How many chances can Steve Ballmer have?

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Simon Tupper

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The company is slowly losing profits year after year and they keep losing market share even after the Windows 8 for PC and Tablets and Windows phone 8...
Steve Ballmer is arguably one of the worst CEOs...

He is a terrible speak person and when he's given an interview, he's simply awkward and he can't seem to be able to prove his point.
Every time an interviewer compared Microsoft to Apple, Ballmer is not capable of standing for his own company.

He fails at driving interest from the general public.
And Microsoft seems to always be behind it competitors on so many aspects....
IE 10, which is supposed to be awesome since it's brand new, is still behind Google Chrome for the HTML5, Windows 8 is full of flaws, many people I know are considering Linux over Windows 8...

Really I don't know why so many people are behind that guy who just keeps dragging the company down...
 
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Dave Blake

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Meh... It depends on if what he is spitting is selling. Right now today Windows 8 and Windows phone 8 are selling. Wait till second quarter next year that should tell the story.
 

Reflexx

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It looks to me like Ballmer is doing a pretty good job steering MS in the right direction as opposed to clinging to old ways.

Keep in mind, that for the past 10 yrs Microsoft was pretty much handcuffed by the DOJ because of their Anti-Trust ruling. MS could not integrate their separate products and systems because it was prohibited. All the while, the competition was doing exactly that.

The fact that just a year after the expiration of the judgement, MS is back to being in the picture and in the process of tying highly complex systems together is pretty awesome.
 

Simon Tupper

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Of course it sells... If Microsoft get only 15% of it's customer to switch to Windows 8 It will be more than OS X... BUT can you consider than an achievement?
As for now people a quite unhappy with the lack of good HTML5, the lack of flash player, the slowing here and the list is long...
Yes Microsoft made huge improvements, but they did not beat the competition by releasing a better product... and this is also true for WP8 (and I love both products, I wouldn't switch to another OS)
Maybe I'm asking too much, but I thought Microsoft was in the race to win it... and I blame it on Ballmer... he's the one who has to find solutions and yet he failed almost every product
launch...

I am not the only one who's disappointed by Ballmer... he was named worst CEO, the news paper don't like him, most tech websites don't like him... you get the point...
Microsoft needs a new CEO and tell publicly that it was not HIS decision, because it would be seen as "leaving the ship before it sinks".
 

Laura Knotek

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Simon Tupper

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True, they made a lot of improvements as I said before, but why does a browser like IE 10 that requires you to buy a 69.99$ CD to get it, is still behind Google Chrome which has no restrictions and is totally free?
 

Laura Knotek

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True, they made a lot of improvements as I said before, but why does a browser like IE 10 that requires you to buy a 69.99$ CD to get it, is still behind Google Chrome which has no restrictions and is totally free?
Safari isn't as good as Chrome or Firefox either.

I actually prefer open source and/or cross platform browsers better than proprietary or single-platform browsers.

Firefox, Chrome and Opera are my preferences, since they run on Windows, Linux and OS X.

I really have no use for IE or Safari, since both of those are limited to platforms (no IE for anything but Windows, and no current Safari for anything but OS X).
 

stmav

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Chrome isn't allowed on our network at work. Users had it install when doing flash update and started dropping network shares and network printers. Not to mention most of our malware instances were from Google links. Fortunately most were caught and we were able to identify the offending sites. I won't run it on my personal network after seeing those issues in the enterprise. But there are those that have no problems and love it. At least we have choices.
 

a5cent

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Lack of good HTML5 is just Microsoft being Microsoft. There always was the standard way and the Microsoft way.

IE has gotten better since then. W3C: And the winner of the HTML5 conformance test is ... IE9! | ZDNet
In response to your "Microsoft being Microsoft" statement I would say they are in a "damned if they support more HTML5 and damned if they support less HTML5 " type situation. Let me explain:

Firstly, HTML5 as a standard is still under development. It isn't finished and will be modified going forward. Secondly, IE is the most widely used browser in corporate intranets, and any features added to IE instantly become a pseudo-standard, as those features get deployed within many corporate environments. So, if Microsoft were to support the entire HTML5 standard, and enterprises were to deploy those features that would later get modified by the W3C standards body, what kind of a mess would that put Microsoft in? Either IE would be declared a non-standard/outdated HTML5 browser, or Microsoft would update IE thereby forcing their customers to spend billions on updating their own websites to achieve HTML5 compliance. Both of those options are very bad. As a result, Microsoft's approach is to limit their support of HTML5 to what seems stable and wait for the rest of the specification to mature. Many of the other browsers don't need to worry about such issues. They are free to support and modify whatever they want at almost any time. Basically, this comes down to the difference between enterprise and consumer software.

This is Microsoft's current predicament. Ten years ago, with IE6, they intentionally got themselves into that kind of a mess which was stupid, but they have learned a lot since then.

Windows 7 was there to repair the mistakes they did with Vista, so I almost never add Vista in a discussion about Windows hahaha
Wrong. Windows 7 was required mainly because Microsoft realized Vista would never recover from its reputation. From a low-level technical point of view, Vista was the most important update to Windows ever. Much of what we value today wouldn't have been possible without the low level engineering efforts that lead to Windows Vista... Windows RT and WP8 are just some examples. Vista's single biggest problem were hardware vendors who failed to deliver functional drivers in time (nVidia was one of the worst as their difficulties impacted millions of people). Basically, it was a very good and absolutely necessary evolution of the Windows OS, hampered by terrible 3rd party driver support and one ill conceived concept called UAC. Of course the tech media completely fails to understand this, so lots of FUD gets passed around as a result. Internally, Windows 7 is almost identical to Vista, the main difference being that hardware vendors had gotten their drivers working reliably by the time Windows 7 arrived.

Really I don't know why so many people are behind that guy who just keeps dragging the company down...
IMHO you are again letting know-nothing media types influence your opinion too strongly, just like you did with your thread about Nokia going under (at least I think that was you, sorry if I'm mistaken).

The main reason Balmer is the #1 most "hated" CEO, is because Microsoft's stock value has been more or less flat during the last decade. Wall Street analysts love to hate Microsoft for that reason. But is that really what we as consumers should care about? If you own Microsoft stock, fine, otherwise you can basically ignore that part of the argument which accounts for 80% of the negativity floating around on the web. I'm not saying Balmer is the greatest CEO of all time. He certainly isn't a visionary and he isn't really a software guy, but calling him the worst CEO of all time is completely ridiculous. Anyone saying as much deserves a royal kicking in the rear end and should be reminded of the CEO's of AIG, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. Worse? Really?
 

Simon Tupper

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Where did I say "Worst CEO of ALL TIME"?
And you intentionally ignored that part where I talked bout profits... Microsoft is making less and less profits... it's a fact... my opinion is not influenced by the medias on that...
As you said he is not a visionary and he most certainly failed more often in the last decade than Steve Jobs/Tim Cook(Apple) and Larry Page(Google).

Also my post about Nokia was simply a concern of mine. I was simply asking myself "What if Nokia fails to deliver... what impact could it have?" I was not taking shots at Nokia...
 
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