
Ballmer on Ballmer: His Exit From Microsoft - aleem
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303460004579194150724298162-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwNDExNDQyWj
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brianpgordon
I can't believe that the article doesn't contain the slightest mention of any
of the numerous disasters that took place under Ballmer's leadership. The
writer makes it sound like Ballmer's only fault was that he was only a little
too slow to change the company. In reality Microsoft lost billions due to
tactical business errors like the Surface, Xbox hardware failures, Windows
Phone, and the Zune.

~~~
ChuckMcM
That is an interesting narrative. Microsoft didn't "lose" anything, they have
made billions over the last decade. So you have a profitable company bringing
in billions of dollars that is pretty much qualifies as "doing a good job."

So when people talk about the 'lost billions' they create a hypothetical
Microsoft, the one of today which made billions of dollars but _also_
dominated in new markets and made billions more. There is absolutely no
evidence that Microsoft could have done both, regardless of who was at the
helm. It would have been epic, but it isn't clear that it was possible.

So this article was Ballmer's take on his reign, he's not going to say "I
didn't capture the smartphone market" he is going to remember that he made a
lot of money off enterprises for his employees and his shareholders. I would
happy to be that successful.

Google has never made serious money off their hardware products or operating
system products, Apple has never made serious money off their operating system
products or their network products, and Microsoft has never made significant
money on either network products or hardware products. All three have a space
where they are really good, all three are so so in the other two spaces. Why
is Ballmer presented as an idiot and Page and Cook not?

~~~
r00fus
Imagine if Apple spent billions on boondoggles that made it such that instead
of having $150B in their bank account, they only had $100B or $50B - because
that's what's evident - MSFT might have double it's current cash ($80B) [1] if
it had executed well on those new key ventures.

Is it any less a managerial failure to repeatedly fail to execute like this
than it is to push a company from profitable to unprofitable (or run it into
bankruptcy)?

And that's ignoring the cultural morass that failed policies like stacked
ranking promote - that could likely have poisoned Microsoft's productivity
well.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Well if you are unconstrained from reality you could argue that Apple _could_
have made MacOS available for _any_ x86 laptop and sold it from $50/copy and
completely STOLEN what was left of the technical Windows market. But no, their
stupid reliance on only putting it on some over priced hardware left BILLIONs
on the table.

You see how that works? In lots and lots of ways MacOS is much better than
Windows 8, and yet Apple won't sell it to Dell or Lenovo to pre-install on
their laptops, they won't even _talk_ to them about it. But it would be cool
(and we know its possible with all the Hackintoshes out there). Everyone
agrees that Microsoft fumbled on the phone business and Apple executed very
well. Apple so far has totally fumbled their network products offering, social
music network? icloud? not stellar.

~~~
r00fus
"Unconstrained from reality" is an understatement for your example.

I'm not arguing that Microsoft should have abandoned their cash cows and say
"put office on the web" as a target.

Instead they should have, for example, actually stove to make money from their
Xbox division (it's still in the red from it's inception).

Or made phones that didn't suck back in the early 00s - I had a colleague
doing testing for mobile enterprise software for WinCE and each weekend he'd
show me his return list - a half dozen or more OQO, HP, Dell, or Compaq
handsets that just up and died during his testing - every week.

Ultimately, Microsoft could be making so much more than what they are. Apple's
1st and second most profitable areas didn't even exist 8 years ago.
Microsoft's have existed for 20+, they simply can't make a new profitable
venture. That's a failure of management.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I don't know of anyone who set out to not be successful. That is why looking
backwards in time is so strange sometimes. You say "Gee, that decision cost
you so much time and money!" but you don't necessarily get to see what they
were looking at when they made it. Imagine one comes to a fork in the road,
unmarked, both lead in the general direction of your goal, one of them has a
bridge washed out. At the bridge it is obvious which fork to take, at the
fork, which cannot see the bridge, not so much.

I'm not apologizing for Microsoft executing poorly, what I am saying is that
there success is a matter of positive degree rather than one of success or
failure. We can productively discuss if they may have been _more successful_
had they invested differently but there shouldn't be any discussion that they
are _not successful_.

I don't know where you are in your career or life, but I know that everyone
gets a chance to look back and see some things that look obviously stupid in
the future looking toward the past. If you are like me, and you see some
things that would have really made things different (I turned Bill Gates down
when he offered me a job in 1978, I held my tech stocks in 2000 hoping there
would be a recovery, Etc.) don't dwell on them. Figure out whether or not you
made the right decision with the information that was available, and if so let
those past decisions lay in peace and not haunt your dreams.

I have found that this statement : _" Ultimately, Microsoft could be making so
much more than what they are."_ is nearly always true. When looking back in
time, a path can be plotted which would have made you more money (I could have
bought 1000 BTC for $250 for example, I didn't) but that exercise is useless
unless it helps to learn something about how to make better decisions right?

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redthrowaway
It's refreshing to see Ballmer's attitude towards Microsoft: he's willing to
do whatever's in the best interests of the company, even if he personally
would prefer to stay around longer (and make more money in so doing). How many
professional CEOs can you say the same of? How many people who worked their
way up the rungs of leadership would voluntarily step aside, thinking they
weren't the right person for the job?

~~~
keithpeter
I take your point, but can making more money possibly mean anything to
Ballmer?

Isn't it more about what Gates said (basically _meaning_ and Microsoft being
Gates' and Ballmer's big project)?

~~~
mathattack
Yes - for them the share price isn't about the cash, it's about keeping score.

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nostromo
The thought of the CEO of Ford taking over Microsoft just seems crazy to me.

I'm sure he's a competent manager, as Balmer seemed to be, but is he a tech
visionary?

~~~
erbo
Bear in mind Mulally not only saved Ford, but saved the Taurus:

 _" I arrive here, and the first day I say, 'Let's go look at the product
lineup.' And they lay it out, and I said, 'Where's the Taurus?' They said,
'Well, we killed it.' I said, 'What do you mean, you killed it?' 'Well, we
made a couple that looked like a football. They didn't sell very well, so we
stopped it.' 'You stopped the Taurus?' I said. 'How many billions of dollars
does it cost to build brand loyalty around a name?' 'Well, we thought it was
so damaged that we named it the Five Hundred.' I said, 'Well, you've got until
tomorrow to find a vehicle to put the Taurus name on because that's why I'm
here. Then you have two years to make the coolest vehicle that you can
possibly make.'?"_ \- [http://www.fastcompany.com/1573670/what-other-
automakers-can...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1573670/what-other-automakers-
can-learn-alan-mulally)

As the driver of a sixth-generation (2011) Ford Taurus, which is in fact a
pretty cool car, somehow it doesn't seem so crazy that Mulally could save
Microsoft as well...

~~~
JeremyMorgan
That's a very interesting comparison. For a while there the Taurus was the
laughing stock of the company, and now they're pretty damn nice.

So... we gonna back FrontPage now?

~~~
ak217
Yes, that's interesting. I think the decision to keep the Taurus brand was a
mistake, since Ford tarnished it with too many shitty cars over the years.
They have some really good brands (Fiesta, Raptor SVT, even Focus) but I would
consider Taurus irreparable, just like FrontPage.

The company logo needs an update too, IMO.

And they have an incredible iconic brand, "Model T", I think they would do
well to use it again.

~~~
hackula1
Some new innovation in trucks would certainly be interesting. As a driver with
over 200k on my F-150, I could see some sort of T-150 being a pretty sweet
redesign.

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auctiontheory
The larger the company and its existing revenue streams, the greater the
resistance to any significant change. Even with Ballmer out, this law of
corporate inertia still holds.

As entrepreneurs, the above is actually good news - it's why we have a decent
chance of blowing past the incumbent.

------
antonius
Regardless of what some may say about him, spending 30+ years at a company and
serving as CEO of your remaining years shows the trust that Steve had. Similar
to when Bill Gates left, it will be a sad day when Ballmer is not around.

~~~
chris_wot
I'm sure that all those people who were screwed by the stack ranking system
will be _really_ upset.

~~~
3825
I'd imagine being a Microsoft alumni, regardless of the details of exit, means
many hiring managers would at least take a look at your resume.

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avenger123
I got more insight from this article as to the type of person Ballmer is than
anything else I have read about him. Good read.

~~~
officemonkey
It certainly is more insightful than a Youtube video of him sweating and
yelling "DEVELOPERS" or another rehash of his iPhone-will-never-amount-to-
anything quote.

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bgirard
"The Ballmer Years" stock price graph is extremely misleading because the
number of outstanding shares has changed. If they want to track Ballmer'
performance they should graph market cap.

~~~
keithwinstein
It depends on your perspective. If you're one of Microsoft's shareholders (the
perspective the WSJ may be writing for), market capitalization is not directly
relevant.

If Jane owns 100 shares of ABCD that most recently traded at $10 apiece, and
then the issuer issues 1,000 new shares to its employees but the shares
continue to trade at the same price, the market capitalization has increased
but Jane's stake hasn't changed in value.

Shareholders do care about price return and dividends. They might also care
about total return, subject to some reinvestment strategy and tax regime.

Market cap is also problematic because it can't be calculated in real time.
Reporting companies generally only publish a share count once a quarter. They
publish two numbers: the gross count of shares outstanding on a particular day
(which doesn't count in-the-money options and other live claims on a company's
equity) and the fully-diluted share count averaged over the quarter (without
publishing the strike price distribution of the options).

Neither one is exactly what you'd need to calculate an implied whole-company
market valuation anyway, so in general any attempt to measure market cap is
necessarily going to get an uncertain, out-of-date, imperfect metric. (A
useful one, don't get me wrong! But not what principally matters to the
shareholders.)

~~~
bgirard
That's a good point. Thanks!

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Thiz
What would Elon Musk do as CEO of microsoft?

Just wondering...

~~~
breckinloggins
He would probably be really bored.

This is pure speculation, but I don't think Elon would like a "turnaround guy"
type of job. He seems to be driven to do really big things that people say
can't be done. I don't think Microsoft's shareholders would appreciate the
distraction, and to Musk, I'm pretty sure that even "put Windows on top of BSD
and open source it" wouldn't be his idea of "big things that people say can't
be done".

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geoka9
"Steve was a phenomenal leader who racked up profits and market share in the
commercial business, but the new CEO must innovate in areas Steve
missed—phone, tablet, Internet services, even wearables."

Why does MS insist it has to be everywhere there's any money to be made? Apple
is happy being a phone/tablet company, Google is the Internet gig, but MS has
to have a finger in every pie, right?

~~~
lostoptimist
"Google is the Internet gig"

That's not really true. Google is trying to capture nearly everything, too.
Enterprise (docs), phone, tablet, computer, search, advertising, social, ISP,
wearable products (Glass), etc.

~~~
thatthatis
And cars and solar power

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bitwize
My question is what's next for Steve? Being Bill's bulldog has been pretty
much a lifelong career for him. In his place I don't know that I'd be happy
anywhere else; I might decide to enjoy the huge sacks of cash money I'd made
and spend more time with my kids.

~~~
gnaritas
Retirement I imagine, he's absurdly rich. Maybe he'll join Bill and start
giving some of that money away.

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jusben1369
To me Ballmer = Cook where Bill = Steve. Cook is taking over a company
dominant in it's markets. It's raking in huge sums of cash selling legacy
products. There's no sign that Cook can ensure Apple makes the leap to the
next big thing. Indeed, coming up through Apple he's probably not the right
guy just as Ballmer is now realizing his deeply engrained MSFT strains makes
him not the right guy for a new environment.

~~~
nirnira
I think people should wait at least five years before bothering to analyse Tim
Cook's tenure over Apple, because at this point, it's just stupid to even try.

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ffrryuu
So he finally realized he's fail for the last 5+ years?

