for all the wrong reasons
Ballmer, writes Hartung, has abandoned important markets (mobile music, handsets,china cheap jerseys, and tablets), damaged the long term prospects of Dell, HP, and Nokia, blew the Windows Vista deployment, and offered tech customers nothing to get excited about with Windows 7 or Office 2010. The company stock price has halved since 2000. Microsoft is PC company, nothing more. of all, Ballmer has bet the future of Microsoft, Dell, HP, Nokia, and other unspecified companies, on Windows 8. This is insane bet for any CEO and one that would have been avoided entirely had the Microsoft Board replaced Mr. Ballmer years ago with a CEO that understands the fast pace of technology shifts and would have kept Microsoft current with market trends. with a tremendous sense of irony that I find myself penning a defense of Microsoft and Ballmer, but these are fundamentally the wrong criteria for judging the company.
So let talk about Steve Ballmer. Despite a 12 year tenure as CEO of Microsoft he perpetually caught in Bill Gates penumbra and has always been an easier target than his peers. Steve Jobs was known for his indomitable will and personal intensity, Gates for his keen intellect, quiet demeanor,benandirvs.com/TermsOfUse.html, and cutthroat tactics. Ballmer, in contrast, is most famous for comical sales pitches, throwing chairs, and leaping around a stage like an extra on a Planet of the Apes remake.
In 12 years, Ballmer has overseen a lot of screwups. Microsoft various internet services remain perennial also rans and the company brand strategy is an abysmal three step process of 1) Coining a term, 2) Applying that term to everything until it becomes meaningless, and 3) Junking it.
Vista reputation as a train wreck was partly a result of Microsoft failure to stand up to its partners; the company was forced to publish documents in which one executive noted, the end,soccer jerseys 2014, we lowered the requirements [to qualify as 'Vista Capable'] to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded. Ballmer personally signed off on that change after a phone call from Paul Otellini, and the resulting problems can be fairly laid at his door.
Zune failure to catch on, Windows Mobile decline in late 2010, and Microsoft general failure to meet or anticipate the explosive growth of touch centric devices are also solid points, but focusing solely on these events obscures a much more complex picture.
Rearchitecting Windows MobileMicrosoft Windows Mobile operating system was never all that popular or well regarded thanks to a mixture of bugs, poor feature implementation, and bad design. It was a quintessential example of what I call Microsoft strategy to leverage its PC monopoly into market share in other areas by appealing to businesses and offering the OS on a huge range of cheap hardware. People used it because they had to, and it died as soon as something better came along.
This is where we came from (photo courtesy of Engadget)
Windows Phone is a completely different animal. Read reviews of Windows Phone 7, especially after WP7.5 was released, and you see something Windows Mobile never earned: Respect. Windows Phone 7 has done something far more important than simply padding Redmond bottom line; it demonstrated that Microsoft was capable of genuine innovation. It gave the company a legitimate design vision that separate and distinct from iOS or Android, and that works on its own merits.
Windows Mobile was never going to be that product. It was fundamentally built on the idea that what people needed was a desktop experience that fit on a handheld and it incorporated all of the ugly compromises, poor menu structures, and schizophrenic layouts that occur when you take a fairly clunky design paradigm and translate it into a device with 1/10 the screen space.
Myopically worshipping the altar of Shareholder Value is one of the most visible examples of what wrong with Wall Street. It why banks took enormous risks with mortgages that made no sense whatsoever when evaluated over the long term.
It an approach that makes no sense for considering Microsoft. When Sony makes and sells a TV,Wholesale MLB Jerseys, that the end of the relationship. Microsoft is responsible for maintaining vital software packages over a 5 7 year period. If it screws up a version of Office and breaks backwards compatibility, or ships a UI that people can use, companies lose a lot of money.
Of course Windows 8 is a bet of terrible proportions, but Ballmer has decided that instead of forking the OS between 2 as Apple is doing or having a thousand (bad) forks of Android and (finally good enough) forks of Linux, Windows 8 will be One Ring To Rule Them All OS in PCs, laptops, tablets, phones,nhl jerseys canada, TV consoles, hybrids, etc.
Will it work? Only time will tell, but remember that Ballmer has a botomless money bag and a bulldog like determination to see ot through!!
Actually,wholesale nhl jerseys cheap, at the time, WinCE system was the market leader, shoving Palm OS to 2nd place, but RIM swooped in and dominated the market, shoving both WinCE and PalmOS to the side.
There was competition on other points that made RIM a great success, and made Apple a better success. Microsoft never responded to RIM success. Microsoft also acquired Danger, that had a cult devotion from a niche market, but they made horrible products from that division. They ultimately have bad strategy, and cannot deliver.
Many are thinking on an operational level, but as a CEO you have to have a multi market multi business business strategy that incorporates all business procedures and functions, not just operations management The technical merits of product A or B don matter at this level.
As an example, look at Apple, they took a bugalicious class Mac OS, made it into a market success, and migrated the market to a whole new platform, derived from NeXTSTEP OS platform and now called iOS or Mac OS X. Steve Jobs inherited a bad system, but made the bad system a success, and migrated everyone to a better system. This is seeing the whole picture, working on a strategy level (not operations level), and this is where Ballmer fails.
All I know is I never count out any corporation of the size and influence of Microsoft. They have a very widelatitudewhen it comes to screwing up and changing directions. While smaller companies would sink after making such a bad decision, they have the industry power and money to make a serious of catastrophic decisions, and probably still be able to survive if they can pull it back together. Time will tell, but people forget the limitations of touch centric devices vs classical PCs. A classical PC, with a keyboard and mouse, is still the workhorse of the world. Perhaps the biggest thing that will change is that the actual PC has become so small it can be our phone, and we plug it into a multi monitor setup when we get home, full with real keyboard and mouse. THAT is the future. but shhhhh Darn it, maybe I should have kept it to myself ;p. In that respect, consider how nice it would be to have a unified OS, capable of legacy Windows app support and legacy like experience.
When a companies core business is something other companies give away for free the man at the top screwed up. Apple and Google both give away their software to hook people to their hardware and/or services. Microsoft doesn really have any services that are particularlycompetitive. XBox and their development platforms are really their standouts and they haven really figured out how to leverage either. Windows, WinMo and Office are dying revenue streams and unfortunately for MS that is their mainstay. Glad I am not holding any MS stock.
Agreed, Michael Apple doesn give away operating systems. They do give away iTunes, but that is to support a profitable music business. Where I would fault Microsoft is their lack of a stategy to successfully move beyond the PC OS business, if that is where they think the world is going. MS is very successful and wildly profitable in the PCniche, but they stubbornly try to stretch the PC motif to every other market (smart phones, tablets), which is what Apple and Google don try to do. Apple keeps them separate, and Google doen even try to do PCs. Microsoft comes late to these other markets with a one size fits all solution, which of course fits none. MS is in danger of becoming the next Kodak, who saw the world going to digital photography but couldn bring themselves to give up the profitable film business until it disappeared and they went Chapter 11. There are smart people and a ton on money at Microsoft, but they seem clueless in the strategy department, and on the glide path to oblivion.
Ballmer has guts and is willing to take risks? You have got to be kidding me. All the company has done in the past ten years is vomit up poorly designed software to make sales targets. His deplorable decision making left me with a Capable Toshiba laptop that couldn even be upgraded properly.
And as far as its responsibility to shareholders, the primary responsibility of any company is to make money for its shareholders. Period. Adherence to that philosophy ensures that the company will create innovative, competitive products, which also happens to serve its millions of users. Do you think Microsoft milliions of users were served by the labyrinthine, impenetrable, pathetically coded mess that was Vista? Windows 7 is only brilliant by comparison in that it a good operating system, rather than an unusable piece of crap.
相关的主题文章：


http://www.sz-xnd.gov.cn/E_GuestBook.asp

http://www.whitby-cottages.net/cgi-bin/details.cgi

http://www.divessi.com/setlanguage/jpn/about_ssi