Failed Windows 7 launch? What the hell are you smoking?
Has a lot of failures on his plate for one man? Please hand this comment an award for middlebrow remark of the year.
Let's put Steve Ballmer's accomplishments in perspective: Have you tripled a multi-billion dollar company's revenue over ten years? Did you launch the Xbox? Did you launch Windows Phone (10% marketshare in 3 years)? Did you launch Bing (growing faster than the search market)? Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world? Did you grow the Windows Server business out of nothing compared to where it was 15 years ago? Did you turn Visual Studio into the gold standard for IDEs?
Didn't think so. Ballmer will be remembered for one great mistake, and that's denying Microsoft's culture and employees a strong technical visionary over the course of his tenure.
Ballmer is a COO, kind of like the guy running Apple these days - neither Ballmer nor Tim Cook have a strong ability to anticipate changes in the way technology is consumed compared to their predecessors. And this is largely what's responsible for Microsoft's big whiffs - they missed the mark multiple times on the consumerization of technology.
People are already starting to grumble many of the same criticisms of Tim Cook's innovation that they did about Steve Ballmer, and who can blame them? Over the past three years all Apple has shipped are the same products they had before but with different screen sizes.
However, that doesn't mean that Tim Cook won't be successful in growing Apple's business, nor does it mean that Steve Ballmer was a failure.
As an ex-Microsoftie, I could not be happier to see Steve go. The company needs a technical visionary in order to stop having to play from behind every time there's a change in the market.
But to call Steve a failure is utter nonsense and requires overlooking all of the successes that he and Microsoft had during his tenure.
"Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world?"
They already had the most widely adopted platform in Win32. The transition to .NET was horrible. No one was sure what .NET actually meant for a while, as it was used in marketing for all kinds of things. They also seemed to change their minds every few months about how which platform people should use. Finally it converged, and .NET is not bad. But they already owned the desktop app OS and dev platform since the mid 90s, when they overtook Borland and others.
I don't know if MS took out Borland, or Linux took out Borland. Maybe Borland took out Borland.
All I know is that for a sample of 1, me, I used to use (and really like) the Borland (Pascal, C, ...) compilers in the late 80s and early 90s. Then, I started doing more unix and then Linux work. GCC, perl and later Java was there. By the time Delphi was there, it was too late - Java had already provided a free equivalent. (Java is just Modula + OOP + UCSD-P-code in C++ clothing)
iOS and Android are largely for consumer devices, .Net is largely used in the enterprise for B2B products that consumers never see. .Net and Java dominate the enterprise market. Apples and oranges.
What does that have to do with anything? The iPhone is still a consumer device as well. The enterprise isn't about mobile anything, it's about internal applications and B2B systems integration and .Net and Java rule the roost here, as does SOAP still. What works on the public net and what works in the enterprise are light years apart and probably always will be.
The enterprise is desperately, rapidly re-building all of those internal applications (at least the client-side) on mobile platforms, and iOS is in the lead.
This is why these "mobility" servers like IBM WorkLight or SAP/Sybase Unwired are hot products.
Not at all, and the iPhone kicked the blackberries ass, but that has shit to do with enterprise space. All business != enterprise space. Enterprise != mobile. Mobile created a new space, apples and oranges.
He's referring to the fact that Ballmer dismissed the iPhone when it first came out as an expensive toy that only consumers would care about. As everyone has seen now, "enterprise" phones like Blackberry are dead in the water and workplaces are adapting to supporting iOS and Android devices instead.
> People are already starting to grumble many of the same criticisms of Tim Cook's innovation that they did about Steve Ballmer, and who can blame them? Over the past three years all Apple has shipped are the same products they had before but with different screen sizes.
I think the big difference is, Cook doesn't seem to be pushing innovative people out. The only big head to roll under Cook's watch was Scott Forstall's, and apparently he left because he clashed with Jonny Ive (and wanted to go to war with Google in the machine learning space - not just having a few in-house alternatives, but trying to lock Google out of the iPhone to promote Apple's stuff).
Has a lot of failures on his plate for one man? Please hand this comment an award for middlebrow remark of the year.
Let's put Steve Ballmer's accomplishments in perspective: Have you tripled a multi-billion dollar company's revenue over ten years? Did you launch the Xbox? Did you launch Windows Phone (10% marketshare in 3 years)? Did you launch Bing (growing faster than the search market)? Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world? Did you grow the Windows Server business out of nothing compared to where it was 15 years ago? Did you turn Visual Studio into the gold standard for IDEs?
Didn't think so. Ballmer will be remembered for one great mistake, and that's denying Microsoft's culture and employees a strong technical visionary over the course of his tenure.
Ballmer is a COO, kind of like the guy running Apple these days - neither Ballmer nor Tim Cook have a strong ability to anticipate changes in the way technology is consumed compared to their predecessors. And this is largely what's responsible for Microsoft's big whiffs - they missed the mark multiple times on the consumerization of technology.
People are already starting to grumble many of the same criticisms of Tim Cook's innovation that they did about Steve Ballmer, and who can blame them? Over the past three years all Apple has shipped are the same products they had before but with different screen sizes.
However, that doesn't mean that Tim Cook won't be successful in growing Apple's business, nor does it mean that Steve Ballmer was a failure.
As an ex-Microsoftie, I could not be happier to see Steve go. The company needs a technical visionary in order to stop having to play from behind every time there's a change in the market.
But to call Steve a failure is utter nonsense and requires overlooking all of the successes that he and Microsoft had during his tenure.