The Ballmer decade and what's next for Microsoft
Confidence, lost
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Radio Reg It's a different Microsoft leaving the first decade of the 2000s compared to the one that entered it.
The year 2000 was a safe and secure world of the client and the server - and closed source code. Ten years later, Microsoft is grappling with open-source and - as ever - a successful internet strategy. Also, it has just delivered a version of Windows that embraces safety and jettisoned vision.
Three things defined Microsoft's actions and its challenges in the last 10 years: a shift in platforms from the cozy world of the PC to games with the Xbox, mobile phones, and the cloud; security, with the race to not just lock down Windows but change the way Windows is built in the wake of the worms of the early 2000s that ripped through millions of PCs world wide and thoroughly tarnished Microsoft's already troubled reputation on security; and spending billions of dollars to try and catch a company it ignored for the first half of the decade and allowed to build a possibly unassailable position in search and advertising: Google.
Along the way, there was Steve Ballmer taking over as chief executive, the court ruling in the US Department of Justice's antitrust case, the Windows Vista debacle, inflammatory statements on Linux and open source, and the hiring of Lotus-Notes inventor Ray Ozzie to replace Bill Gates as chief software architect. It was Ozzie who issued a call to action for Microsoft on internet services.
In a decade's-end edition of MicroBite, The Register's software editor Gavin Clarke and All-about-Microsoft blogger Mary-Jo Foley assess the last ten years, look ahead to what Microsoft's got coming, and ask whether Ballmer can last to the end of the coming decade as Microsoft's CEO.
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COMMENTS
Steve Ballmer Has Ruined Microsoft.
I really have no idea why many people believe that Steve Ballmer is so intelligent.
I personally haven't seen any evidence of it in his 10 years as CEO of Microsoft.
In fact Steve Ballmer has essentially ruined Microsoft through idiotic business decisions and scoffing at the competition.
The acting like a complete mad man and screaming and flailing his arms around and making absurd and asinine statements to the press part doesn't help either I am sure.
Take all the money away and he is just a low class, loud mouthed fat man who acts like he is insane.
So where is the evidence that he is so intelligent?
The Microsoft name and reputation doesn't instill much confidence in people or businesses.
Poorly made and unreliable hardware products, insecure and grossly overpriced software products and horribly unethical business practices taken straight from the philosophy of Niccolo Machiavelli's book "The Prince".
That is what Microsoft has come to mean to me and no doubt a lot of other people as well.
stay Ballmer, please!
I hope he stays, only because he's the worst thing that ever happened to Microsoft and with some luck he'll ruin them completely. IMO the computer world would be a lot better off without MS.
Stay stay!
Where would we be without the chants of 'developers, developers' & a sweat stained shirt?
yuck!
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