Re:Why Steve Ballmer will resign from Microsoft in 2010
by trafficlight on Tuesday October 06, 2009 @01:52PM
(#864742)
Amazing. He really missed the entire point of the internet.
Re:Why Steve Ballmer will resign from Microsoft in 2010
by vorador on Tuesday October 06, 2009 @03:54PM
(#865049)
Well, I think this is becoming more and more right. I mean, how many people only use Facebook, Youtube and Wikipedia only ?
The internet, after an incredible growth phase, has just begun to shrink.
Re:Why Steve Ballmer will resign from Microsoft in 2010
by trafficlight on Tuesday October 06, 2009 @07:24PM
(#865611)
You must have some numbers to back up such a bold statement. Otherwise that's a ridiculous assumption.
Re:Why Steve Ballmer will resign from Microsoft in 2010
by vorador on Wednesday October 07, 2009 @04:32AM
(#866318)
I don't have numbers - actually nobody has them, but the growth of web 2.0 websites had a consequence : less and less people host themselves their websites.
Re:Why Steve Ballmer will resign from Microsoft in 2010
by axod on Tuesday October 06, 2009 @03:13PM
(#864961)
That pretty much defines Microsoft.
Re:Why Steve Ballmer will resign from Microsoft in 2010
by nearestneighbor on Tuesday October 06, 2009 @01:02PM
(#864603)
If someone like that could be the CEO of Microsoft, anyone can!
Re:Why Steve Ballmer will resign from Microsoft in 2010
by wmeredith on Tuesday October 06, 2009 @01:55PM
(#864757)
The critical thing about a job as a decision maker (a CEO) is not to never be wrong, it's to usually be right. If someone were to cherry pick a bad decision from my past, I'm sure they could find a doozy.
Re:Why Steve Ballmer will resign from Microsoft in 2010
by kakooljay on Tuesday October 06, 2009 @03:03PM
(#864941)
Good point - &, to be fair, let's not forget that even Bill Gates (among others) also underestimated the potential of the Internet in the early '90s...
Re:Why Steve Ballmer will resign from Microsoft in 2010
by RyanMcGreal on Tuesday October 06, 2009 @03:34PM
(#864986)
It's fun to go back and read an early edition of Gates' The Road Ahead, in which he just completely misses the value, growth potential and benefits of an open, neutral data network. Rather, he simply transposed "a PC in every house" to "an MSN connection in every house".
In fairness, Gates caught on pretty fast and didn't let his own prior prognostication get in the way of positioning Microsoft to extend his company's product lock-in to customers' internet access (see: IE).
Re:Why Steve Ballmer will resign from Microsoft in 2010
by nearestneighbor on Tuesday October 06, 2009 @07:50PM
(#865673)
Benefit of hindsight or not, but I think predicting that the number of web sites would actually decrease is showing a total lack of common sense. If I were a shareholder, I'd want someone else at the helm.
In a post from June [http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/02/web-death-google] Boris relates a famous story about a meeting between Yahoo and Microsoft which took place when Yahoo was still a small start-up:
"Yahoo was growing at neck-breaking speed and David Filo and Jerry Yang were invited to Redmond to talk about working together.
"The meeting turned into a disappointment when Steve Ballmer joined the conversation and gave his opinion on the future of search engines. According to Ballmer Search Engines were a temporary solution to a temporary problem. Ballmer claimed that 'within a few years there will only be a handful of websites left. People will use their Favorites to navigate to those destination sites and nobody will need a Search engine except for a few students and professors.'"
Oops.