
SteveB’s Retirement Announcement - protomyth
http://hal2020.com/2013/08/25/stevebs-retirement-announcement/
======
CaptainZapp
Uhh, Poor Steve having to save the company because it was at the brink of
extinction due to the evil government action of the US and the EU is about as
revisionist as it comes.

Look, that company violated antitrust laws left and right and Steve Balmer was
instrumental in this sordid affair.

I'm neither a Microsoft hater (I actually think their OS offerings since XP
are pretty solid) but that's just so much revisionist bullshit I couldn't even
finish the article.

Microsoft was not punished for being big and successful. They where punished
(and rightfully so) for repeatedly and purposefully violating the law in a
multitude of jusrisdictions.

~~~
yulaow
"funny" fact: they also did not respect the punishment EU gave them, so they
were punished again over it.

Microsoft has serious problems with let the competitors a chance to compete.

edit to add data: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/6/4069126/eu-fines-
microsoft-...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/6/4069126/eu-fines-microsoft-
for-windows-7-sp1-browser-ballot)

~~~
winter_blue
> _Microsoft has serious problems with let the competitors a chance to
> compete._

When you come down to it, there's a lot of circumstance involved.

For instance, take iOS -- it doesn't allow _any other_ browser engine
WebKit/UIWebView. And no one is suing Apple over it.

~~~
rbanffy
> For instance, take iOS -- it doesn't allow any other browser engine
> WebKit/UIWebView.

Get back to me when 90+% of smartphones from all major manufacturers are sold
with iOS. It's not just being anti-competitive - it's being an anti-
competitive monopoly.

~~~
winter_blue
I don't think anything will change even if/when iOS has 90%+ of the market
share. Thing are going to remain the same, and Apple will get what it wants.

------
nostromo
People put so much weight on leadership.

Microsoft when Balmer took over had one direction to go: down. It's reversion
to the mean. Eventually a company is going to roll 7 on the craps table.

Unless Cook is extremely lucky and skilled, in 5 or 10 years people will say
the same thing about Apple. Days of stagnation and decline will also visit
Google and Facebook eventually.

I understand our fixation on leadership. It _is_ super important. But as a
thought experiment, I wonder if Steve Jobs was running Microsoft 2000-2010
instead of Steve Balmer, would Microsoft be in great condition today? Or were
there already internal and external forces at play at that point that were
trouble for Microsoft?

I guess the ultimate lesson is one you can learn from Bill Gates: quit while
you're ahead.

~~~
michaelwww
_> Microsoft when Balmer took over had one direction to go: down_

Not at all. As mentioned here in the Vanity Fair [1] article, the iPhone could
have been a Micosoft product and now brings in more revenue than the entirety
of Microsoft. Ballmer said "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get
any significant market share. No chance." If you cut through everything else
said, I think this is pretty damning.

[1] [http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-
mo...](http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-
ballmer)

~~~
hudell
Well, if apple hadn't been forced to release iOS sdk, it probably wouldn't get
any significant market share as he predicted.

~~~
michaelwww
How was it forced? Steve Jobs: _Let me just say it: We want native third party
applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in
February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer
community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our
users._ [1] Oct 18, 2007

[1]
[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1183763?start=0&tstart=...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1183763?start=0&tstart=0)

------
elorant
What this article misses is that despite the successes and failures of SteveB,
to the outside world Microsoft is largely considered as a company without a
vision. I don’t know if they ever had one, but all those talks all these years
about tablets and handheld devices and those beautifully crafted videos about
how computing will be 20 years from now, all that don’t materialize into
products.

Take for example Surface (the table not the tablet). They go and produce a
sci-fi table with a touch surface which looks amazing but costs an outrageous
$10.000 and has no freaking applications. And that coming from a software
company which has spend the better part of the last 30 years building APIs.
Where’s the vision in that?

I use .NET daily as a platform for building web apps. I love it. I consider it
a pretty solid platform and the IDE is like the golden standard in the
industry. But in the long term I don’t think that they have a clue as to where
they’d like to take things. Right now MS seems like the company that waits
others to innovate and then follow on their steps. They spend $7B yearly on
R&D and you get to wonder what’s the end result.

~~~
soofaloofa
Research can (and arguably should) exist outside of a corporate vision.

------
protomyth
I thought the interesting line from the article was: "For employees and ex-
employees, our biggest beef with Steve will probably turn out to be that he
made a great, if sometimes brutal, place to work a lot less great. And that,
particularly in the second half of his CEO tenure, it became a lot more brutal
yet cruelly random in how it measured and rewarded employee contributions."

It is one of those situations that gets repeated at companies of every size.
It was a fun place to work then someone did something and the fun stopped. The
weird part is when it happens at places that are profitable.

It being "cruelly random" isn't really that uncommon either.

~~~
twoodfin
As much as I agree with the criticism of Microsoft's implementation of stack
ranking, if the stock had kept growing like it did in the '90's I think you
would have seen a lot more happy employees.

Nobody cares too much about the review system when the options you got three
years ago are making you a millionaire.

------
bhauer
Often the people who decry the era of desktop PCs over _also_ still believe it
righteous for the US and EU governments to levy fines and targeted regulations
on Microsoft. Which is it: are desktop PCs relevant and therefore worthy of
strong-handed regulation or are they irrelevant?

Surely if they are irrelevant, we can call off the government attack dogs and
allow Microsoft to bundle a browser and media player with their desktop
operating system already, yes?

So thank you, OP, for bringing attention to the regulatory position Microsoft
is in versus its competition. I've ranted elsewhere [1] about the market-
holistic detriment I believe the anti-trust judgments caused. At the time, I
had been of mixed feelings, being an avid Netscape fan. Since then, I've come
to regard the anti-trust cases as a tragedy.

Ultimately, I think it was not just Microsoft who suffered but also the
consumer. I presently find the world of mobile computing _far_ from the ideal
that I want, and I feel it arrived in this form thanks in large part to an
unnaturally narrow competitive landscape (the irony!) When I retrace the steps
of the past 15 years, I see there were fits of movement in a direction of
unified computing, but those were lost. Only recently with the NSA leaks and a
gradual pendulum swing back to self-control are we seeing some blips of
unified computing.

Yet now Microsoft concedes that tablets and mobile phones should be first-
class computing devices (argh!) and simply follows the proven money-making
model of the other titans. I still hold out some hope that they will come
around to a unified computing model, among other things [2].

[1] [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft-
awakens](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft-awakens) and [2]
[http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft)

~~~
rbanffy
> Which is it: are desktop PCs relevant and therefore worthy of strong-handed
> regulation or are they irrelevant?

The question is irrelevant. While PCs are rapidly losing importance in the
general computing and communications market, Microsoft's monopoly extends over
most of the desktop computer market. It is, therefore, a monopoly. It may not
be as important as it once was, but the PC market is still huge by all
measurements (and is mostly less relevant these days because the mobile device
segment exploded).

~~~
bhauer
Do we go after Instagram for being a monopoly on photo sharing? Twitter for a
monopoly on arbitrarily-small marketing messages and snark? Facebook for a
monopoly on social networking?

Yet, the EU _has_ \--in laughably minor ways--gone after Google for its
monopoly on search.

It seems there is some correlation between the size (real or imagined) of the
market with whether the government attack dogs are loosed.

The point may not really be relevant to the matter at hand, I'll agree. But
it's nevertheless amusing to me how often I see the same people who decry
desktop computing to be over still harping on about the need for the
government to bust Microsoft for its desktop computing monopoly.

~~~
nknighthb
There is no law against _being_ a monopoly. Microsoft was not punished for
_being_ a monopoly. They were punished (poorly) for abusing their monopoly
position.

~~~
bhauer
Reducing the situation so ends up sounding disturbingly capricious, where
favors are granted to the politically powerful and oppression is handed out to
the politically weak by defining their actions as abusive.

I feel Google _abuses_ its search monopoly to shove Chrome down my throat. I
feel Youtube _abuses_ its web video monopoly to force me into using Google+. I
feel just about every company is shoving their cloud services and making
management and control of local resources frustratingly limited by comparison.

But do I want any government to step in and assist me? No, thank you very
much.

I feel I'd be happier with technology today--perhaps only slightly, mind you,
but happier--had Microsoft been left alone in the late 90s/early 2000s.

~~~
hga
The US, at least, in theory goes further, consumers must be harmed.

The above examples may be abusive, but are they harming you?

------
petilon
In assessments of Steve Ballmer's tenure (including Ballmer's own assessment
as reported on ZDNet) Vista is mentioned as a prominent failure. No one seems
to want to mention the bigger failure: Windows 8, whose adoption is below
Vista.

~~~
huhtenberg
Luckily for Microsoft, Windows 8 failure really comes down to the lack of the
Start button on a desktop screen. If it were there, everyone would've just
skipped the fancy tiled screen, went straight to the desktop and got an
improved W7 experience.

Windows 8.1 puts the button back, so the adoption rates should climb back up
and rather quickly.

~~~
mythz
The Start Button isn't back, it's the same lose-context-and-switch-to-Metro
B.S. that was in the first version.

So instead of activating the hot corner, there's now a prominent button where
the Start button was, but it still takes you to a disjointed (touch-friendly)
desktop that many wish could be disabled entirely.

~~~
michaelt
To be fair, Windows isn't the only desktop environment to throw away old
interface designs and adopt new ones that many wish could be disabled.

Not saying it's a good (or bad) think in either case (as I don't know) but
it's certainly not a unique-to-microsoft thing.

------
anuragramdasan
>> Had it succeeded he probably would have gotten the kind of credit regularly
attributed to that other company head named Steve.

Some times some statements within an article show such negative attitude that
it becomes difficult to take the rest of the article seriously. I don't know
why the author has such resentment towards 'that other company head named
Steve' and why he feels to need to mention it at all.

Also in one paragraph it is mentioned that Steve is a hero. The paragraph
immediately following that states that he couldn't get things put together at
the same time or execute his plans. How does a CEO become a hero when he is
not able to deliver the most important things expected of him?

A very confusing article this one.

