l******n
发帖数: 492 | 1 In the wake of the CEO ousters at HP, Yahoo and Nokia and the CEO implosions
at Cisco, SAP, RIM and Dell, it’s surprising people are still picking on S
teve Ballmer. Hedge funders are calling for his head. Employees are complain
ing.
I am by no means a big Microsoft fan — during my five-year tenure at Sun Mi
crosystems, Microsoft was a vicious, scorched-earth competitor. But I have t
o give credit where credit is due: Ballmer has done a remarkable job, especi
ally in contrast to the leaders of most technology companies. Ballmer’s pro
blem is that everyone expects Microsoft to be as good as Apple at entering i
nto new markets.
The reality is that Microsoft has never been a technology innovator. People
are nostalgic about the days of Bill Gates, when Microsoft supposedly innova
ted. However, under Gates, Microsoft copied other products relentlessly, eve
n from its very beginning. MS Basic copied Tiny Basic. MS DOS copied CPM-86.
Windows copied the early Mac OS. Word copied WordPerfect. Excel copied Lotu
s 1-2-3. Access copied FoxPro. Windows Server copied Novell Netware. Exchang
e copied Lotus Notes. Internet Explorer copied Netscape Navigator. C# and .n
et copied Java. All Microsoft has ever done is enter markets late and invest
and iterate until it wins. On top of that, Gates used monopoly position to
force adoption of ensuing products, a luxury that Ballmer has not had.
During Ballmer’s 10-year tenure, Microsoft has tripled revenue and doubled
net income. Legacy products such as Office, Exchange and SharePoint have bee
n transitioned to the cloud. Windows 7 is a huge hit with over 400 million l
icenses sold, and early looks at the upcoming Windows 8 are resulting in rav
e reviews. Windows Phone 7 is a very late entrant into the modern smartphone
category, but it is already being declared the number three player, with it
s innovative user interface and upcoming distribution via Nokia. Some analys
ts even predict that it will outpace Android within a few years.
Even more importantly, Ballmer has shepherded Microsoft as a big player in t
wo new and growing markets: console gaming and search. The Xbox now has 20%
market share in the console market, with 45% year-over-year growth, and has
led the way to motion-based gaming with its hit Kinect product.
According to Comscore, Microsoft’s Bing search now has 31% of the US search
market due to its distribution deals with Yahoo and others. While some lame
nt the amount of money Microsoft is losing on Internet services, the ad doll
ars will soon start to follow the eyeballs, as I personally experienced duri
ng my tenure at Webtrends where we provided search.
The scale of the losses has to be put into context with the scale of Microso
ft. Yes, losing $2 billion a year on online services sounds really bad. Losi
ng $2 billion per year to gain 30% of a $30 billion and growing market actua
lly makes a lot of sense, especially when you are delivering $70 billion in
revenue and $24 billion in profits. Microsoft lost billions on Xbox and is n
ow in a leadership position in that market, and it will follow that same str
ategy with Bing search and Windows Phone.
The reality is that Apple and Microsoft are the only large technology compan
ies that have been able to create new products. Cisco continually bought com
panies to grow their revenues until the party ended. Oracle and IBM have had
the same strategy as Cisco and will both soon run out of legacy application
and middleware vendors to acquire. Nothing new has come out of HP, SAP or D
ell in a decade.
Although they both create new products from scratch, Apple and Microsoft hav
e very different DNA. Apple creates new markets, and Microsoft eventually do
minates them. Steve Ballmer is not going to be Steve Jobs, who is widely lau
ded as perhaps the greatest CEO of our time. Even Apple can’t get another S
teve Jobs and now has a CFO running the company.
Who do detractors think Microsoft should replace Steve Ballmer with? HP has
gone through three CEOs in a year and ended up with Meg Whitman, a non-techi
e whose core eBay website to this day looks like it was designed in the mid-
90s. The only viable candidates are IBM’s Steve Mills and VMware’s Paul Ma
ritz, who likely would not change a thing strategically at Microsoft.
Microsoft shareholders should be grateful they have a CEO who has steadily g
rown both earnings and revenue, transitioned legacy products into the cloud,
moved aggressively into new markets such as console gaming and Internet ser
vices, revived the mobile product, and is now transitioning the Windows prod
uct line towards a new generation of tablets and processors. Yes, Microsoft’
s stock has been flat through the 2000s and the decade’s massive technology
market transitions to cloud and smartphones. That’s a much better outcome
than tanking like HP, Sun, Nokia, RIM and others, and Microsoft’s products
are now very well positioned for the coming decade. Booyah, Ballmer!
Peter Yared has founded four e-commerce and marketing infrastructure compani
es that were acquired by Sun, VMware, Webtrends and TigerLogic. You can foll
ow him at @peteryared. | t**x
发帖数: 20965 | | S******4
发帖数: 2865 | 3 He is doing a just-Ok job. It's great that he hasn't managed to kill the
company yet... but he sure knows how to waste money.
6.5 billions for aQuantitive.
8.5 billions for Skype.
Now he is interested in Yahoo again?
Google got Youtube and DoubleClick for about 2 billions. | w*****g
发帖数: 4298 | 4 He got a good deal on SharePoint and Kinect | k*x
发帖数: 1829 | 5 What is the fact? The subject or the entire article?
【在 t**x 的大作中提到】
: this is the fact.
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