'Missed paid search' and 'missed music player' etc. etc. are all haughty claims - MS was never an internet oriented business, it's like saying 'Oracle missed the search business' - well sure. Just like Google missed social? Or Facebook missed mobile? Or missed photo-sharing?
I'm no fan of Ballmer or MSFT, but if the goal of MSFT is to make money via decent products that work well enough in the eyes of their buyers, he did that. Just not in the way that you might want or expect them to.
I like Satya more, but give it a few years and we can judge then.
He missed a ton of opportunities and messed a lot of things like Nokia and Skype acquisitions that barely panned out. He let Apple and Google steal the mobile show when Windows Mobile had been the smart phone king for a long time. Microsoft used to be #1, now they are behind Apple, Amazon and Google.
Granted, he was good at milking the Windows and Office cash cows that had been gifted to him from Gates era, but he spent an insane amount of money on things that never panned out.
MSFT has a lot of money in the bank account so I'm sure they'll be fine even if they put a rock in the CEO seat.
Sorry to nitpick, but for some reason this comment irks me. Your comment seems to imply that yahoo was healthy, they hired Mayer, and then Yahoo died as a result.
Yahoo was a sinking ship, and it would have been a tough turn around for anyone.
Not that I think Mayer was the world’s best CEO or anything, but the idea that she “killed” yahoo seems absurd. It’s like accusing a surgeon of killing someone that died in ER surgery; the reason the person was in the ER in the first place was because they were dying.
Microsoft dying under Ballmer would have been night and day different as Microsoft was basically the world’s most valuable company, not a clusterfuck like 2012 yahoo.
In ER terms, the surgeon could have cut the leg off and saved the person, but got a bit too greedy and ended up killing the person by trying to save everything.
As the parent comment notes, your previous comment seems to suggest some kind of causation between Mayer’s tenure as CEO and the eventual breakup and sale of Yahoo. This is the fallacy known in poker as “resulting”.
Nicholas Carlson’s “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo” is a fair account of her first few years at Yahoo. Keep in mind that when she joined, there was something like a total dozen mobile engineers at Yahoo. The company had burned through 3 CEOs in a decade, etc.
Mayer was not a perfect CEO in terms of strategic vision or her choice of acquisition targets, but I don’t think her time as CEO was particularly bad either.
Also - Satya has not yet had any real such things to 'miss'.
AI and blockchain are not products, there are no household-name dollar companies coming around on that yet.
It will be some time before we can judge Satya.
Revenues grew quite substantially under him.
Under Satya ... not so much.
Have a look here: [1]
Satya is a better communicator, and he seems like a nicer guy. This is naturally going to make employees 'feel better', but really that may not be what drives the business.
The stock price was obviously trailing revenues for whatever reason, maybe analysts just didn't like Ballmer, but irrespective, he massively grew the business and the reflection in stock price would have been inevitable.
Jury is still out on Satya.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...
did Oracle spend lots of $ and resources trying to get in to search?
As it stands, at least MSFT has a presence which entails at least strategic advantage. Not trying would be worse than trying and failing.
But it doesn't matter - they're not a search company, it's such a different beast. Why on earth do people expect that MSFT should have been the king of that domain I have no idea.
Take a look at the chart. Ballmer was CEO from January 2000 to February 2014.
"I mean, what has he done or not done that is impacting the stock?"
- along with Gates, made decisions that resulted in the company being found guilty of breaking the law twice(and counting)resulting in fines, restrictions...
- along with Gates, invested over $10B of cash in failed telecom investments that ended up being written off
- failed to make any meaningful investments at the bottom of the market crash when numerous companies were available for cheap..
- invested $10B's in various "emerging" businesses that even years later represent only about 10% of MSFT's revenue, aren't growing at even 10%..
- approved the onerous Licensing 6 program when many companies were hurting economically thereby pissing off a good portion of our customers and fueling the move to Open Source.
- has been at the helm as MSFT failed to take security seriously and then has had to drop everything to play catch up, missed the paid search move and had to play catch up, missed the move to web services and had to play catch up, missed the portable music wave and had to play catch up, let IE stagnate and had to play catch up, and now seemingly can't ship any major product on time even stripped of formerly core features (can you say Longhorn, CRM, SQL, VS, etc. etc. etc?).
Continued...
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/03/old-school-competencies...