Ballmer is a terrible CEO for Microsoft

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Ballmer is arrogant. That is not a fatal flaw in itself, but when combined with an unwillingness to get deep into the details of where the problem is arising, it becomes a fatal flaw.

Ballmer is now famous for saying:

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.

We can get into talking tough and all that, but Ballmer — as the face of Microsoft — should have never made such a short sighted comment about any product released by a serious competitor like Apple. What is less quoted is the comments he made immediately following the above:

In the case of music, Apple got out early. They were the first to really recognize that you couldn’t just think about the device and all the pieces separately. Bravo. Credit that to Steve (Jobs) and Apple. They did a nice job.

But it’s not like we’re at the end of the line of innovation that’s going to come in the way people listen to music, watch videos, etc. I’ll bet our ads will be less edgy. But my 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we’ll get him to own a Zune.

What is so shocking about this is that Ballmer recognizes that first to market is important — yet it took until 2010 to launch Windows Phone 7, three years after the iPhone.

Where is the “innovation” that Ballmer mentions in the music space — the Zune is effectively dead now and I bet his Uncle does have an iPod at this point. 3

This is the epitome of short sighted behavior by Ballmer and should have made the board and shareholders incredibly un-easy at the time and especially now. Instead it bolstered his support as a man who was going to squash the evil Apple bug.

Short sighted behavior like this can and should be forgiven if the person later recognizes his errors and immediately moves to correct it, yet again though it took three years to get a serious iPhone competitor out of Microsoft. They never created a music/video player that gained traction after the Zune faded into Wikipedia archives. That cannot and should not be forgiven.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://brooksreview.net/2011/05/ballmer/
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