Excerpts from infamous mini-msft blog (in 2005 another msft employee venting anonymously):
"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?).
During Ballmers tenure, the company massively increased it's revenues and profits, and they were exceptional in other areas.
'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.
>Then he looked up, waited for a pause in the presentation, and said in a soft voice: “This number is wrong!”
>...
>Any other executive would have assumed his finance people could write Excel formulas and delegated the task.
All the (successful) executives I ever dealt with have a sort of "sense" for numbers, and surely do not really-really trust their finance people writing Excel formulas, or - better - they trust them as long as the results are reasonable and don't raise this "number sense" alarm.
Yes, and the funny thing is the author even didn't get the correct take-away from this event.
Ballmer looked at the bottom line, was surprised by the number he saw and then started looking at the math that produced that number in detail. It has nothing to do with being a math wizz. The lesson here is that good executives ignore noise (the speaker) and focus on importance (numbers).
Balmer isn't a superhuman who can listen to a talk, read slides and do higher level math simultaneously, but he can spot a bottom line number that is surprising given his mental model of the deal. He expected to see one number and saw something else. That's when he stopped skimming the slides and gave 100% of his attention to the math that produced that bottom line number. That's also the point where he tuned out the speaker completely.
Math genius is not required. Superhuman ability to divide attention is not required. The only skill Ballmer displayed here is ability to direct his attention to a number he didn't trust, which turned out to be the right decision.
Programmers of average ability have their spider sense tingle when they look at code with sql injections, or at loops that don't terminate, or suspect allocation/threading logic. Bad code looks bad. Not always, but often enough. Finance is no different.
Also, if the math was that wrong that it made the entire deal not make sense financially given it was a very large deal in monetary terms (which he stated) what were those 30 people doing? Most M&A deals make sense strategically first and then at a price second - rather than for a price first (especially if that price was very high).
I am not impressed by this exploit, because there are some chance he had studied the document before the presentation, or even asked someone to verify it.
He was flawed on many aspects, for example trying to attract developers by dancing and chanting "developers, dev...".
His successors put Linux in Windows, open sourced .NET and this seems more efficient... without even harming Windows market share.
Yep, a lot of techies fail to appreciate the extent to which this is true. For those who disagree and were around in 2000, where is Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Yahoo, AOL, and Netscape today?
Looking back, the whole "Developers, Developers, Developers..." bit was just what we saw publicly, I hope he was on fewer drugs when doing day to day management, but perhaps that is part of why Microsoft found itself in a dying segment of an industry it once monopolized.
Depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? Under his watch MSFT grew in revenue, profit, and stock. If the point of a business is to make money, he did well.
He raises a good point about the law of large numbers. When your core business is doing $75b and has 95% market share, it's near impossible to find other lines of business to complement that core in a meaningful way. I'd go as far as to say it's illogical to expect crazy growth or innovation at such a point.
That bit had me scratching my head. To me the law of large numbers had to do with stats. But apparently, MBAs have come up with their own completely unrelated "law".
"A leader falls on his sword for his team if and when needed."
I like this. It also reminded me of a lesson I learned when reading Maj. Richard Winters' memoirs: a good leader leads from the front. First one in, last one out.
Strange comparison. If you look at the leaders in WWII (Churchill, Eisenhower, Hitler, Stalin, etc), none of them were at the front. Generals generally aren't either. Its direct leaders such as corporals and sergeants who are leading from the front; not officers. As comparison: the direct leaders would be CTO, division leaders, or direct managers.
But Ballmer didn't fall on his sword; he just apologised, to people who had no ability to punish him for the mistake which he claimed as his.
If you receive an apology from someone several levels above where the mistake was made, I don't think it means much. You end up with no reassurance that anything is being done to stop it happening again.
The Nokia fiasco is a big blot on Ballmer's record. For a good reason: It shows the consequences of great arrogance. Nokia's marching orders were to make Windows Phone a success, and not to dilute that mission with a drop of alternative products. Just because he could, he took one of the finest companies on the planet and trashed it with a doomed strategy, at a cost of tens of billions in foregone value to his own shareholders and Nokia's employees. He took that much money, put it in a pile, lit it on fire and blocked the fire brigades, whether for vanity or for a weakly articulated strategy.
Interesting read but a pity that the author doesn’t understand the difference between blog and blog post particular as one of his points was attention to detail.
If the author is reading this blog is the medium (like magazine or newspaper) and blog post or post is the individual what a blog is what one authors.
[+] [-] achow|7 years ago|reply
"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...
[+] [-] sonnyblarney|7 years ago|reply
'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.
[+] [-] Adrock|7 years ago|reply
Take a look at the chart. Ballmer was CEO from January 2000 to February 2014.
[+] [-] jaclaz|7 years ago|reply
>Then he looked up, waited for a pause in the presentation, and said in a soft voice: “This number is wrong!”
>...
>Any other executive would have assumed his finance people could write Excel formulas and delegated the task.
All the (successful) executives I ever dealt with have a sort of "sense" for numbers, and surely do not really-really trust their finance people writing Excel formulas, or - better - they trust them as long as the results are reasonable and don't raise this "number sense" alarm.
[+] [-] gizmo|7 years ago|reply
Ballmer looked at the bottom line, was surprised by the number he saw and then started looking at the math that produced that number in detail. It has nothing to do with being a math wizz. The lesson here is that good executives ignore noise (the speaker) and focus on importance (numbers).
Balmer isn't a superhuman who can listen to a talk, read slides and do higher level math simultaneously, but he can spot a bottom line number that is surprising given his mental model of the deal. He expected to see one number and saw something else. That's when he stopped skimming the slides and gave 100% of his attention to the math that produced that bottom line number. That's also the point where he tuned out the speaker completely.
Math genius is not required. Superhuman ability to divide attention is not required. The only skill Ballmer displayed here is ability to direct his attention to a number he didn't trust, which turned out to be the right decision.
Programmers of average ability have their spider sense tingle when they look at code with sql injections, or at loops that don't terminate, or suspect allocation/threading logic. Bad code looks bad. Not always, but often enough. Finance is no different.
[+] [-] bigtones|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scriptproof|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rimher|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThrowawayR2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kelukelugames|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brewrwe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Delmania|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerr|7 years ago|reply
Did he?
[+] [-] openIce|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] majani|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddebernardy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|7 years ago|reply
I like this. It also reminded me of a lesson I learned when reading Maj. Richard Winters' memoirs: a good leader leads from the front. First one in, last one out.
[+] [-] Fnoord|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjw1007|7 years ago|reply
If you receive an apology from someone several levels above where the mistake was made, I don't think it means much. You end up with no reassurance that anything is being done to stop it happening again.
[+] [-] Zigurd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pappaSsmurf|7 years ago|reply
https://bgr.com/2016/11/04/ballmer-iphone-quote-explained/
edit: added the word 'serious'
[+] [-] letientai299|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbenhur|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SandersAK|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rich-and-poor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theNewMicrosoft|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewmate|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timc3|7 years ago|reply
If the author is reading this blog is the medium (like magazine or newspaper) and blog post or post is the individual what a blog is what one authors.