[steve8918]

The real culprit that needs to be fired is Steve Ballmer. He was great from the inception of MSFT until maybe the turn of the century, when their business strategy of making and maintaining a Windows monopoly worked beautifully and extremely profitably. However, he is living in a legacy environment where he believes he needs to protect the Windows/Office monopoly BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, and he and the rest of Microsoft can't keep up with everyone else around them because of innovation.

This mindset has completely stymied any sort of innovation at Microsoft because they are playing with one arm tied behind their backs in the midst of trying to compete against the likes of Google, Facebook, etc. In Steve Ballmer's eyes, everything must lead back to the sale of a license of Windows/Office, and that no longer works in their environment.

If Microsoft engineers had free rein to make the best search engine, or the best phone, or the best tablet, without worries about how will it lead to maintaining their revenue streams of Windows and more importantly Office, then I think their offerings would be on an order of magnitude better and more creative.

[j_baker]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_phases_of_a_big_project

The six phases of a project:

1. Enthusiasm

2. Disillusionment

3. Panic

4. Search for the guilty

5. Punishment of the innocent

6. Rewards for the uninvolved

This is the way it seems to have played out (and the way project/startup failure almost always seems to play out).

[specialist]

Awesome. Thank you. Very similar to the "process" I've witnessed and documented. From memory:

1) Assemble non-experts, non-stakeholders

2) Misidentify problem

3) Establish quorum

4) Do not communicate decisions

5) Everyone runs off in separate directions

6) Assign blame

7) Repeat.

Given the challenges of organizational psychology (aka herding kittens), where trying harder won't change outcomes, I support the strategy of multiple competing teams, as detailed in the book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity.

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Rules-Vol-Power-Modularity/dp/0...

[kvb]

This doesn't make any sense to me... You think that the problem with Bing is that it's too focused on revenue for Windows? I suspect the problem is that it's really hard to build a better search engine than Google (and that even if it were slightly better, people are resistant to change).

Microsoft's overall profit numbers still look pretty strong to me, and their product portfolio is as diverse as ever. They've got 6 different products in their server and tools division alone that generate more than a billion dollars each year! [1] That's not to mention Office, Windows, Xbox, etc.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-server-and-tools-unit-now-in...

[ikono]

Right or wrong, your argument is exactly why Ballmer is still in charge and at the same time the reason many think Microsoft's future is bleak until he's not.

[Goronmon]

>Microsoft's overall profit numbers still look pretty strong to me, and their product portfolio is as diverse as ever. They've got 6 different products in their server and tools division alone that generate more than a billion dollars each year! [1] That's not to mention Office, Windows, Xbox, etc.

What, if anything, has Ballmer done to make a difference in those areas?

[flyinRyan]

>Microsoft's overall profit numbers still look pretty strong to me, and their product portfolio is as diverse as ever.

RIM was singing the same song. Profits/etc. are basically the waves behind the ship. By the time those start going down you're not dying, your decomposing.

[rlu]

I suspect that Ballmer wasn't really able to have full control of the company and decisions until Gates left (so...2007, right?). Then, I'd say that CEOs have to be judged 3-4 years in the future, meaning that if a CEO of a huge company decided something _today_, the successes/failures of that decision would only be evident years down the road.

So given that Microsoft seems to be in some exciting times right now, I'd feel comfortable guessing that this is more or less the strategy that got laid out once Ballmer gained full control of the company.

Then again maybe I'm completely wrong. Either way, we'll never really know I guess.

[deveac]

>Ballmer had been frustrated by Sinofsky before. Microsoft partners apparently had a reference design for tablet hardware ready in time for Windows 7. Sources tell us that Sinofsky refused to add support for it in Windows 7. Whether it would have been successful is hard to gauge, but it would have put Microsoft in the tablet market several years earlier, and possibly around the same time as Apple’s original iPad.

I would love to just catch a quick glimpse of the Universe in which this is NOT 100% Ballmer's fault. It must truly be full of fascinating things to see.

[Zigurd]

This is a bit of revisionism. Windows tablets, and tablet support in Windows, have been around since Windows XP. It was unsuccessful every time it was tried.

Saying "no" to tablet support was, in light of Microsoft's experience with tablets, the right thing to do.

[kabdib]

Yeah, but all the tablets were crappy. They weren't what a tablet needed to be to succeed, which unfortunately really means "ditch a lot of Windows." At MS this is heresy and is not tolerated.

Xbox managed to ship a non-Windows-based product because they were nearly completely isolated during the product's inception. (Yes, the Xbox kernel is largely Win2000, but with a LOT of stuff ripped out).

I don't know how WinCE succeeded at all. Microsoft would have been better off if it hadn't, and something better had come along. Lordy, what a pile...

In summary: At MS, you are either (a) Windows, and shipping something probably inappropriate for your users, or (b) playing a political game where users come second, or (c) isolating yourself from the rest of the company, if you can swing it.

MS needs to fix it's "Windows everywhere" mindset.

[deveac]

>Saying "no" to tablet support was, in light of Microsoft's experience with tablets, the right thing to do.

The point is that the failure of MS to bring a viable tablet to market cannot be painted as any single exec's fault over Ballmer. I was responding to the article's accusation of Ballmer's frustration at being told no (fair or not, I can't say). The bottom line is that the buck stopped with Ballmer, and if he was frustrated at being told "no", then even if "no" was the correct business decision at the time, the reason it was is the fault of Ballmer.

[Shorel]

Good for me and for everyone I guess.

I don't want MS success and another long monopoly.

[dmethvin]

Funny, that's just the attitude Steve Jobs had about IBM in the 1980s. He was sure that IBM was the bad guy monopolist that stood in the way of Apple's success. He created the famous "1984" commercial as a result.

You're looking in the wrong place, 30 years late. The 2012 Microsoft is more like 1984 IBM and that's not likely to change. The duopoly of Apple and Google has more ability to dictate our technology today, if that's what you're worried about. At least we have a choice though.