Microsoft Corporation

[freedom]

Steve Ballmer is retiring soon. Microsoft is rallying.

The market must have hated him so much.....

[felixleong]

CEO will retire within 12 months, microsoft stocks is up 9% pre market
I think its a big win for steve ballmer
considering he owns like 4% of microsoft stocks, he has made a big gain by leaving ^^

I personally bought a new desktop that had windows 8, it sucked so much that I'm now using back my old computer that has windows 7

Microsoft, change or die

[freedom]

Quite opposite, I think Windows 8 is fabulous on my surface tablet. Much better than iPad or Android tablets which are toys only...

[felixleong]

it may be good for tablet, but till this day I still dun know why they put windows 8 into desktops, really not so suitable

[rogerwilco]

http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/08/23/qu...-13-years/
Quoted: ‘Emotional’ Steve Ballmer Stepping Down As Microsoft CEO After 13 Years

“This is an emotional and difficult thing for me to do. I take this step in the best interests of the company I love; it is the thing outside of my family and closest friends that matters to me most.”

— Steve Ballmer, announcing his plans to retire as Microsoft CEO within the next 12 months. He is 57 years old.

In the end, the boisterous, excitable and passionate chief executive of the world’s largest software company admits it’s time for new blood. At the helm since 2000, when he took over for Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Ballmer has been under fire for a while. Microsoft has struggled on different fronts, including search, the Web, PCs and operating systems and mobile — markets owned by Silicon Valley companies.

There’s no shortage of adjectives that describe Ballmer, including those he used to describe himself and Microsoft, such as “tenacious” and “irrepressible.” Did we also mention determined? Two years ago, in response to an investor’s call for new leadership, he said, “you tell me if I lack energy, conviction or we’re not driving all the change we need to drive!”

In the memo announcing his exit, Ballmer reminds employees and the world that Microsoft remains quite profitable and has a bunch of cash, thank you.

We have grown from $7.5 million to nearly $78 billion since I joined Microsoft, and we have grown from employing just over 30 people to almost 100,000. I feel good about playing a role in that success and having committed 100 percent emotionally all the way. We have more than 1 billion users and earn a great profit for our shareholders. We have delivered more profit and cash return to shareholders than virtually any other company in history.
But as Troy Wolverton wrote for SiliconBeat recently, Microsoft’s newest computer OS, Windows 8, has so far been a dud amid a PC industry slump. (As we wrote in November, Steven Sinofksy, the executive who oversaw Windows 8, left soon after its launch.) While Windows Phone is seeing some market gains, the company’s mobile push has failed to make much of a dent in the dominance of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. (Mobile OS global market share in the second quarter, according to an IDC report released earlier this month: Android 79.3 percent, iOS 31.2 percent, Windows Phone 3.7 percent.)

Other Microsoft watchers and pundits have called for a change at the top for a while. We wrote about a book released early this year in which former company executive Joachim Kempin said Ballmer forced out managers who threatened his power; slammed the “lame duck board”; and said the company needed someone younger to lead the company in the age of social and mobile.

The Redmond, Wash., company’s shares had risen more than 10 percent from May to July of this year, but had fallen about 12 percent in the past month. Last month, Ballmer set in motion a reorganization that was said to put more power into his hands. Today, he said he is leaving the company after it finds his successor. Microsoft shares rose sharply in early trading after the announcement, and are up about 7 percent to $34.55 as of this post.

[freedom]

since 2009, Microsoft has doubled its shareholders' equity(from 39,558 to 78,944) again even after massive write down of goodwill and dividends. From company executive's point of view, Ballmer is an excellent CEO.

From visionary point of view, Ballmer is not that good. But investors are expecting too much. Apple was such a small company(small in terms of both profit and products) when Steven Jobs started to work on iPhone. Maybe at the same time, Microsoft was working on a similar project, but unlikely to be successful any way because it is difficult for such unproven project to get funding or attention with Office, Server & Tools and Windows making monstrous profit.

The same can be said for online business. The business is losing billions of dollars every year. It's quite a surprise that it can last this long. If not Microsoft, other companies would probably just abandon the project and focus on something else.

[Jared Seah]

There's something to be said about how investors vote with their pocket when a CEO leaves...

Steve Ballmer - shares went up.

Steve Jobs - shares went down.

[CityFarmer]

Are there fair statements...? Hmm...

SIx opportunities Ballmer missed at Microsoft

So now we know that Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer, Steve Ballmer, plans to retire within the next year. “Huzzah!” said the markets, as the stock price jumped on the news in what also must have been just the latest blow to Ballmer’s self-esteem. No wonder, though: Ballmer oversaw Microsoft during what’s been called its lost decade, and here’s a look at opportunities missed -- and botched -- during his tenure.

1. MOBILE

Microsoft achieved dominance at a time when everyone wanted to own a personal computer tethered to his or her desk at home or at the office. It forged lucrative relationships with major PC-makers and optimised its software around the Intel processors, thumping the competition along the way (including, mind you, Apple).

That strategy worked brilliantly until other devices started taking screen time away from the desktops and laptops that were Microsoft’s bread and butter. (See also the fate of Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Intel.) As users have developed a decided preference for computing anytime and anywhere they want, PC sales have suffered and have been in an outright decline for more than a year.

The biggest threat came from smartphones, a market that is growing by about 50 per cent annually. Ballmer had Windows Mobile on the market way back when, but it was never a great product, despite his repeated promises to make it better. He also struck a belated partnership with Nokia, and reviews suggest that their product has some neat advantages (such as the camera’s ability to take pictures at night -- cool!), but it all smacks of too little, too late.

2. MUSIC

It’s easy to forget that Apple was nearly dead in the late 1990s. Their computers were overpriced and were incompatible with most software. Apple was saved by iTunes and the iPod, which provided a legal and convenient way to download and share music. Apple ended up succeeding in smartphones because they took what they learned making music gadgets to revolutionise the smartphone market.

While Microsoft had an early head start making software for the portable music market, the manufacturers it relied on to make devices weren’t very good at making great music gadgets. Eventually, in 2006, Microsoft came up with its own product -- the Zune -- but despite some neat features like the ability to share music over wifi, it turned out to be – wait for it – a flop.

3. TABLETS

Microsoft debuted e-book software back in 2000, long before rivals like Amazon and Apple had offerings, but it failed to take off because no one had invented a screen that was easy on the eyes for hours at a time until Amazon gave us the Kindle. (See the pattern? When Microsoft first dominated the arena, software trumped hardware. But as time went on, software divorced from great hardware came to be a liability and Microsoft, except for the Xbox, has never been a primo hardware company.)

Microsoft Reader was embedded on the Windows Pocket PC platform for mobile devices, and later, on Windows. But it was discontinued in August 2012. As with music, it was another case of getting in early but botching the execution.

4. SEARCH

Microsoft knew that the Internet was big and was ruthless at fighting and winning the browser war. Internet Explorer was so successful that Microsoft had to spend years fighting off antitrust suits that now seem silly. Those clashes probably distracted the company from the Internet’s real money-maker: Search products.

Microsoft later realized that Google’s success was due to its monopoly in search-based ad sales and tried to compete with its own service, Bing. Too late. Google already had become the Microsoft of search, and went out to strengthen its grip with the help of its Chrome browser, which included an integrated search engine. That sounds a lot like Microsoft’s old strategy of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, doesn’t it? The difference is that Google hasn’t faced the kind of regulatory scrutiny and backlash that Microsoft endured.

5. INNOVATION AT SCALE

Microsoft did launch one very successful new product during Ballmer’s tenure: the Xbox game console. Unlike its tablets, phones and music players, the Xbox brand combines a fine piece of hardware with excellent software. I may be partial to Sony’s PlayStation, but no one can deny the impact of games like Halo and Gears of War on the industry.

The question is: Why was the Xbox the only successful venture Microsoft made into a new product line? Maybe the answer lies in the next point.

6. CORPORATE MANAGEMENT

Running companies well is hard. Running huge companies well is even harder. Thus it has been and thus it will always be. It takes dedication, hard work, foresight and -- one of the trickiest ingredients of all -- creativity.

All of Microsoft’s problems boil down, at some level, to a mixture of bad luck and bad management. Microsoft continues to make excellent office productivity software (I’m writing this on Word, and I use Excel all the time), and I have no interest in trading in my Windows operating system for anything else.

Yet these are successes engineered by a company that is, essentially, a very profitable utility, not a company that is a ground-breaking innovator. That explains why Microsoft’s stock price hasn’t budged for more than a decade even as management has distributed billions of dollars in dividends.

The company has certainly been willing to invest lots of money and effort in competing in a range of markets, yet it keeps losing to nimbler, more creative rivals like Apple and Google. Microsoft has helped make up some of these losses by branching into business services, although it hasn’t made that transition as well as IBM.

Steve Ballmer certainly wasn’t the only reason for these failures, but it was ultimately his responsibility, as Chief Executive, to fix them. His departure is long overdue, and his successor has a lot of work to do. BLOOMBERG

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Matthew C. Klein is a writer for Bloomberg View. .

http://www.todayonline.com/business/six-...-microsoft

[Dividend Warrior]

It will be interesting to see who is the new CEO and what his/her vision shall be.

[freedom]

Microsoft's mobile strategy is far earlier than Apple. Windows Mobile or earlier PocketPC was good at that time along with palm & blackberry. But the hardware limited what Microsoft could do on its mobile strategy(Even Microsoft's PC strategy lies on its hardware vendors. Microsoft alone can't push PC into as many consumers, it's the likes of Dell/HP/Lenovo that put PCs into everyone's hand), plus PC business was so good, there was no point to move mobile further with such a small market(Smarthone was selling far less than PC before 2010, to ask Microsoft not to further its PC strategy and focus on mobile is suicidal). Apple did not win the smartphone because of its superior software but its hardware(Android's success proves that there is nothing special about iOS. iPhone is still so profitable because of its hardware, not software). At the very beginning, apps are very limited in iOS, too. I think today, Microsoft has proven itself already. Give it a piece of good hardware, Microsoft's software has no difficulty to run it as good as anyone else. Microsoft was and always is a software company, then maybe a little bit hardware(XBox, Surface, etc). Even today, Microsoft still heavily relies on Nokia for its Windows phone and its PC vendors for tablet(Surface forms quite a small part of its tablet strategy volume-wise and Surface is just Microsoft's push for hardware vendors that if they don't move forward, Microsoft will do it by itself).

so to say that Microsoft missed mobile, why has no one mentioned that Apple has missed the whole enterprise market since its Mac times?