When will they let Ballmer go?
I mean, really. Like Colligan is for Palm, Ballmer is a boat anchor tieing Microsoft down. What Microsoft needs is a change of culture - they need a better vision for their direction and to be able to move more nimbly. They’ve proven they can do it with XBox, but so far it’s an isolated success. Check it, I just ran across this piece with some choice words from Ballmer.
I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people
Has he confused all social networks with MySpace? That is, he has decided that only kidz use any social network? I know most teens I know are avid LinkedIn users. Wait, no they aren’t. Facebook is heavily, heavily skewing older in age. Or does younger people mean younger than Ballmer and that Ballmer is really only interested in the senior citizen demographic?
He goes on to say this in reference to Facebook in particular:
there was little in the way of technology to justify the lofted valuation attached to a site expected to achieve revenues of only $150 million this year.
Um.. so why is he valuing Facebook at $10 billion? Is that increasing shareholder value? Investing in a severely over valued company? That he must believe, by his own statements, is faddish and liable to go down at any time?
Then he hits this beauty which shows his complete detachment from reality. It must be nice to live in Ballmer land with the fairy penguins and pixie dust:
There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That’s for sure
Sooooo…. Microsofts position is that the only good technology is really old technology? Or technology that takes a really long time to write? If he believes this, why doesn’t microsoft hire a couple dozen engineers and make one themselves? They’ve got tons of technology and synergies to leverage. They should be able to make a Facebook killer toute suite. I guess it explains how long it took them make and how good they made Vista!
And check out this one:
Mr Ballmer also noted that sites such as Geocities, an online community that was bought for $3 billion by Yahoo! in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, “had most of what Facebook has.â€
I can’t even keep writing this post. This all off in crazy land.
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:30 pm
its almost like saying that coca-cola is just some carbonated water and sugar, scientifically easy to produce so the company is pretty much worthless.
they really get it.
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:43 pm
LOL!!1!eleven!!!1 Good times. Good times.
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Did you read the TechCrunch article on this?
http://tinyurl.com/ynw6el
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Are they crazy! The problem isn’t necessarily the notion that social networks are a fad, who knows. It’s the reasoning behind that - it’s a fad because the kids like it? There are many, many social networks that are not targeted at kids.
The geocities comparison is patently the most ridiculous comparison I’ve heard in a long time. Seriously. SERIOUSLY. They were both on the web. That’s sort of where the similarities end.
Much of what Ballmer says is intrinsically wrong. Or if the conclusions are not necessarily wrong, he’s assessment of how he got to that conclusion is flawed and bound to result in silly actions.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:25 am
[...] I just think they’ll muck it up. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Ballmer isn’t the guy to be steering that ship no mo’. ↑ Breakfast Links: Truffle, Topless Men [...]
May 5th, 2008 at 10:39 am
[...] now comes all the craziness. First TechCrunch pondered if Steve Ballmer should be fired for this. Well, yeah, duh. But not because of this. On the flip side of the fence, Matthew Ingram asks the same of Jerry [...]