Ballmer Leaves Microsoft Board 142
jones_supa writes: After leaving his position as CEO of Microsoft a year ago, Steve Ballmer has still held a position as a member of the board of directors for the company. Now, he is leaving the board, explaining why in a letter to fresh Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "I have become very busy," Ballmer explains. "I see a combination of Clippers, civic contribution, teaching and study taking up a lot of time." Despite his departure, the former-CEO is still invested in the company's success, and he spent most of the letter encouraging Nadella and giving advice. Nadella shot back a supportive, equally optimistic response, promising that Microsoft will thrive in "the mobile-first, cloud-first world."
Re: C (Score:3, Informative)
M$ never dominated the mobile market with WinCe or PPC
They were highly unpopular compared with the Black Berry and Palm Pilots.
Re:Before leaving, Steve did ALS Ice Bucket Challe (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, because Bill would never give money to charity.
Re: C (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry but you're incorrect. In 2007 Windows Mobile had the largest market share of any OS for mobile devices, with 42% of the market:
http://bgr.com/2011/12/13/appl... [bgr.com]
They had tied Blackberry the year before, and edged them out in 2007 which was when iPhone was released. Then the next year iPhone took over.
Going back pre-smartphone, when the only real players in the PDA arena were Palm and Microsoft, Microsoft surpassed Palm in 2004, and from then on it was all downhill for Palm as they tried to update an archaic OS to utilize advances in hardware.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/65... [pcpro.co.uk]
Microsoft soundly won the PDA war, but then were totally decimated soon after the PDA market transitioned into the Smart Phone market. In turn, Palm, then Blackberry, then Microsoft all owned the market and then stagnated, failed to innovate, and were superseded by new OSes that didn't have legacy issues (or trying to maintain backwards compatibility, etc).
Re:Microsoft is a spent force (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft doesn't have many fans on Slashdot but even the most die-hard of fans must now see that they're in a real bad position.
The used to be invincible in the consumer space but now the computing device of choice is either the tablet or the smart phone. Precious few of these are Windows based.
The used to be invincible in the business user space but the move to mobile computing means business people are using iPhone and iPads, not Windows Phones and Surface.
Then there was the own goal of the latest generation XBox. They managed to piss everyone off for no discernible gain.
The only area their grip is still strong is PC gaming. For how long, who knows?
Microsoft mice are still popular... (grin)
The XBox and PS3 were pretty much even, there was no clear definitive advantage for Microsoft. Plus, we don't even know if Microsoft ever broke even with the Xbox.
Microsoft's bread-n-butter has always been MS Office, Desktop OS, and the Enterprise space. MS is developing Office Apps for the iPad and Android, PC/Laptop sales have stabilized as people realize that they still need them to edit and create content, and the Enterprise space is doing better than ever with the advent of virtual servers.
I'm not saying that Microsoft doesn't have challenges but saying that they are "struggling just to remain relevant" shows a lack of understanding about the business as a whole. As proof, in Q4 2014 Microsoft enterprise sales "increased $2.3 billion or 6%, due primarily to increased revenue from our server products". A $2.3 billion dollar increase in one quarter is nothing to sneeze at...
http://www.microsoft.com/Inves... [microsoft.com]
Re:Microsoft is a spent force (Score:4, Informative)
Google aggressively filters out porn from the results. Bing doesn't. Which is convenient when you want to find porn.