
NY Times all but says it: Ballmer must go - Flemlord
http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/times-borg-on-long-and-winding-course.html
======
10ren
Clayton Christianson (of _The Innovator's Dilemma_ ) has a story about
Digital, the minicomputer manufacturer that was the second largest computer
company in the late 80's:

Their management used to be the darling of the tech press and they could do no
wrong. In fact, they were excellent management. Then, when Sun workstations,
and PCs appeared, customers switched to them, and Digital didn't make the
transition. _The press blamed management._ But management was the same; it was
doing just as good a job as before. The problem was the disruptive innovations
are almost always fatal to incumbents.

So that's what's happening here. Microsoft rode a disruptive innovation, the
PC, and now it's over. Can't really blame management for that.

It's worthwhile noting that Google has only been successful in one business
(search+ads) - great though it is, they don't rake in comparable _revenue_
with gmail (or other products).

Apple is an extraordinary exception in their success with PC's, then with
iPods, and now with iPhones.

~~~
eru
I would call Apple an exception. But not an extraordinary one. E.g. IBM is
also still around, and was there for even longer.

~~~
Tamerlin
I wouldn't, not in that way at least.

Apple's been really good about jumping onto up-and-coming trends, particularly
recently.

IBM's adaptation was the opposite: do nothing. The mainframe market hasn't
changed much; the only real change has been that making mainframes costs more
now, so IBM's main profit now is in consulting... for mainframe work :)

~~~
10ren
Although IBM started in mechanical office automation - e.g. cash registers and
type writers.

~~~
Tamerlin
True... and so did one of their biggest competitors in the mainframe market
(National Cash Register).... :)

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dtf
Someone linked to this post in the comments, which I'd never seen before. It's
by the guy who wrote the Vista shutdown menu, and it's pretty depressing
reading:

[http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-
shutdown-c...](http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-
crapfest.html)

~~~
jacquesm
Unbelievable. Well, believable, I worked a short stint for a bank as a
programmer and it reminds me of what happened back then.

Too many chiefs and very few indians.

~~~
nearestneighbor
> very few indians

Not at MS

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jsz0
It's not fair to compare pre-antitrust Microsoft to post-antitrust Microsoft.
They will never be allowed to be what they once were. What we're seeing now is
the real Microsoft competing without most of their monopolistic advantages.
That is a company producing mostly mediocre products & services that don't
interoperate with non-Microsoft products & services all that well. When you're
a monopoly that's a great business model. When you're just another player it's
a disadvantage.

I also don't think it's fair to lay it all on Ballmer. Most of the current
Microsoft flops were projects in development while Gates was CEO. I'm not sure
they've ever really caught up after completely missing the boat on the
Internet in the mid-90s. I envision most of the management structure at
Microsoft as being comprised of a bunch of people who never really had to
compete with outside forces other than deciding which company to buy and kill.

~~~
btilly
Um, Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000. Most current Microsoft flops such as
Vista started development after that. You're probably confusing his stepping
down as chair in 2006 with his stepping down as CEO in 2000.

Also I can assure you that Microsoft temporarily caught up after missing the
boat. Just review the history. Until partway through 1995 they didn't think
about the web. But by early 1998 they had the dominant browser, successfully
destroyed Netscape, and had a strategy for taking over the server side of the
web that people were genuinely concerned about.

Then the lawsuit hit. Microsoft's plan to use the browser monopoly to leverage
a server monopoly had to be put on hold. In the next 2 months several major
competitors (Informix, Oracle and IBM) jumped on the open source bandwagon.
The dot com era exploded. And Microsoft lost control.

Post lawsuit they tried several things to get control back, with no success.
Nothing they tried there had any traction. (Remember Hailstorm?) They poured
energy into trying to get control of DRM, which customers didn't want in the
end. They got sued again, more painfully, in Europe. They are being sued again
over antitrust issues by Novell.

So the question is this. Has the lackluster performance of Microsoft since
Ballmer took office been because of the lawsuit, or because Ballmer is a worse
CEO than Gates? I'm inclined to say "lawsuit + accumulated ill will". But it
is hard to separate the two.

~~~
d4nt
I think you're being quite charitable there. A lawsuit locking you out of a
market like that is only as tough as having a big competitor beating you in
that market. At this level you need a CEO to (a) anticipate then work around
some of these things, and (b) break through despite them. Take Nintendo; they
lost their market position for years because of Sony's playstation then came
back with the Wii. They did it by wrong footing the competition and moving
away from realism and performance.

Microsoft could have wrong footed Google by buying Facebook or Twitter. Or
built the App Store for Windows Mobile. Or built MS Office completely in
Silverlight years before Chrome, V8 and HTML5 arrived. They didn't want for
resources, just vision and drive.

~~~
eru
Or shipped the Internet Explorer with a built-in adblocker. (Though they would
have needed to block all advertisements, and not just Google's, so that they'd
stand a chance in court.)

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jacquesm
I'm kind of happy with Ballmer actually. He seems to be a fairly crazy person,
which is the best that could happen for the rest of us.

The last thing you want is competent management at Microsoft.

This video says it all:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc>

I don't know what he's trying to prove but it sure didn't work for me.

~~~
btilly
I suspect that people who voted you down are people under 30 who don't
remember what life was like when Microsoft truly dominated everything.

pg commented on the phenomena in <http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html>.

~~~
jacquesm
Downvotes are not going to stop me from speaking my mind. It's almost as if
people think that by downvoting someones opinion they can make that opinion
less real or so. Not sure what is going on in their heads.

If they would engage in debate _and_ downvote that would be the ideal I guess
:)

On /. because people can choose to post 'anonymously' and only randomly get
allotted mod points instead of having an infinite supply such frustration
tends to be vented by some anonymous ad-hominem attack, here it's the downmod
button.

Interesting how the technical facilities change peoples behaviour.

As for the subject, I wasn't joking either. Ballmers 'reign' has been a
trainwreck, so far he has consistently failed to produce anything that has
caused microsoft to gain lost terrain. Vista, the Zune, MSN Search (which
three months after launch is stuck in the 3% reach territory).

And I'm fine with that. Now for someone to get up and give google a run for
their money.

~~~
ErrantX
I nearly downvoted because it reads like the standard anti-MS "troll" comment.
But considering the original submission it fits the theme - so I didnt :)

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johnohara
10,000 million dollars on R&D next year alone is not an insignificant amount
and an awful lot of fertilizer for a voracious tree that yields a lot of fruit
other than apples.

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DavidSJ
_the ability to snatch data anywhere off of the Web — so-called cloud
computing_

Interesting definition of cloud computing...

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RyanMcGreal
Obligatory:

>What I meant [by saying Microsoft is dead] was not that Microsoft is suddenly
going to stop making money, but that people at the leading edge of the
software business no longer have to think about them.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html>

------
known
I agree.

