Ballmer has been a terrible CEO. Time and again he has displayed poor judgement that has cost shareholders billions of dollars.
Here's something to ponder: When Bill Gates retired as CEO in 2000, imagine that the board of directors hadn't chosen Steve Ballmer to replace him. Instead, they chose a CEO who stuck a sign on his desk saying "Windows and Office Development - nothing else" and then went to sip cocktails on a beach in the Bahamas for the next 13 years.
How much more would Microsoft be worth now?
I think Ballmer's alpha-male personality has blinded him to the 'do nothing' option. He loves the thrill and prestige of investing billions of dollars in new projects and is therefore biased against doing nothing and letting the shareholders keep their money.
And when he does 'do something' his execution is often flawed. Here he is in 2007 talking about the new iPhone: "Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get." [1]
Whenever people mention Microsoft as only a "Windows and Office" company, I know they have a very outdated perspective of the company. Look at all the billion dollar divisions they have that are not Windows and Office. Sure, almost all their other products such as SharePoint, AD, Exchange, SQL Server, .NET are based on Windows, but people buy Windows because they want those products, not the other way around.
Also: Ballmer was absolutely right when he made that comment about the iPhone. The iPhone did not sell phenomenally well at all when it was introduced. It did alright, but nowhere near what it does now. The average Joe could not afford one at $600. I know, because I had the original one (only because my employer bought it for me, of course), and and I was the envy of people everywhere. Random people on the street and at restaurants and airports would ask me wistfully how I liked it.
When it did take off was when AT&T started subsidizing iPhones to the tune of $400 per phone (and then make money off the contracts, because the average Joe is a short-sighted chump). That's when suddenly everyone I knew had a brand new iPhone (and later, Android phones). I would credit that business model for bringing about the smartphone revolution more than the revolutionary design Apple introduced.
Did Ballmer absolutely miss the alternative strategy? Of course! But so did Apple / AT&T initially. It was probably born later out of desperation when the iPhone wasn't selling as they hoped.
You hold a rather unusual view of how the iPhone progressed. The subsidy model already existed for numerous other smartphones -- but they sucked. Apple sold ~4 million iPhones from launch to end of 2007. Those were unsubsidized purchases and they captured >20% of smartphone market share (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2008/01/the-truth-about-the-iph...). It seems pretty clear-cut that it wasn't a new carrier sales model that made the iPhone a success.
That chart shows cumulative sales only until early 2008, before the 3G was introduced. This does not show the most interesting aspects of iPhone growth. The subsidy model existed, but it did not apply to the iPhone. Here's a more revealing chart (from Jan 2012):
http://paidcontent.org/2012/01/25/419-chart-apple-iphone-sal...
Note how in '08, when the subsidized iPhone 3G was introduced ("New features, new price") it sold almost more in one quarter than the previous original had sold all year. Of course, it also had a number or new features such as an app store, but the one that really made a difference was the subsidy. Also, as mentioned below, it was sold internationally so that certainly helped, but it was the US smartphone market that first saw phenomenal growth.
As you say, the original iPhone did do well, but that was compared to the rest of the smartphone market, which in ~2007, was tiny by today's standards, because it was mostly limited to business users. The subsidized iPhone suddenly created a consumer smartphone market. Even as the iPhone was gaining market share, the other players were also selling more and more devices every year, which is why they were complacent. Until they weren't. The rest as they say is history.
> Note how in '08, when the subsidized iPhone 3G was introduced ("New features, new price") it sold almost more in one quarter than the previous original had sold all year. Of course, it also had a number or new features such as an app store, but the one that really made a difference was the subsidy.
But, er, that's not actually what happened. The original iPhone was released in about six countries in June 2007, usually at $600 or equivalent. In September 2007, the price dropped to $200 (in the US; there were regional variations). In June 2008, the 3G was released, at $200, in 22 countries.
It had 3G (the original's lack of 3G made it a hard sell in Europe, in the few countries where it was even available; many European telcos had skipped EDGE and gone straight to UMTS/HSDPA), and the app store, and people were more used to the idea. In 2007, normal consumers simply didn't know what a smartphone was, at all. It's far more likely that a combination of that was responsible for the growth than a price drop which actually happened nine months earlier.
Hmm, I guess I'm looking at the wrong time frame. Do you know what sales were like from launch until they subsidized it? I remember tracking its progress from announcement through launch and until a couple years ago, and as I recall it only really took of after the subsidies. Am on a phone, so can't find a cite to back that up at the moment though.
> I would credit that business model for bringing about the smartphone revolution more than the revolutionary design Apple introduced.
That wasn't actually a new business model. Subsidy was already pretty much standard in the US; it's just that for whatever reason (probably risk-aversion), AT&T didn't do it for the iPhone for the first six months.
People who say Ballmer is a bad CEO based on the stock price really aren't paying attention. He took over at the height of the tech bubble. Microsoft's PE (and everything else) was a joke. Since he took over revenue and profits have increased by an impressive amount. The only reason the stock has been flat is that it was extremely over inflated when he took over.
(Certainly he has made mistakes, but frankly I think he's done just fine. Windows phone 7-8 have been pretty good, just slightly late. Xbox has been pretty successful. Azure has been fine. Bing has been the only real failure/money loser, but at least it might be holding back Google to some extent. That was the whole purpose anyways.)
Steve Ballmer started at Microsoft in January 2000 [1]. Since then the S&P 500 has gained 15 points, the Nasdaq has lost 12, and Microsoft...about 45 [2]. Thus MSFT has under-performed the S&P 500 by over 60 points and the Nasdaq by over 33.
This does not show that Ballmer is crap. Just that Microsoft has been crap since Ballmer took over. Generously: he has been unable to arrest the disintegration of shareholder value.
UPDATE: Out of the 3 395 overlapping 20 trading day time periods between 7 January 2000 and 19 July 2013 MSFT outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) in 1 543 of those periods, or 45% of the time. Thus, if you were to flip a coin on any trading day between those dates and, were it to come up heads, buy and hold MSFT for 20 trading days you would, on average, make money on 9 out of 20 days. If you made money you made, on average, 4.9%. If you lost money you lost, on average, 4.6%. Comparable statistics for SPYs are a 59% win rate (3 out of 5 times), 3.2% up, 4.4% down.
Msft had a PE of 58 when he took over. S&P had a PE of 29. Msft was vastly overvalued, there was nothing he could have done that would have made msft go up in normal conditions.
I say Ballmer is a bad CEO because of the stack ranking employee evaluations and the rampant smothering of prototype technologies that later turned out to be valuable in favor of "core" technologies - you know, the two behaviors that are absolutely toxic for a tech company.
I agree with a great many criticisms of Microsoft, but this one always strikes me as nonsensical. I was an intern at Microsoft and (while I never participated in stack ranking) it never seemed particularly destructive. I went on a tour of Valve and one question that was asked during the Q&A was what kind of evaluation and ranking system they used - the answer was stack ranking. Companies have to use some form of evaluation and ranking for their employees once they grow past a certain size - it's just an organizational requirement. The alternative is upper management without quantifiable information about the many people under them, which makes it harder to allocate resources and operate efficiently. Or so I imagine, I'm not in upper management at a very large company, but that certainly seems to be the case pretty much everywhere.
Go through a stack ranking where you get a bad review simply because "there are too many good developers on the team" before you say that it is a nonsensical criticism.
Making employees feel like shit for reasons outside their control is bad management.
Anecdotal, but, I know a bunch of good developers at Microsoft, and I've never heard any one of them complain about that before. They complain about a bunch of things, many of them related to upper management, but that "lost decade" article was the first I heard anyone complaining about stack ranking.
Stack ranking has been used at Microsoft since 2006. Furthermore, he wouldn't be overly involved in deciding performance evaluations. That's more the role of Lisa Brummel, who is the EVP of HR.
> People who say Ballmer is a bad CEO based on the stock price really aren't paying attention
Most of the criticism here doesn't mention the stock price, but since you bring it up...
> He took over at the height of the tech bubble. Microsoft's PE (and everything else) was a joke.
Even if you set your start date as the collapse of the tech bubble in 2002, Microsoft's stock price has remained pretty flat. You might argue that the market was still overvaluing Microsoft in 2002, but perhaps that was because it overvalued the ability of its CEO to grow profits and return cash to shareholders.
> Since he took over revenue and profits have increased by an impressive amount
How much of the increase in profits is due to the Windows/Office cash cow, which would have existed under any other CEO? For the remaining growth in profits, how much money was invested to achieve that growth? After all, any CEO can increase company profit by $1 billion per year - he just needs to put $20 billion in a bank account.
I'm not saying he is a great CEO. I'm saying he was put in an impossible situation and he's done fine. Msft had a PE of 58 when he started. And he gets to follow bill gates. Just like Tim cook. It doesn't matter how well he does, people are calling for his head because he isn't Steve jobs. It's tough to follow a legend. (I also think Tim cook is doing just fine)
I think most people are unconfortable with Balmer's lack of pushing Microsoft in new directions. Not so long ago Blackberry's numbers wheren't bad, they were selling a boatload of devices, clausing new deals all around the world, and pushing these facts as a sign of health. But it just felt wrong because all the good news were about fields bound to die or shrink in the near future.
Balmer as a CEO brings plenty of money, sales are strong, figures are good, but mostly in fields that might as well disappear in the next years. Even things like Office and .NET which should have many years left are so heavily bound to windows that they might as well get silently siloed into niche markets while the current PC market gets disrupted.
At the 2010 company meeting, Balmer said "Last time I told you do good things and the stock price will follow [LONG PUASE] Do good things and the stock price will follow." That was when I decided Balmer could say one thing as CEO that would positively impact the stock price and by definition it would be the last thing he could ever say as CEO. (Sometimes I wonder if that pause was him coming to the same conclusion)
That line, coupled with the fact that it was preceded by a cheesy line form a TV show about high-school football that most SDE's wouldn't get caught watching let alone bye into the sentiment when applied to a software company, really didn't make me think he was in touch with ... well anything.
Ballmer is ideal material as a COO but he is in no way CEO material.
He didn't even join the board until he got made CEO.
He has done a pretty good job with maintaining the lines that make Microsoft the bulk of its revenue but in new areas he is very fucking useless.
Bill Gates did some masterful work at making Windows the dominant force that it is but Balmer has done nothing but waste money on Windows Phone and Surface.
If only Balmer was smart enough to realize he needs someone else to get new shit off the ground, then Microsoft would have half a chance.
They have the cash and they have the researchers. Brilliant researchers doing excellent research. Thing is; they don't really use that research. A few things end up in cash cow products (like one of the automated data type detection features of rise4fun.com went into Excel), but that's about it.
I think the next Xbox is going to be the thing that finally takes him out. Not one gamer I know wants one, and the 360 works just fine for the family. They managed to derail what was one success story he could actually point to... It's going to be an epic bellyflop. I say he's out after the sales figures come in next year.
The XBox was really the only diversification from their core Windows/Office business which has really even slightly worked, though. MSN/Windows Live/Bing/Whatever it's called now was a massive cash sink and market failure, as was Zune and Windows Phone. Azure is looking like it's heading that way too, though no-one's making much profit in that market right now.
Ballmer got it wrong regarding the iPhone, but I doubt that doing nothing was an option in that case.
Against its rivals in the computer segment, Microsoft didn't have to act, but Apple came at them from a different angle; by leveraging its dominant position in the music player market. Nokia, which had a crushingly dominant place in the smartphone business when Apple joined, tried the "just keep doing what you do" strategy for a long while; their marketshare steadily dropped. Probably not coincidentally, it was an ex-MS exec Elop that changed that strategy, with results comparable to Microsoft's. RIM is still clinging to it, with no success.
In comparison, Google had a more measured, deliberate approach, but they did react to Apple. When Apple went into the smartphone business, Google was gearing up to fight against Nokia, RIM and Microsoft. The disruption caused by Apple forced Google to reevaluate. They figured out key places where Apple was unable or unwilling to compete on, and capitalized on those.
My memory is that MS were ready to go with an actually decent, capable release of Windows Phone (WP6.5? maybe?), which then got clobbered and reworked into a consumer OS when they panicked over how well the iPhone was doing.
Apple didn't come at them in an unavoidable way at all - Apple was going for a small sector of the consumer market, where MS could have ripped the business market away from an already-floundering RIM inside a generation. It's just not Apple's way to target enterprise functionality the way MS can.
Why was this a "fiasco"? The result of the process outlined in that memo was, not to put to fine a point on it, one of the most profitable business decisions in world history.
I admire Gordon Letwin as much as the next guy, but OS/2 was never going to be the commercial success that Windows became, for basically the reasons the memo lays out: Windows 3.0/3.1 absolutely dominated the exploding PC market because it was targeted at hardware that anyone could afford. OS/2 was dependent on a level of hardware that wouldn't be commonplace until another generation or two of Moore's Law cycled through.
Microsoft simply didn't have that time to waste, and neither did their customers. The choice was between abandoning a phenomenally successful OS and API for the "next generation", or slowly building a bridge from that OS into the future carrying their customers with them. They made the right call, even if it did take roughly 11 years until Windows XP for the transition to truly be complete.
Yes, but OS/2 2.0 was not going to be released in 1990 either so it would be stupid to abandon Windows 3.x immediately anyway. And as I mentioned in the comments, nothing prevents the two from coexisting for a few years with OS/2 2.x being compatible with Win3.x.
Win3.x (OS/2 2.x would be able to run Win3.x apps) or both, but this problem would only last a few years at most. Eventually 286s and <4MB of RAM would become obsolete. (And BTW OS/2 2.x not running well in 4MB of RAM had more to do with the Workplace Shell, MS had similar difficulties with the Explorer shell too)
Yeah, it isn't that he tried to diversify that's the problem, but that he did it so incredibly clumsily. A company with billions in the bank had no business bringing out WP7, say.
I've historically liked him because of the "developers, developers, developers" thing, but over the last 5-10 years I think history has proven you right. He's a bad CEO who consistently makes bad decisions.
Half-agreed. I still like him because he's the only rich and powerful person who would do that ridiculous dance on stage for the whole world to see, only in the name of people like me, me, me!
But "bad CEO"? Come on! If you look beyond the HN filter bubble, he has definitively diversified MS beyond its early Windows/Office shackles, increased revenues consistently and made (most of) the new divisions very profitable.
And if you think there's no "HN bubble", ask yourself why there's this huge front-page thread about MSFT tanking 10% but little talk about GOOG tanking 14%.
In a stable market with no big changes, he would be an excellent CEO, and he was generally considered a good one until the last few years (some would say after Vista, other after the iPhone).
Has Xbox actually been profitable? I understood that overall, they're still down a net few billion. I can see how entertainment and taking over the home and living room (especially after their moronic handling of Media PC) is important, but I don't think it's been a cash maker by itself.
A quick search turns up one article[1] claiming 3BN loss over 10 years.
As far as Azure, I'd be surprised if they've recovered all the money they've put into engineering and so on. Maybe if you consider they had to do a lot of similar work for MS online.
I honestly think the Xbox is their gamble on "the next big thing". I don't think it's about the games. I think it's about the living room presence. And in my mind that is Apple's next big battle, and Microsoft has a huge head start. Cable boxes are going to die/morph into the game consoles. If I had to make a prediction, I could see Apple and Nintendo working together on a competitor...
But Xbox is just their entry into the next battlefield: the living room and tv.
Here is the VC question: how are you making money off a box in the living room? Who is buying it? Why?
What does it bring that a tivo that plays netflix and hulu doesn't already? Of anyone I know, they either have no cable (younger gen), where they just hook a computer into the tv to watch online content, they have cable and a tivo or provider DVR (mid aged families) or they are >60 years old, don't want anything to change, and can't learn to use a dvr even when I guide them through it (my grandparents).
Who is your audience? Why? What value are you delivering they don't already have in their living room? How is that going to save your company? How is an xbox one, which, while not sale-subsidized by license fees like the 360 or ps3 were, isn't making you healthy margins but supposed to provide revenue generation?
Or it's the entrance to your home, entertainment-wise. How long do you think that cable companies are going to be putting these hideous, power-eating, under-performing boxes from Motorola / whomever in your house, which serve essentially minimal purposes. In my hypothetical future, game consoles replace those. Why have 3 pieces of hardware when you can have one (wifi router + cable box + xbox)? As TV changes over the next X years, I think Microsoft is positioned very, very well to make moves in this space. They have the weight to lean on the Comcast / Verizon / Cox / Turner / take your pick, and the technical ability to make things work.
Looking further down the line, you can see a future where home automation is centered around your central console, another area where I think Microsoft could make some moves. In a sense, they could own the operating system of your home. But this is probably a decently long ways out, so who knows.
> How long do you think that cable companies are going to be putting these
Well, as long as they are "free" and subsidized by bills. People like free, and cable companies usually give out the ancient hot DRM DVRs for free with subscriptions. I don't see people lining up to replace their DVR with an xbox (which isn't an actual replacement, it has no coax in or tv tuner).
> Why have 3 pieces of hardware when you can have one
Xbox doesn't have DOCSIS either. You can't put a cable modem in it. You maybe can use it as a router, but you can use anything with a land line ethernet plug as a router, or you could get a hotspot as a router.
> you can see a future where home automation is centered around your central console
I see this, but xbox one is so locked down, expensive, and it uses gamepads, not tv remotes. I don't see people keeping the xbone on as a media sync server, when you could buy a router with attached storage for a quarter the price.
In my mind, the end user wouldn't pay $400+ for the device, it'd have wifi and whatnot built into it. The content delivery system would subsidize the cost. And honestly the majority of the market could give a shit about being locked down.
The answer to your question is proprietary gamer content. There's a certain generation that will spend big money to have an ideal gaming experience, and a subset of that set doesn't like that on PCs.
I know the audience you speak of won't do this, but Steam big picture mode does solve that problem. Plug pc into tv via hdmi, get a bluetooth adapter or just use a corded 360 or ps3 gamepad, play games. You can even do that with a gamer grade laptop which also happens to be portable, albeit expensive.
I see a full-os media server box plugged into the tv that can act as router, sync server, tv dvr, game console, and with miracast etc provide displays all over a home, but I don't think xbone is sophisticated enough to do it. Does it even support non-xbox gamepad input?
XBox is only profitable if you read the data very carefully (ignoring sunk costs), or if you take the 360 _on its own_, ignoring the original and XBox Live. It will probably eventually be profitable, but it isn't now.
I'd be astonished if Azure is profitable; AWS isn't, and it sees vastly higher volume at similar prices. And, of course, profitability for Azure is a messy concept; is it profitable when it makes more than they spend on it, or when it makes more than what they spend on it plus what they're losing by selling fewer Windows Server licenses to Amazon et al?
XBox has made far less money than a stock buy back plan would have therefore it was a bad idea. I don't know the specifics on Azure but it's still in the rounding error stage.
An earlier comment about how better it would have been for Microsoft to just do nothing. Maybe, from a money perspective. But meanwhile they did research, tried out designs, products, services. It's not all loss.
There's more to the trip than the destination. There's a whole ride where things happen and have a value in themselves. Unless we only value the shareholders' money.
Yes, but sane CFOs have to evaluate "what's the best use for this money?" and trade off share buy-backs (or overt dividend declarations) against other investments the company could make.
So, it's perfectly reasonable to say that any investment with dramatically worse return than a share buy-back is a financial loser. If you'd like to argue it's a strategic winner, then change the time window or otherwise make the financial analysis take those strategic gains into account (with an appropriate discount to compare NPVs).
> Yes, but sane CFOs have to evaluate "what's the best use for this money?" and trade off share buy-backs (or overt dividend declarations) against other investments the company could make.
Sure. That means they decide between investing a certain amount of capital in some projects, or returning that capital to the investors.
> So, it's perfectly reasonable to say that any investment with dramatically worse return than a share buy-back is a financial loser.
Not, it's not reasonable. Investing on a project has return for the company, but dividends or buybacks don't. They're in a different category. I think OP wanted to say "it would have been better to invest the money at the risk-free rate than investing on that project".
CFOs are paid to and should be evaluated on creating/optimizing returns for the owners of the company (the shareholders).
If the return from a project for the company (and the therefore the shareholders) is greater than that of a dividend/buyback, do the project. If the dividend/buyback is the idea with the best return, do that.
This evaluation works whether on a projected/discounted look-forward basis or a backward looking basis. In both cases, you have to model assumptions about the path not taken.
Note that most established companies have a portfolio of ideas. Few operating companies return most of their net profits to shareholders. (some companies setup as financial instruments do/must, and whether a REIT is an operating company or not is a question, but Microsoft certainly is an operating company and returning 100% of net profits, even if that were the best idea they had on first-order evaluation, would be a terrible idea.)
It does this only because the market thinks that management thinks the shares are undervalued. If things are "efficient" then a buyback and dividend are equivalent Conversely, if shares are overvalued then a dividend payment is better for management.
At any rate, the relevant thing to compare Microsoft's investments to is the opportunity cost of the money. If Ballmer spent ten billion dollars on a project that netted only a 3% ROI, then shareholders would have been better off receiving that money and putting it into other companies.
Dividends are taxed at the same rate as capital gains, so it should make little difference to a shareholder if a company paid him 1000 dollars or raised the resale value of his stock by 1000 dollars.
No, because your forced to pay capital gains early thus having less money to compound. Try simulating it with 10% growth vs 5% dividend (which is used to buy the same stock) and 5% growth for 10 years.
Oh for Microsoft, maybe. I'd love to have rounding errors like that! A more salient question for now is, is that a rounding error for Amazon, Rackspace, Heroku, etc. as well?
Microsoft got extremely rich thanks to Windows and Office. Windows and Office was pretty much all to profit from backthen. It was the whole of it pretty much, they stagnated web browsers with IE6.0 after putting Netscape out of business. Microsoft thrived by being able to control the whole industry.
Microsoft spends a lot of money on R&D....I think Windows will become primarily a enterprise OS and Microsoft as result will shrink but will still be important.
You are right and i'm asking since years: are microsoft investors blind? Why they not make any pressure on the directors board to change the ceo? How much time they need again? Or are they trusting the "reorganize reorganize reorganize" that is now ballmer motto?
Here's something to ponder: When Bill Gates retired as CEO in 2000, imagine that the board of directors hadn't chosen Steve Ballmer to replace him. Instead, they chose a CEO who stuck a sign on his desk saying "Windows and Office Development - nothing else" and then went to sip cocktails on a beach in the Bahamas for the next 13 years.
How much more would Microsoft be worth now?
I think Ballmer's alpha-male personality has blinded him to the 'do nothing' option. He loves the thrill and prestige of investing billions of dollars in new projects and is therefore biased against doing nothing and letting the shareholders keep their money.
And when he does 'do something' his execution is often flawed. Here he is in 2007 talking about the new iPhone: "Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get." [1]
[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/20...