The End of The Ballmer Era
Well this has been a long time coming, to say the least. Since about the fall of 2008 coming. He hung on and was supported for far too long I think. Last week Steve Ballmer announced that sometime in the next 12 months he will retire as the CEO of Microsoft.
"Right now we are selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year."
That was then, January 2007, this is now, where the iPhone and Android dominate the smart phone market. Steve Ballmer laughed in the face of his impending attacker. I’m sure you’ve seen the video. Hindsight is 20/20 but staying in the know about the trends in technology takes foresight. Ballmer himself didn’t need to do the research but he should have been surrounded by people who did. Surely someone at Microsoft saw the iPhone for what it was going to be. Did they keep quite or were they kept from being heard by the right people? Lots of bosses say they don’t like yes men but secretly really do. Was Ballmer like this? He shouldn’t have been laughing he should have been angry. Why wasn’t it Microsoft bringing out a product like that? What did Apple know that they didn’t? And if he wasn’t mad, the board at Microsoft should have been.
"They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, blah dee blah dee blah"
Less than a month after the first Android powered phone was sold Ballmer quipped about Google and Android at Telstra’s annual investment day on November 6th 2008. He went on to say that he doesn’t really “understand their strategy. Maybe somebody else does.” Clearly, he didn’t. In my opinion this was the day that the board should’ve been officially worried and started to take some action. Where was the foresight at Microsoft? Where was the Vision? Ballmer was a business man so, where were the geeks to keep Microsoft fresh? We know they had a lot of them but why weren’t they getting time at the table? Or were they?
Microsoft and the Enterprise have been married for a long time now. They have been really good for each other, financially. Back in the day people bought Windows for their home PC because that was what they used at work. It’s been so good that Microsoft is making the lions share of its revenues courting this market. Ballmer, being a business man first, made financial decisions to grow the bottom line without much consideration for anything else. That’s why the explosion of the post PC consumer market and their desires was a blindside to Microsoft. This isn’t a market they really had any need to be aggressive in before. People get Windows PC’s because that’s what they use at work, remember? Or was it?
The consumerization of IT
It wasn’t long before people with their iPhones and Android phones started bringing them to work and they expected service and support from their IT departments. Those departments had to evolve to support them or risk loosing relevancy. Nobody wants to tell their boss no and a lot of the people with these phones were high up the ladder, at least to start with. This will be the eventual nail in Microsoft's consumer coffin if they aren’t extremely aggressive in courting these consumers. I almost wonder if they knew they were in trouble on the consumer end and that’s why they have been so aggressive in the backend and cloud spaces. But this is getting too forward thinking for an opinion on Ballmer and his retirement.
One only need look at Yahoo! today in order to see what a leader with vision can do to begin to teach an old dog new tricks. In my opinion, Microsoft would have been best served if they would have realized that everything was changing around them and found a new leader that could help them in this new world. And that should have happened in the fall of 2008. It wouldn’t have been too late then. I mean look at BlackBerry. They will be gone soon or at least a distant memory in markets that matter, and they have no fallback position like Microsoft does. If 2009 would have been the rebuilding year under the right leader, Microsoft may have turned this phone game around or been better equipped to compete in the new post PC consumer space. Today, Windows phone can’t get much traction, people don’t like Windows 8, and the Surface didn’t hit the mark. Microsoft doesn’t know what these consumers want and didn’t start paying attention to them until way late in the game. The saddest part of this is that people who have a Windows phone seem to really like them. The problem is that people had a few years to get invested in another platforms ecosystem. It’s hard to get them to move. It’s all just been too late and it started with not saying goodbye to Ballmer much sooner. Since about the fall of 2008 sooner.
Goodbye Ballmer, sometime in the next year. Let’s hope you didn’t ruin Microsoft for the post PC consumer.
