General Consultant Discussion

This author says the reason that Steve Ballmer was shown the door (aka retired with no successor in the wings) is failed launch of Windows 8 and Ballmer's belief that it was going to be a huge hit. A failed OS upgrade also impacts the PC industry as people often buy new PCS with the latest OS rather than upgrade old ones. Naturally the move to tablets isn't helping the industry. The whole Microsoft Surface $900 million writedown is also a major reason Ballmer was retired out. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9241890/Windows_8_stains_Ballmer_s_legacy?taxonomyId=125&pageNumber=1

As a new Windows 8 user, I can see why. I don't see how it got out the door like this. now they are adding a start menu back, but I'm told all it does is bring you back to the tablet based launcher, nothing like the old start menu which still sounds like a fail. Lenovo will now be pre-installing Pokki (a start menu replacment) on all computers

This reminds me a lot of trying to bolt on technology/software to get from point A (Windows) to point B (Tablet). Microsoft seems to be at step one of maybe 5 to 10 technology steps that would be needed to get to a truly innovative tablet OS. Also remember they're chained by legacy applications which Google/Apple largely did not have. When you look at Windows 8 several parts of it are interesting. They recognize the integration of messaging, media, notifications. Unfortunately in practice there are so many holes in the product that to me it is more of a patchwork of ""this is what we want to be"" than something exceptionally useful. It didn't take that long to master the new UI though admittedly I did not worry too much about changing settings,etc --- which I think start to become more frustrating to find. I bet ultimately their next step is to allow the tiles to be completely turned off and become an icon that someone can click if they want to use that UI.

It wasn't the low adoption that got him, it was his projections to the contrary. A public company simply cannot have a CEO who repeatedly over-promises and under-delivers. More deeply, this last error speaks to the question of, ""How did he come to get such bogus data?"" There were plenty of warning ahead of time, and MS hasn't had an OS blast out of the park since Windows 95 -- and there weren't really any before it, so that was a 1-off. I see his botched forecast as further indication of a toxic corporate culture that has shifted to sitting on bad news, and pumping only happy gas up the chain.

It's not just Windows 8, but Vista and all the other porjects the were killed off, or left on the side of the road during Ballmer's tenure. He's leadership at MS missed many technology innovation opportunities. It's interesting, noted in this wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer, that Bill Gates will be back with a special committee to select the next CEO.

They need to think 'trans-formative', i.e. somebody like Elan Musk

The short list I saw didn't have Elan Musk, did you mean Elon Musk from Space X & Tesla? He'd certainly be a great choice but I sure he's smarter than that. The short list I saw was former MS personnel: Jim Allchin, Brad Silverberg, Paul Maritz, Nathan Myhrvold, Greg Maffei, Pete Higgins, Jeff Raikes, J. Allard, Robbie Bach, Bill Veghte, Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia, Steven Sinofsky, and B. Kevin Turner, Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer (COO)

Increasingly I think they need to start breaking some parts of the company into separate organizations. Operating systems seems like one natural. XBOX another. MS Office and Applications another. Online perhaps yet another. The company as a whole is too big and slow moving to think they're going to be able to transform the whole thing at once.

Ray Ozzy is in the only one on that list that could work. The rest are all little 'mini-ballmers'