Ballmer retires..

[itsmydamnation]

I suppose this isn't the thread for it, but I'd ask what MS succeeded at under Balmer?

He inherited a OS monopoly and Office, that carried MS. Nothing else can really be called a success that I know of. And that's with incalculable inherent advantages to having Microsoft's cash.

I wrote up a long thing but I guess this thread probably isn't for business discussion, so I'll just leave this...

http://www.dailytech.com/Ballmer++i...tting+Significant+Marketshare/article7139.htm

The guy is not a guy with any vision.

as said before the entire Enterprise space in everything from desktop management to MS-SQL and everything in-between. Things like sharepoints integration into windows 8 is magic, Lync is now truly high end enterprise, the list goes on and on. These are the kind of things that Microsoft get little credit for ( the people who give credit normally have NFI) but Microsoft sure make a whole lot of money from it.

 

[Eolirin]

as said before the entire Enterprise space in everything from desktop management to MS-SQL and everything in-between. Things like sharepoints integration into windows 8 is magic, Lync is now truly high end enterprise, the list goes on and on. These are the kind of things that Microsoft get little credit for ( the people who give credit normally have NFI) but Microsoft sure make a whole lot of money from it.

Not to mention going from having absolutely no cloud platform in 2010 to not only snapping at Amazon's heels but realigning all of their major enterprise products around a cloud services model in less than 3 years. That kind of change is almost unheard of for a company of Microsoft's size.

Everyone is so focused on the 'devices' end of things, the phones and tablets that they've been late to market on and have struggled to get adoption with, that their big wins on the services end get drowned out. Office 365 subs are doing insanely well, even in the home market, Azure platform growth is rapid, they've seen several businesses grow to one billion plus in revenue in the last few years.At this point it doesn't really matter that much if they never manage to get significant market share on phones or tablets, though obviously it's better for them if they do; they're so well positioned at this point to move most of their profitable businesses to a platform agnostic state if they need to (for the ones that aren't already) that they could cede Windows almost entirely and still have over a dozen products bringing in more than a billion dollars of revenue each.

And much of that is down to Ballmer's push to cloud.

 

[Davros]

I think he's a genius

Ballmer announced that he will retire within the next twelve months. The company’s stock surged; Ballmer is now worth about a billion dollars more than he was on Thursday.

 

[bkilian]

I think he's a genius

The stock went up 7%. Ballmers Microsoft stock went from about 10billion to 10.7 billion. Do you really think he needed that extra 700 million? As conspiracy theories go, that's a pretty lame one...

 

[Alexko]

I think he's a genius

You have to admire the irony. That's just beautiful!

 

[Gubbi]

Revenue and income tripled under Ballmer. The stock price don't reflect that because all that money went back to shareholders in the form of dividends, - unlike other companies that accumulate cash in overseas subsidiaries.

They continue to struggle with mobile. But in their core markets they look stronger than ever: Enterprise back office, servers (and services), office productivity and consoles.

They have a solid product in the cloud segment with Azure which is poised to see great growth.

Cheers

 

[silent_guy]

I like Asymco's take on it: http://www.asymco.com/2013/08/26/steve-ballmer-and-the-innovators-curse/

Steve Ballmer will not be remembered as favorably as the man who created Microsoft. But at least he won’t be remembered as the fool who killed it. That epitaph is reserved for his successor.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yup, I'm not sure how successful Microsoft will manage to be once Ballmer is out. I think a lot of investors that were trying to push him out aren't going to like the results. Be careful of what you wish for, because you might just get it.

Regards,
SB

 

[IdaGno]

this must be newspeak for gets thrown under the bus

 

[zed]

http://sportsbeta.ladbrokes.com/Specials/Microsoft-Specials/Next-Microsoft-CEO-N-1z0z7huZ1z0z1etZ1z0ys9q/ stephen elop favorite to take over
bill gates at 50:1 is quite a good bet I think

 

[Dominik D]

I wouldn't even consider Elop - he's too expensive and busy, IMO. Here's my Top 5 future Microsoft CEOs in the order if likelihood even though I'm sure nobody cares.
1. Philippe Dauman (Viacom, business-oriented so if Ballmer has say in this nomination, he'd opt for suit; friend of Bill's)
2. Meg Whitman (HP, Disney, eBay and others, business-oriented, probably preferred choice for Ballmer)
3. Howard Schultz (Starbucks, ex-Xerox and some other companies, local so it'd be fairly easy for MS to get into talks with him)
4. John W. Thompson (Symantec, IBM, MS board member, would make for one interesting choice)
5. Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!, Google, Walmart board member, pretty well respected, could finalize what Ballmer couldn't: Yahoo! acquisition)

Honorable mentions: John Chambers and Timothy Koogle. Sinfsky pissed too many ppl off so he's not returning. Julie Larson-Green isn't loved internally so probably not. Bill is not coming back, I think. Although this would bump stock prices tremendously.

 

[AlexV]

Bill is not coming back, I think. Although this would bump stock prices tremendously.

Just trick him into believing it's for philanthropic reasons:smile: