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Ballmer's not exactly a visionary: In a post from June [http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/02/web-death-google http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/02/web-death-google] Bo
by kakooljay 17y ago
Ballmer's not exactly a visionary:
In a post from June [http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/02/web-death-google http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/02/web-death-google] Boris relates a famous story about a meeting between Yahoo and Microsoft which took place when Yahoo was still a small start-up:
"Yahoo was growing at neck-breaking speed and David Filo and Jerry Yang were invited to Redmond to talk about working together.
"The meeting turned into a disappointment when Steve Ballmer joined the conversation and gave his opinion on the future of search engines. According to Ballmer Search Engines were a temporary solution to a temporary problem. Ballmer claimed that 'within a few years there will only be a handful of websites left. People will use their Favorites to navigate to those destination sites and nobody will need a Search engine except for a few students and professors.'"
Oops.
- nearestneighbor 17y agoIf someone like that could be the CEO of Microsoft, anyone can!
- wmeredith 17y agoThe critical thing about a job as a decision maker (a CEO) is not to never be wrong, it's to usually be right. If someone were to cherry pick a bad decision from my past, I'm sure they could find a doozy.
- kakooljay 17y agoGood point - &, to be fair, let's not forget that even Bill Gates (among others) also underestimated the potential of the Internet in the early '90s...
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoIt's fun to go back and read an early edition of Gates' The Road Ahead, in which he just completely misses the value, growth potential and benefits of an open, neutral data network. Rather, he simply transposed "a PC in every house" to "an MSN connection in every house". In fairness, Gates caught on pretty fast and didn't let his own prior prognostication get in the way of positioning Microsoft to extend his company's product lock-in to customers' internet access (see: IE).
- nearestneighbor 17y agoBenefit of hindsight or not, but I think predicting that the number of web sites would actually decrease is showing a total lack of common sense. If I were a shareholder, I'd want someone else at the helm.
- trafficlight 17y agoAmazing. He really missed the entire point of the internet.
- axod 17y agoThat pretty much defines Microsoft.
- vorador 17y agoWell, I think this is becoming more and more right. I mean, how many people only use Facebook, Youtube and Wikipedia only ? The internet, after an incredible growth phase, has just begun to shrink.
- trafficlight 17y agoYou must have some numbers to back up such a bold statement. Otherwise that's a ridiculous assumption.
- vorador 17y agoI don't have numbers - actually nobody has them, but the growth of web 2.0 websites had a consequence : less and less people host themselves their websites.