Pondering the Future of a Re-Org'd Microsoft 400
puddingebola writes "This story from Forbes touches on Steve Ballmer's announcement that Microsoft will reorganize. From the article, 'Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer appears to be planning a major reorganization. His apparent objective is to help the company move toward becoming a "devices and services company," as presented in the company's annual shareholder letter last October.' What follows is an analysis of the current state of Microsoft's current ventures: shrinking PC sales, Nokia management calling for a change of course, Office 360 lagging, a $1 Billion investment in Nook, the losses on Xbox. Once again, if Microsoft starts to lose the revenue of Windows and Office, how long does the boat float? And what of the suggestion, on the verge of another update in the Xbox console, that Microsoft should sell the Xbox division?"
The circle of life (Score:2, Interesting)
First they'll drop the software, then they'll drop the devices, and then they'll be IBM 2.0. How ironic.
What in the world are they thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)
Brilliant move! De-emphasize the divisions that bring in the big bucks *and* have a unique advantage over competitors for legacy reasons, while placing even more emphasis on the divisions that lose money and have mediocre market share.
Seriously, this move by Ballmer is about the direct opposite of what a business in transition should do. I wonder how much longer before the stockholders finally kick him out.
To a first approximation, Microsoft *is* Windows and Office. That's what keeps everyone locked in. That's what brings in the big volume licenses. Cede that, and the rest of the edifice collapses entirely. Ballmer might not like it, but Microsoft is a software company and lives or dies on desktop software. The truth is that they have to transition to a more mature company model, paying dividends and making a lot fewer splashes. They aren't ever going to be hip and cool and revolutionary. And their customers don't want them to be.
Re:What in the world are they thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is they have historically sacrificed everything for windows desktop. Office could be running on other platforms, but it won't for that reason.
The OSX version should not even be called office, since it lacks so many corporate features like Excel services.
Why is Ballmer still CEO? (Score:4, Interesting)
As a naive individual with little to no business knowledge or training, could somebody please explain how Steve Ballmer is still CEO of Microsoft?
What knowledge is the board of directors privy to that the entire rest of the world isn't that has kept him employed for so long?
I *must* be overlooking something to explain how somebody could so completely mismanage Microsoft to the point of irrelevancy and still work there.
Re:Better Idea (Score:2, Interesting)
When will Microsoft wake up the fact they release crap, users are getting fed up with it.
People have been putting up with it for over 20 years; why would MS change their strategy now?
Isn't the point of TFA that Microsoft is changing course?
Changing course from scraping along the side of the iceberg to directly ramming into it, but still...
Re:Get your resumes ready guys! (Score:5, Interesting)
You somehow missed the start of last decade, when market started to become global.
From an employer's perspective, the difference between an US-based remote worker and an India-based remote worker is the salary (to a greater extent) and cultural differences (to a smaller extent, includes English proficiency). Speed of communication is just as good (instantaneous regardless of where you are) and cheap (VoIP).
Apart from some relatively small cultural differences (which can be ignored with little effort), everything else is advantageous for the India-based worker: smaller salary, less pretentious, able and willing to work overtime for insignificant compensation, etc. Even if Quality of Work might (arguably) be lower, you can get 5 IN workers for half the price of an US worker and (arguably) have quantity offset quality. But to date, my 10+ years global workforce experience tells me that IN-based work quality is about 60-70% of US-based quality (valid for coding and support, YMMV) for a much, much lower salary. Mexico, for that matter, is worse than that (mainly due to laziness; they're smart but hellishly lazy).
One more thing to mention: the horrible Indian accent and general incompetence you sometimes encounter when calling support has a very simple root cause: the employer got overly greedy and went for the cheapest outsourcing company they found. their mindset was: "why pay 1/4 of the salary and have good customer service when we can pay 1/7 of the salary and fuck our customers?" - Dilbert method FTW.
Note: My global workforce and outsourcing experience covers USA, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Chile, Mexico, India, Romania, China, Singapore, Japan and Egypt. I could literally write a short novel about each.
Re:Never Heard of Office 360 (Score:5, Interesting)
What you want, then, is a Coleco ADAM.
If you booted the ADAM up without a game cartridge, it loaded up its word processor, and you could print to the attached printer.
If you had a casette tape in the machine when it booted- it would run the casette.
And if you had a game cartridge in during boot time, you could play the game.
Re: Never Heard of Office 360 (Score:2, Interesting)
First Xbox was a terrible beast of a power hog... Like having an extra 1969's fridge. If it sipped power like Wii then this would make sense.
Second, Microsoft failed to move Office to .net CLR back in 2003, at the same time they moved all the Xbox (gen 1) tech to powerPC. It's to late now, office 97 formats still rule in companies and modern apps write against DATA FORMATS, we don't copy exe behavior anymore.
iPad really stole Microsoft's chance to push something truly NEW on companies. Microsoft has failed multiple time to get past Desktops and Laptops... The biggest enemy of all has reared its ugly head. NOBODY CARES!
Re:Get your resumes ready guys! (Score:5, Interesting)
Case in point, this past week my business partner has spent roughly 20 hours upgrading to windows 8 and trying to get Office 2013 to work on her PC. That's 20 hours not spent working on client projects. And we have projects to work on so Windows 8 + Office 2013 have cost us $2000. Meanwhile this week I've worked 20+ hours on projects on my Mac. Just as I have for 10 years now. Yes I know I pay premium upfront for Apple products, but they've stayed out of my way and let me get work done.
Re:Get your resumes ready guys! (Score:4, Interesting)
Who do you think approved Win8, and who pushed for the dumb strategy of trying to unify the UI across all devices? It was the guy at the top.
And as the other poster said, Win8 was a boon for Apple, not Linux. Linux shot itself in the foot by adopting the same idiotic unified-UI strategy with Unity and Gnome3. The KDE folks had the right idea, wanting to have different UIs for different devices (but running the KDE libs underneath them all; kde-desktop for the desktops and laptops, kde-netbook for netbooks, and kde-active for phones and tablets), however almost no one in Linux-land wants anything to do with KDE for some reason, and instead they prefer to keep using Gnome, while simultaneously bitching about the Gnome devs and their arrogance and removal of features.