Ballmer retires..

Ballmer is set to retire in a year.

 

Watch the stock price rise...

 

About time. He wasn't particularly revered internally.

 

Pfew, that's a relief. Will be interesting to see who's next, but it's hard to imagine anyone worse.

 

Do you guys have any tips on how I could go about becoming the successor he is looking for? I don't particularly have the skillset, but I sure could use some money. Any help?

 

Awesome.

 

Then again, neither did Ballmer.

Within minutes of the announcement, Microsoft's stock surged by more than 7%.

 

Ya, and who do they expect to take over that is generating that optimism? Or is no one at the helm better than Ballmer?

 

Dean Takahashi has an article up on what Balmer's removal could mean for Xbox...

http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/23/w...d-what-his-retirement-means-for-its-future/1/

Now Takahashi knows the Xbox business having written books about it, so he has insight there rather than just being joe schmoe journalist.

In the end though it's unclear what Balmers removal will mean, going by the article.

On the one hand he seems painted as being anti-Xbox early on, while Gates was pro. He seemed to demand profitability, not always a great idea imo.

But OTOH, it seems he was a strong proponent of integrating Xbox into everything MS did, bringing it closer to Windows and the like, which could be looked at as a positive, making it more integral to MS and less possible to be spun off.

Overall, I've never liked him and am glad he's leaving personally. I read the company has lost half it's value since he became CEO (and given inflation over such a long period, it's much more than that).

 

Ballmer is probably the worst public face I've ever seen chosen to lead a company. I hear almost nothing positive about him. He should have been gone a long time ago. People used to hate Bill Gates, and some still do (they shouldn't when they see his philanthropic work), but Ballmer wasn't even close when it came to filling his shoes.

 

Two sides to that story. It lost half its book value, while at the same time growing revenue and profit at an average of >10% per year, returning more than $150 billion back to investors with stock buy backs and dividends (more than any other company in history), and launching a number of new billion dollar businesses.

By any measure other than stock price, which is not controlled by the company, the company has had stellar performance over the last 13 years. Even counting the bad things and write downs, the company has done pretty well.

Ballmer became CEO right before the dot com bubble burst, the entire tech market lost more than half it's value, and stockholders lost stopped trusting tech companies as growth companies. I don't think you can blame him for that, and I'm saying that as someone who had options at $60.

I'm not saying I agreed with all the things he did as CEO, but he's not the horrible monster everyone makes him out to be.

Stockwise, the company went from a "growth" company, which tend to have price multiples in the 30-60 range, to a "blue chip" company, which tend to have price multiples between 10 and 15. Pretty much all of the "value lost" in the last 13 years can be attributed to that correction.

 

He made (I guess along with his team) a great job in the corporate realm, good buy out that have been properly leveraged.

Now they made big mistakes and to be honest I think that their monople and the matching lawsuits have hindered their capability to improve Wondows (vs what Apple can do), not that I think that those lawsuits were not legitimate, the point is they hit sort of a ceiling.

But they made awful mistakes, I think that 2 biggest they made are :
giving up all together on winphone 6 aka letting their costumers (mostly corporate users) with no choice but to embrace competitors products => that one I will never understand...
Windows 8, putting the UI and the tech aside (one sucks the others is great), they did nothing less than turn Windows into 3 distinct development environments... a disaster that will have long term consequences... I think they opened a door for Google to enter their private ground.

There are other issues, like the out of control R7D expenses of the Windows division.

I've still have to read the good paper about the re-org Ballmer triggered may be they are heading toward the good direction, though I doubt it. (in the personal realm) They are sort of stuck between 2 opposed paradigm, on one side Apple which control its environment (~closed environment) and the opposite Google (completely open). Windows lays in the middle, not closed but it is not free and not as opened as Google offer.
Sounds like a rough place to be, like between a rock and a hard place.
Imo they should split the windows division, they are doing well in the corporate realm and windows 8 goes again their best interest. Actually the coporate side is the easy one.
In the private realm Windows is no longer what it used to be (for the costumers), they have to find a path, between Apple and Google approaches I'm not sure that path actually exists...

 

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.

 

Microsoft needs a new CEO who probably doesn’t exist - http://arstechnica.com/information-...ft-needs-a-new-ceo-who-probably-doesnt-exist/

several new billion dollar businesses were created... so he was very successful, the failures were big too but overall he delivered.

 

Xbox. Server and tools division. A ton of other things. Yes, he isn't a visionary. He is a business major, he executes on a vision.

Visionaries are hard to come by, and they have almost as much chance of driving a company into the ground as taking it to new heights. I would like to see MS with a visionary at the top, but it isn't likely.

 

True, the shareholders will dictate who takes the company reins, and Ballmer was VERY VERY generous to them during his tenure. During the Ballmer reign, Microsoft has returned more money to shareholders than any single corporation in history with the single exception of Exxon. This was one of the main reasons why Ballmer was able to hold on for so long. That and being best friends with the Chairman.

 

The obvious one is the Xbox division. And beyond that, the fact that the company has continued to grow throughout his tenure. There aren't many CEO's that can say that when taking over a successful corporation.

Regards,
SB