Well that remains to be seen. IMO, it really depends on what grows out of that project over time. From a business growth standpoint, I'd point to ARM until further notice.
In fact, I'd submit to you that what they did with Live over the last 7 or 8 years has been far more significant and influential. It's influence literally changed an entire market.
He was behind the OG X-box, which didn't make black ink (mostly due to a number of factors) but had fans going into the 360, which he helmed. Being first helped them there to where they started to make a profit despite bleeding ink over the RRoD.
He made Zune, which fell on it's face because it wasn't an iPod.
He was making that tablet/book thing, that Ballmer didn't think would be successful.
I love Allard, but I can't see him making MS be profitable. He could make them real innovators and maybe give Apple a run for their money in something like "MP3 players aren't hip and useful, let's innovate that!"/iPod did. But I doubt that now.
bill0527 said:
Allard was also the main brain and visionary for Zune.
Unless investors practically beg them to do that, I doubt that'll happen.
If it didn't break massive backwards compatibility with old games and applications, I would go crazy if Microsoft pulled an Apple/NeXT and made an OS X knockoff on a BSD/Linux base. I know that ain't going to happen, but having a main-stream *NIX that could have games and applications cross-ported to Apple and *NIX offshoots would be nice.
I just...I hate when people point to Zune and say, "...that was Allard's baby. it failed so he failed!"
No, Zune failed because it came to the market 6 years late with its own DRM issues, no brand name, a new ecosystem that people weren't terrible interested in experiencing, funky looks and 5 accessories to Apple's endless supply. Everyone in the business let Apple become the household name for portable music in a way even the ubiquitous Walkman never was. Nobody was going to be able to top the snowball from rolling when it reached that size. If Zune had come out in 2000 instead of 2006 (or whenever it came out), it could have most certainly competed.
Sorry for the digression. Again, I don't disagree that Allard is not who MS needs at the top of their company; I just disagree that the failure of the Zune is a fair noose to wrap around his neck when critiquing his leadership abilities. It was a good product sanctioned too far behind in the race.
TheSeks said:
He was behind the OG X-box, which didn't make black ink (mostly due to a number of factors) but had fans going into the 360, which he helmed. Being first helped them there to where they started to make a profit despite bleeding ink over the RRoD.
Few markets are harder to break into than gaming. Allegiances, fanboys, and tightwad spenders. They introduced a new product in 2001 (after the biggest player had a year practically to themselves) without much support beyond their 1st party and in less than a decade owned North America.
What was the last new market Microsoft jump in from BEHIND only to catch up with and pass the competition? I'm thinking circa 2000 when they jumped on Palm Pilot's ass with WinMo and the iPaq. That was the last time, I think.
I love Allard, but I can't see him making MS be profitable. He could make them real innovators and maybe give Apple a run for their money in something like "MP3 players aren't hip and useful, let's innovate that!"/iPod did. But I doubt that now.
People say J Allard should replace Ballmer, but I don't think it would be a good idea to have someone as a CEO who is known for sex orgies and sexual harassment. Doesn't even matter if it's true or not.
He was one of the main brains and visionaries behind the Xbox 360. Probably their only really successful commercial consumer product outside of Windows.
They're paying too much for Skype, I agree, but losing money? They're sitting on cash ($50B, I think) and do absolutely nothing with it. I say let them go crazy.
dc89 said:
"How are we going to communicate with this, we don't want to carry around a mouse right? So what are we going to do? Oh a stylus right? We're going to use a stylus... NO. Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away and you lose them, yuck. Nobody wants a stylus."
Something happened to nearly all stocks at that time... just a little minor thing called the global financial crisis and economic downturn. Hardly worth remembering.
I have a personal problem with Ballmer, and they are giving up some mind share and profits COMPARATIVELY speaking.
BUT....
In general terms they are still making a fuck ton of money. After all of their Gross and Losses and shit they still had a net bring in of 18 billion dollars and change. FFS this isn't a company that is currently barely scraping by. But fuck I made my point on this on my big previous post.
Something happened to nearly all stocks at that time... just a little minor thing called the global financial crisis and economic downturn. Hardly worth remembering.
I know, but this is what gets the ball rolling. At least it's being talked about by people more influential than me and a few others in every disappointing Microsoft thread that makes its way to GAF.
Read his post. ARM has no business in the desktop market where you want horsepower. There was a piece of news a while ago how there could be a C2D-level ARM processor in a few years and it would have about the same power consumption as an equivelant C2D. It's great for mobile products and that's it.
Umm...MS is already very profitable. They had $24 billion in operating revenue last year.
brotkasten said:
They're paying too much for Skype, I agree, but losing money? They're sitting on cash ($50B, I think) and do absolutely nothing with it. I say let them go crazy.
Microsoft Corp's board stood behind Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer on Thursday, defending its longtime leader after influential hedge fund manager David Einhorn touched off a debate by calling for his dismissal.
This. Thank god for Microsoft SQL Server, because otherwise enterprise-level database systems would be completely dominated by Oracle. Anyone who has dealt with Oracle (and their insance prices) knows how bad that would be...
Seconded. To me, SQL Server is one of the best software Microsoft ever released. The other would be Visual Studio, though I suppose some would disagree.
Stock price is too often about perception and not underlying business fundamentals. People who bought MSFT back in 1999/2000 bought an extremely overvalued stock at the height of the tech bubble. Since then it's more than doubled pretty much every meaningful income metric, pays a decent dividend, is still pretty much a monopoly in its major markets and is currently fielding arguably their best products ever. Hell, Microsoft has the same credit rating as United States sovereign debt.
Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Intel and others are all victims of extreme over-valuation a decade ago and people constantly harping about them being "unable to innovate" or some shit currently...
The problem with looking solely at stock price is that all it means is perception, not reality.
Granted, perhaps that's because the perception of Ballmer is extremely poor. But in terms of actual numbers, the growth during the last 10 years are 100% undeniable:
I used to build custom bicycles for alot of the MS people. What I would hear time and time again is that they had too many different teams all working on somewhat similar products. People wouldn't share information or ideas out of fear of being passed over by a rival team lead. There was no person creating a singular vision for how everything was going to work together. that also led to MS changing direction at an almost absurd frequency.
At one point in time MS had different media playing software on their phone os, pc os, mp3 player, and videogame console. This software came from different teams and was developed and maintained with little to no sharing of code.
Microsoft is the GM of technology. Too big to do anything quickly, too fragmented to do anything together, and too cowardly to commit to innovation.
Yup, I have a friend who started at MS four years ago and he was on the Windows Vista team after it got approved. Once the team's vision is approved he would often complain about how the team is just too big to do anything truly creative, even the smallest idea was stuck in chain of command limbo for weeks and weeks. People want to know why MS takes so long to implement change and the like? It has to go through a ridiculously over complicated approval process, and there are many times different teams within the main team don't even communicate with each other. Much communication goes through long ass cycles as well.
To understand how messed up it is, he has been trying to work at Google for the last year, he is even willing to take a paycut because he says working at MS sucks any creativity out of you because 9.9 times out of 10 you'll get flat out rejected and if they do consider it takes months and months to hear if they even liked your idea. Again this is simply an idea that takes that long to get a simple yes or no or please show me more.
Yup, I have a friend who started at MS four years ago and he was on the Windows Vista team after it got approved. Once the team's vision is approved he would often complain about how the team is just too big to do anything truly creative, even the smallest idea was stuck in chain of command limbo for weeks and weeks. People want to know why MS takes so long to implement change and the like? It has to go through a ridiculously over complicated approval process, and there are many times different teams within the main team don't even communicate with each other. Much communication goes through long ass cycles as well.
The problem with looking solely at stock price is that all it means is perception, not reality.
Granted, perhaps that's because the perception of Ballmer is extremely poor. But in terms of actual numbers, the growth during the last 10 years are 100% undeniable:
I wonder what this would have looked like if they were half a decade late to the mp3 player game. Imagine if MS had been able to grow an ecosystem like iTunes in the early 00s and taking over a lion's share of the PC mp3 market. Or if they had been able to make something that would help the Tablet market go.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment of the image, but isn't that a little misleading? Ballmer took over shortly before the tech bubble crash. For that graph to mean anything, it would have to be compared with something else....say, the Nasdaq average. Microsoft stock price % movement versus the Nasdaq % movement at the same time.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment of the image, but isn't that a little misleading? Ballmer took over shortly before the tech bubble crash. For that graph to mean anything, it would have to be compared with something else....say, the Nasdaq average. Microsoft stock price % movement versus the Nasdaq % movement at the same time.
