02.08.11
Gemini version available ♊︎Here It Goes Again: Insinuations That Microsoft’s CEO Should be Ousted
Summary: Steve Ballmer wants to reorganise, but the reorganisation should include removing him, argue pundits
SUCH suggestions, rumours and speculations about Steve Ballmer are nothing new. They go back at least to 2008 and the subject was brought up here on many occasions, e.g.:
- Two Questions: Will Steve Ballmer Leave and Did He Make Bach/Allard Leave?
- Gates Successor May Leave, Steve Ballmer Expected to be Kicked Out Too
- Microsoft’s #1 Cash Cow Doesn’t Sell Well Anymore, Steve Ballmer Pressured to Leave
- Microsoft Exodus Noted in the Press, Is Steve Ballmer Next?
- Catching up With Microsoft
- Ramifications for Steve Ballmer After Ray Ozzie Metaphorically Falls on His Sword
- Shareholder Likens Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates to Bernard Madoff
- Steve Ballmer at Risk of Being Thrown Out, Bill Gates Still Makes the News Due to Fraud
Amid crisis at Microsoft (inability to find an alternative direction), there are more yet suggestions that Ballmer should get canned, e.g.:
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is reportedly looking to shake things up at the top by bringing in senior managers with more tech and engineering backgrounds, according to a Bloomberg report citing unnamed sources. The move, on the surface, is supposed to accelerate Microsoft’s push into tablets, smartphones and other categories where the company has fallen behind.
But dare I say again that the problems with Microsoft have more to do with senior managers not having the technology and engineering know-how that’s needed to keep one of the pioneers of technology ahead of the game? You see, the root of the problem is not product managers. The root of the problem goes much higher than that – all the way to the CEO’s office.
Microsoft booster Matt Rosoff [1, 2, 3, 4] has another take on it. The Microsoft booster takes it in a different direction by suggesting that existing people (some of whom are leaving) were technical. The former article wrongly suggests that Gates as opposed to Ballmer was a “techie”, conveniently forgetting what Gates went to college for and what his colleagues thought of his code (they used the “S” word to describe it). According to this page, Kildall said that “Steve Jobs is nothing. Steve Wozniak did it all, the hardware and the software. All Jobs did was hang around and take the credit.” Sounds pretty familiar, eh? █
“Now it was time to annihilate a new competitor, and Gates wanted Eller for the job. [...] By February 1990, Eller’s group was partially staffed. They were already working on their first demo, and their mission was clear: Kill GO Corp. Raikes had said as much. Squashing the competition was not a written policy, but something woven into the ethos of Microsoft.”
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s PR mogul
ᶃ Gemini Space
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twitter said,
February 8, 2011 at 6:43 pm
Perhaps Ballmer should not have famously told an audience, “It used to be developers, developers, developers. Now it’s advertisers, advertisers, advertisers.”
Really though, it is plain to see that the company wasted all sorts of technical attention on things no one wants. Digital restrictions baked into hardware and their OS and other anti-competitive foolishness at the hardware level. OOXML, a new format that no one wanted. A new GUI for both of their cash cows that everyone hated, the office “ribbon” and Vista’s coffin black upsell. Tilting Windows, har. Zune. Bing. The destruction of Hotmail. The destruction of Yahoo. Mono. SCO. Novell. Patent extortion. The list of customer hostile and anti-competitive malice goes on and on. Microsoft is a company that deserves to fail.
Will Reply:
February 9th, 2011 at 12:01 pm
Except that Microsoft is probably seen as a company that is “too big to fail”, both from the standpoint of its political maneuvers and from the perspective of the average, nontechnical user that, should MS ever go under, all computing would instantly collapse and revert to a pre-20th-century level.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
February 9th, 2011 at 12:17 pm
There are some decent articles debunking this myth. I can think of a few.
Meanwhile, to quote Gordon (thistleweb) from yesterday, “more sloppy #BBC tech “journalism”, “PC virus” story with no mention of #Microsoft, or #Windows http://tighturl.com/2xc4 business as usual”. Well, no warning about Windows means that they won’t educate the users… PC=Windows=computer=something that inherently attracts “viruses” (physical organism like bugs).