of salt) they don't have a huge ongoing set of services, and most Apple skills are pretty transferable to other *nix style services. If anything, I could imagine that Linux might get a whole lot of extra designers. The iPhone would be missed, and there would be some havoc as people rush to alternatives, but it doesn't do anything truly special that an S4 or equivalent doesn't do. The iPad would be missed also, but it's the same story. Microsoft though has its fingers in so many pies that if it disappears over night it would basically stop much of the planet. There are a lot of devices running Windows Mobile still. There are loads of applications in use that simply won't run on anything but Windows. Millions of people that don't have the skills to use anything but Office/Windows. Earth without Microsoft would be drastically different. Outlook/Exchange is huge also. There are masses of IT staff that would simply not know how to use anything else. Now, that's not to say that they haven't done a lot of work to take themselves out of that position. Windows 8 was, as I think everyone here would know, a train wreck. There are developers developing for the web, Android and iPhone that 5-10 years ago would have been developing applications that would only have run on Windows. I just don't think either Apple or Amazon have the irreplaceability in so many fields that MS does.
- NoodleIncident 13y ago
  I don't think he meant to imply such a sudden disappearance (technological rapture?). All of Microsoft's core products are generic and replaceable, and it's easy to imagine other companies making them instead.
  - fphhotchips 13y ago
    But that's sort of my point too. There's nothing substantially different about an iPhone or iPad anymore. The PC/Laptop Macs are a little more substantial, but I think that's probably because of HP/Dell/Toshiba etc. commitment to mediocrity more than it is because Apple is special in any huge way. I can definitely imagine Amazon is even worse in that respect - the store is exactly that, and anyone can sell "stuff". AWS is the same, even if the barriers to entry are a little higher. Honestly, the only big tech company that I can't imagine life without is Google, simply because my Google account is so pervasive now. Perhaps Facebook, too. Even then, when you break both of those companies down, you find that none of the products are overly unique to the company. Other people do social, other people do search, other people do maps, etc. It's easy to imagine other companies making any of these things, but when you think about it "other companies" in that thought experiment start to just become another black box with a different logo slapped over the top.
dustinupdyke 13y ago
This is the most intelligent summary of Ballmer's tenure I've seen. It falls back on more facts and numbers than I think all of the others I've read combined. As technology people, we look at companies through a different lens than investors, shareholders and the like. We want to be impressed, we want to be given a new toy that disrupts existing markets and allows us to develop software in some new way, but that isn't the only way to make money and create value.
robg 13y ago
Hard for me to follow his argument when he dismisses Xbox in a footnote for the exact reason he lauds others (relevance, not profits).
- programminggeek 13y ago
  Yes, but Xbox did well in spite of Ballmer. I believe Ballmer and Gates were pushing for Xbox to run Windows XP on launch (like actual Windows with Office) and the Xbox team had to fight hard for it to be a game console. The only reason Xbox even happened is that Microsoft management was terrified that the PS2 was effectively a computer being sold by the millions - a real threat to Windows and Microsoft. If the Xbox team didn't stick to their guns, the original Xbox would have been a monstrosity. You could say the Surface was a poorly executed version of the same idea. iPad is killing PC sales, so try and jump in and take market share. Too bad Microsoft doesn't have people who really "get" the iPad building and selling the Surface. They eliminated the Courier team.
bjhoops1 13y ago
Emphasizing "shareholder value" as a corporate strategy has always seemed self-evidently short-sighted and foolish to me. I find that it is frequently embraced by the sort of people who look for quick answers to complicated problems; who prefer their answers simple and free of nuance. The same bunch who hold a near-religious faith in the ability of Free Markets to solve all of man's problems in the most efficient way possible. If only things were so simple. You'd think that 2008 would have been enough to put neoliberalism behind, but sadly it is not so.
Thiz 13y ago
AAPL stock would stay at $400 for the next ten years? Fuck Ballmer.
programminggeek 13y ago
Microsoft Research is actually more about scoring government contracts than it is about making amazing products. Microsoft has worked on smart houses, wireless sensors, iptv, all kinds of things and they end up with products like the Kin... And to the point of maximizing profits as the goal of capitalism... well if you care about only having rich shareholders and think investors should be the only meaningful winners in the equation, well then short term capitalism will continue to wreak havoc every few years.
bztzt 13y ago
Microsoft, infamously, has been willing to lose billions year after year on new products in the hope of future success. They spend as much as anyone on basic research and incubations with no certainty of productization. For better or worse they've also taken on major redesigns of existing products focused on future scenarios at the risk of damaging short-term success (e.g., Windows 8, office 2007). None of those things fit his narrative about narrow short-term profit maximization. (The example of the above he does mention - Xbox - he dismisses because it's not that profitable! So when something is profitable it's a sign of narrow short-term profit focus, but if it's not it's irrelevant because profit is what matters. Huh?) Microsoft does seem to have trouble turning its R&D activity into breakthrough products, but his attempt at a narrative explaining why just doesn't fit the facts and doesn't make sense.

87 points by greedo 13y ago

cnahr 13y ago

The premise is wrong. Ballmer grew Microsoft profits but he did not maximize profits for Microsoft shareholders. In fact MS share price was famously flat for far too long, and jumped 8% when Ballmer announced his resignation. It's Apple and not Microsoft which delivered amazing shareholder profits. Some basic fact checking before writing an article would be nice.

gentlegiant 13y ago
Are you thinking of capital gain? That's not profit per se.
- cnahr 13y ago
  I'm thinking of what the article said, "doing a good job for Microsoft's shareholders" as Ballmer claimed. He did in fact not do that. Please look up the share price, it has been flat below $40 during his entire reign. And MS isn't issuing some amazing dividend either.
  - gentlegiant 13y ago
    I think the article does a pretty good job of elucidating why the traditional view that a manager's job is to generate the maximum profit for shareholders (narrow view or the Milton Friedman mantra) no longer works - yet the contemporary holy grail as taught in management schools that advancing a broad range of stakeholder interests and also pursuing corporate social responsibility agenda (broad view) does seem to work.
hga 13y ago
And a quick look at the charts indicates Amazon.com has been delivering respectable shareholder gain, despite it famously being managed for the long term. The author ignores that people price in their view of the future of a company, and Ballmer's Microsoft isn't viewed as having a great future. Very possibly not even a good future. In fact, if this parody of how Microsoft was being managed was correct, all these billion dollar new market effort flubs wouldn't be happening and the stock just might be doing better. At the very least the unprofitably invested money could have been returned to the stockholders.
kevin_morrill 13y ago
No, the premise is spot on. Steve Ballmer is possibly one of the worst CEOs ever, but one of the greatest employees in the history of the industry. He was the first product manager on Windows, and created one of the most profitable business franchises in history. The Windows empire was so important to economic activity that Thomas Friedman cited it as a major influence in globalization in his book The World is Flat. Throughout the 90s Ballmer led sales at Microsoft, as it became one of the fastest growing companies and took the lead in the software industry from Borland, Lotus and IBM. In 1998 he championed the cause of getting Microsoft into enterprise computing; few appreciate it today, but Microsoft was laughed out of the room in enterprise sales engagements at the time--today it's a multi-billion dollar market for them. The reason Bill Gates gave him the reigns as CEO is that besides Gates he's the person most singly responsible for Microsoft success. Circa 1998 they were the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of $500+ billion. Early in Ballmer's CEO tenure, they returned one of the largest dividends in history. It was an economic event so large that the Federal Reserve cited it as affecting the macro economy.

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andrewflnr 13y ago

So you want someone like Ballmer running a corporation's existing businesses, while you have a more "visionary" CEO who works on entering new businesses. Is that a lesson here?

mwfunk 13y ago
If there's a lesson, and there may not be, I think that it's that a company shouldn't get 100% into either mode of operation. A company that's totally focused on breaking into (or creating) new markets can get so wrapped up in chasing the next big thing that they neglect their existing customers, or they don't know what to do when a couple of years go by without some big huge new innovation. On the other hand, a company that's totally focused on maximizing profits from its existing products can eventually become a dead end too. It becomes very risk averse, and unwilling to cannibalize any of its existing products with newer, more innovative products. It becomes obsessed with the idea of using every product to sell every other product, such as the ubiquitous Windows branding that has pretty much killed every Microsoft product that wasn't Windows. Maybe there's a middle ground, but I fear there isn't. I think there's just a natural boom and bust cycle for tech companies, and the best they can hope for is to survive the next bust and get to the next boom. At the heart of a lot of this is are the forces that drive the stock market- in the tech industry at least, you can't just carve out a niche for yourself and constantly improve in that one area. You may make a ton of money, but tech investors only care about growth. It's like publicly owned companies have forces acting on them that make them grow and grow and grow until it kills them. It's not sustainable and it kind of sucks that it has to be that way.

ZeroGravitas 13y ago

Looks like someone's noticed that Apple no longer makes the most profit in smart phones and started planning the next era of Apple myth-making. Time to revisit this piece now that Samsung (and therefore Android) profit share has caught up with market share enough to overtake Apple: http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/winning http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/winning "The iPhone, on the other hand, currently accounts for two-thirds of the mobile phone industry’s total profit. Mobile carriers need the iPhone today. Computer stores did not need the Mac. It’s easy to pick and choose the numbers you want to back up the theory you prefer. So if you’re rooting for Android to dominate the industry, it is tempting to focus on unit sale market share, and to attribute Windows’s historical dominance to its massive unit sale market share. But you can flip that around, and argue that because I am rooting for the iPhone, I cherry pick the data to fit the story I want to see unfold — and so I say profit share is what matters, not unit sales, only because that’s the figure that puts Apple’s position in the best light. But I like the odds that I’ll be proven right. Money is how you keep score, because it’s the one thing whose value everyone agrees upon. That’s what money is."

thedrbrian 13y ago
If only we could get decent numbers from Samsung http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-dethroned-apple-in-mobile-profits http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-de...
jaegerpicker 13y ago
I don't believe that Samsung or any Android manufacturer has caught Apple in profits. All the numbers we have seen is from Samsung are dubious at best.
engrenage 13y ago
Samsung profit share has nowhere near caught up with Apple. http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-dethroned-apple-in-mobile-profits http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-de... Looks like you've been taken in by misinformation.
- 13y ago

bridgeland 13y ago

An insightful and balanced article about Steve Ballmer. But the author goes seriously awry in the last paragraph: "Ballmer did exactly what our capitalist system dictate he do: he maximized profits to the benefit of Microsoft’s shareholders. The implications of suggesting he was a failure are far more profound than most of his many critics likely realize." Actually not at all. The best way to serve shareholders is to not focus on profits more than you absolutely must, and instead to focus on doing things insanely great. And there is a personal lesson as well. I like money as much as the next guy, maybe more. But I know from experience that my best work is when I don't think about money at all, when I think about pleasing clients, and creating great stuff, and changing the world.

MarcScott 13y ago

I think you could probably replace "Steve Ballmer" with "Tim Cook" here. From my perspective, Apple seems to be all about the profits. Wasn't it under Tim Cook that the first dividend in decades was paid out to share holders?

MikeCapone 13y ago
The money belongs to the shareholders. Piling it up and doing nothing with it isn't the best use, so returning some via buybacks and dividends makes perfect sense.

asperous 13y ago

> "Ballmer did exactly what our capitalist system dictate he do: he maximized profits to the benefit of Microsoft’s shareholders. The implications of suggesting he was a failure are far more profound than most of his many critics likely realize." I'm not sure I get this point. Are Apple and Amazon not also running successfully under a Capitalist Marketplace?

hyperbovine 13y ago
Apple of course prints money, far more of it than Microsoft, so I don't really see where this author is coming from. Amazon is more interesting; Amazon famously posts loss after loss, preferring to reinvest it all in R&D an infrastructure. It's on open question as to why their stock retains such a high valuation (see e.g. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/12/12/amazon_s_zero_profit_business_strategy_it_s_amazing_but_someday_we_may_all.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/12/12/amazon_s_zero...). I think the answer for most people (including myself) is that a) I don't want my Prime going anywhere and b) Jeff Bezos is a genius.
- hga 13y ago
  A very good point, although in the table I was able to find (http://www.streetinsider.com/ec_earnings.php?q=amzn http://www.streetinsider.com/ec_earnings.php?q=amzn) they've actually only reported two losing quarters going back 2 years, plus one that was 1 cent per share. 6 estimate misses, though, as many times as they exceeded expectations. So it's clear they're not buying "traction" by grossly under pricing their offerings. So given that so many of us know for an absolute fact it's a well run company, and the obvious potential, if not likelyhood of becoming the next Sears and Roebuck (that was a good thing in my lifetime :-), well, they have a way above average story.
- deleted 13y ago
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  - hga 13y ago
    My goodness, it really has been that long. 18 years since they opened their website, and 17 and a bit less than 2 months since my first order, which they did not drop on the floor in the intervening years. Which by itself says a lot. And it's still very useful data, I'm still in the market for every sort of book I bought, every author ... although I hope to never program in C++ again ^_^. Anyone who's noticed that they didn't lose their old sales data like so many others will recognize yet another bit of their excellence.

puma1 13y ago

Let's see where Microsoft is vs where Apple is in 3 years. Apple has 0 innovation going on. OS X and IOS are stale as anything. They are riding on earlier success and eventually will fizzle out.

czr80 13y ago
Indeed, Apple is doomed.
- greedo 13y ago
  Beleaguered is the preferred term.
engrenage 13y ago
Yeah - I'd like to see anyone name any improvements to iOS that have been made over the past 3 years. It hasn't changed at all.
esusatyo 13y ago
I'm not sure if you're trolling, but have you seen WWDC in the past year or two? The innovation in OS X and iOS is at an amazing rate.
- puma1 13y ago
  Are you being sarcastic? Name one original feature implemented or introduced. Ios has introduced not 1 new truly original feature in years.

mindstab 13y ago

From everything I've heard I fear Google is next up on this Ballmer path. They are turning off R&D and looking to capitalize on what they have after a decade of crazy growth from new things that fell out of R&D. It's bizaar to watch them do this, but this at least explains their motivation. As to how they let this start happening to themselves... oh well. Slippery slope

taliesinb 13y ago
Perhaps their product R&D has slowed down a bit ("more wood behind fewer arrows"), but their academic research is still strong. Their collaborations with Hinton, Thrun, and Ng are just the most obvious and recent examples. On the other hand, Microsoft has for a long time made a serious investment in basic research, both on the programming language side and on algorithms, but that hasn't stopped them from misfiring in multiple product categories.
- ProblemFactory 13y ago
  Microsoft Research is still one of the most influential and visible industry research labs in Computer Science, publishing more great papers than most top universities. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=publications http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=pu... However, this work rarely seems to make it into their consumer products. I suspect it's mostly an issue of the organisational structure of Microsoft, rather than the type of research, which makes it difficult to jump the gap from research to products.
  - taliesinb 13y ago
    A rather spectacular example of MSR's work making it into a very successful consumer product is the pose estimator used by Kinect: http://videolectures.net/ecmlpkdd2011_bishop_embracing/ http://videolectures.net/ecmlpkdd2011_bishop_embracing/
- nl 13y ago
  Not arguing with Google's strategy, but has anyone ever really thought about the "more wood, fewer arrows" analogy? If you look at the battles that were won by archery (Crecy, Agincourt, Mongol domination of Chinese, Moslem & European armies) it was the volume of arrows that won them, not the weight of the arrows. There were some battles where arrow weight was mildly important (eg, at Agincourt where the French armour had advanced enough since Crecy that it gave some reasonable protection against arrows). But even in these battles the archers used heavier heads on the arrows (which were also shaped differently) - not more wood. Anyway - totally off topic, and like I said I think Google's strategy is good. But their analogy breaks down when we actually look at history.

systems 13y ago

there is a french proverb that goes like "with if, you can put paris in bottles" you can make anything happen in your imaginary 'if' world in this imaginary world, steve ballmer changed apple in my imaginary world, apple will change steve ballmer and ... well, you know how the rest of the story goes

fphhotchips 13y ago

I have to disagree with one of the final conclusions of the article. For me, at least, it's far easier to imagine life without Apple or Amazon than it is to imagine life without Microsoft. Say Amazon goes bankrupt tomorrow. All of their products stop working over night. Many people are upset because you can't get things as cheap, but for the most part they go to other online retailers, of which there are many. The Kindle is pretty easy to imagine life without, as are most of the other services. AWS going black would frustrate much of the web, but most of that could be taken up by the litany of providers in that space. Apple is a little trickier, but to my knowledge (take with a whole shaker of salt) they don't have a huge ongoing set of services, and most Apple skills are pretty transferable to other *nix style services. If anything, I could imagine that Linux might get a whole lot of extra designers. The iPhone would be missed, and there would be some havoc as people rush to alternatives, but it doesn't do anything truly special that an S4 or equivalent doesn't do. The iPad would be missed also, but it's the same story. Microsoft though has its fingers in so many pies that if it disappears over night it would basically stop much of the planet. There are a lot of devices running Windows Mobile still. There are loads of applications in use that simply won't run on anything but Windows. Millions of people that don't have the skills to use anything but Office/Windows. Earth without Microsoft would be drastically different. Outlook/Exchange is huge also. There are masses of IT staff that would simply not know how to use anything else. Now, that's not to say that they haven't done a lot of work to take themselves out of that position. Windows 8 was, as I think everyone here would know, a train wreck. There are developers developing for the web, Android and iPhone that 5-10 years ago would have been developing applications that would only have run on Windows. I just don't think either Apple or Amazon have the irreplaceability in so many fields that MS does.

NoodleIncident 13y ago
I don't think he meant to imply such a sudden disappearance (technological rapture?). All of Microsoft's core products are generic and replaceable, and it's easy to imagine other companies making them instead.
- fphhotchips 13y ago
  But that's sort of my point too. There's nothing substantially different about an iPhone or iPad anymore. The PC/Laptop Macs are a little more substantial, but I think that's probably because of HP/Dell/Toshiba etc. commitment to mediocrity more than it is because Apple is special in any huge way. I can definitely imagine Amazon is even worse in that respect - the store is exactly that, and anyone can sell "stuff". AWS is the same, even if the barriers to entry are a little higher. Honestly, the only big tech company that I can't imagine life without is Google, simply because my Google account is so pervasive now. Perhaps Facebook, too. Even then, when you break both of those companies down, you find that none of the products are overly unique to the company. Other people do social, other people do search, other people do maps, etc. It's easy to imagine other companies making any of these things, but when you think about it "other companies" in that thought experiment start to just become another black box with a different logo slapped over the top.

dustinupdyke 13y ago

This is the most intelligent summary of Ballmer's tenure I've seen. It falls back on more facts and numbers than I think all of the others I've read combined. As technology people, we look at companies through a different lens than investors, shareholders and the like. We want to be impressed, we want to be given a new toy that disrupts existing markets and allows us to develop software in some new way, but that isn't the only way to make money and create value.

robg 13y ago

Hard for me to follow his argument when he dismisses Xbox in a footnote for the exact reason he lauds others (relevance, not profits).

programminggeek 13y ago
Yes, but Xbox did well in spite of Ballmer. I believe Ballmer and Gates were pushing for Xbox to run Windows XP on launch (like actual Windows with Office) and the Xbox team had to fight hard for it to be a game console. The only reason Xbox even happened is that Microsoft management was terrified that the PS2 was effectively a computer being sold by the millions - a real threat to Windows and Microsoft. If the Xbox team didn't stick to their guns, the original Xbox would have been a monstrosity. You could say the Surface was a poorly executed version of the same idea. iPad is killing PC sales, so try and jump in and take market share. Too bad Microsoft doesn't have people who really "get" the iPad building and selling the Surface. They eliminated the Courier team.

bjhoops1 13y ago

Emphasizing "shareholder value" as a corporate strategy has always seemed self-evidently short-sighted and foolish to me. I find that it is frequently embraced by the sort of people who look for quick answers to complicated problems; who prefer their answers simple and free of nuance. The same bunch who hold a near-religious faith in the ability of Free Markets to solve all of man's problems in the most efficient way possible. If only things were so simple. You'd think that 2008 would have been enough to put neoliberalism behind, but sadly it is not so.

Thiz 13y ago

AAPL stock would stay at $400 for the next ten years? Fuck Ballmer.

programminggeek 13y ago

Microsoft Research is actually more about scoring government contracts than it is about making amazing products. Microsoft has worked on smart houses, wireless sensors, iptv, all kinds of things and they end up with products like the Kin... And to the point of maximizing profits as the goal of capitalism... well if you care about only having rich shareholders and think investors should be the only meaningful winners in the equation, well then short term capitalism will continue to wreak havoc every few years.

bztzt 13y ago

Microsoft, infamously, has been willing to lose billions year after year on new products in the hope of future success. They spend as much as anyone on basic research and incubations with no certainty of productization. For better or worse they've also taken on major redesigns of existing products focused on future scenarios at the risk of damaging short-term success (e.g., Windows 8, office 2007). None of those things fit his narrative about narrow short-term profit maximization. (The example of the above he does mention - Xbox - he dismisses because it's not that profitable! So when something is profitable it's a sign of narrow short-term profit focus, but if it's not it's irrelevant because profit is what matters. Huh?) Microsoft does seem to have trouble turning its R&D activity into breakthrough products, but his attempt at a narrative explaining why just doesn't fit the facts and doesn't make sense.