{"id":10894,"date":"2010-10-11T11:56:11","date_gmt":"2010-10-11T11:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=10894"},"modified":"2010-10-11T11:56:11","modified_gmt":"2010-10-11T11:56:11","slug":"is-steve-ballmer-in-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=10894","title":{"rendered":"Is Steve Ballmer in Trouble?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not doing any bashing, just thinking out loud.\u00a0 I don’t really care all that much about the phone-wars or for tablet computers.\u00a0 I’m just looking at how others do care about them a lot and how there is a building wave of negative news.<\/em><\/p>\n

When you’re on the way up, everything you hear sounds positive.\u00a0 But then things turn.\u00a0 No matter what you do, momentum just seems to be against you.\u00a0 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer might<\/em> be in that zone now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We’ve been hearing lots of negative things and they seem to be snowballing.\u00a0 A few months ago there was news that a number of executives in the phone and device divisions had “resigned” and that Ballmer was taking over.\u00a0 MS was losing market share in these areas.\u00a0 Xbox 360 is a great games platform but it was thumped by the Wii (as was the PS3 – MS and Sony total sales added together are around the same as the Nintendo platform).\u00a0 And Windows Mobile … well … what can you say?\u00a0 Windows Phone 7 (“Series” is dropped from the name,\u00a0right?) is late to the game and will have a huge challenge ahead to make much of a dent in the market.<\/p>\n

MS is way behind in the tablet\/slate market.\u00a0 Apple created a huge fuss over the iPad.\u00a0 I don’t get it but it’s not aimed at people like me anyway – a contented Windows user.\u00a0 Amazon has done well with the Kindle by targeting their core customer: the book reader.\u00a0 They have the sticky factor too by using a bespoke format for their e-books.\u00a0 MS did play in the tablet market way back but it was with a version of Windows with a few extras.\u00a0 The hardware in question was expensive and I probably only saw it being used by a couple of enthusiasts.\u00a0 I thought it would have a market in certain appliance roles, e.g. hospitals, military, warehouses, etc, instead of paper.\u00a0 But it seemed to disappear – admittedly their is a whole army of MS products aimed at niche markets that most of us, including me, have no idea about.<\/p>\n

I cannot forget the blooper by Ballmer in his TechEd NA 2010 keynote.\u00a0 MS is a cloud company and if you have no interest in the cloud then he wants nothing to do with you.\u00a0 Someone, somewhere, was wishing he didn’t say that.\u00a0 The cloud is great but it isn’t everything.\u00a0 Internal systems (private cloud, if you will) is not going away.<\/p>\n

In the last few weeks we read that Ballmer didn’t get his bonus this year because MS did not meet the set objectives for phone and tablet markets.\u00a0 I was stunned to see how “little” that Ballmer earns, compared to how even Irish executives are paid.\u00a0 I was equally surprised to see how much these markets were of a concern to whoever sets Ballmers remuneration package.<\/p>\n

Last week there was a survey that said 50% of MS employess (from a very small sample) did not approve of the job that Ballmer is doing.\u00a0 Ouch!\u00a0 That hurts – I’ve never heard of similar being done by other companies.\u00a0 Surely the executives at Chrysler do a worse job?\u00a0 Maybe it is done but I’ve never seen it make the news.<\/p>\n

The tablet story is very confusing.\u00a0 Around the time of TechEd NA 2010 we were hearing stories that there would be a HP Windows (of soem kind) tablet in the stores by Christmas.\u00a0 Then we heard HP had bought Palm OS and were forgetting about Windows.\u00a0 This one has changed a few times.\u00a0 Then there were rumours that the OS wouldn’t be around until mid-2011.\u00a0 Who the hell knows now?<\/p>\n

Looking at the press today and there is not much good news for Windows Phone 7.\u00a0 Apparently, the launch is today.\u00a0 That sneaked up on me.\u00a0 I knew more about the announcement in Barcelona last February, which paled in comparison to what Jobs would do for Apple and was at some God-awful AM time while I was in Redmond, WA.\u00a0 The press are full of stories about how Windows Phone 7 won’t do well.\u00a0 I’ve read that Verizon in the USA has no interest in carrying it. focusing more on Android and iPhone.<\/p>\n

Do I think Windows Phone 7 will be big?\u00a0 Unfortunately, no.\u00a0 It looks nice.\u00a0 But I just don’t think that this is an area that MS should be in.\u00a0 For me, they are a client\/server company.\u00a0 I think they make the best desktop\/server OS, business applications, and systems management.\u00a0 If I was a dev then I’d be all over their dev environment.\u00a0 Whoops: I forgot that MS is a cloud company, so I’d be all over Azure in that case.<\/p>\n

The phone OS is an improvement in terms of appearance.\u00a0 Will it be usable?\u00a0 I’ve no idea.\u00a0 I probably won’t ever know because my WIndows phone hardware (bought last December) doesn’t have the required hardware.\u00a0 I’m not a phone collector – I buy a phone and use it until I need to recycle it.\u00a0 I make calls and I send texts.\u00a0 The crucial things for these gadgets for the target market are:<\/p>\n