Posted on 01/31/2014 7:04:43 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Microsoft is an insanely profitable company standing on the edge of disaster. It desperately needs new thinking. With word that 22-year Microsoft veteran Satya Nadella is likely the new CEO, attention turns to the leadership of the company's board of directors. It will have two former CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
So new thinking is unlikely to come from them.
In fact, Gates has a track record of huge strategic errors that have cost the company years of progress in market share. Here's why he should be the one to go:
1. Gates' world was: Go slow. Microsoft needs to change its corporate culture. Today’s tech companies try to move fast and fail. They can fail because they move fast, which means that they can fix a mistake as fast as they create one. Microsoft has a historical culture of moving slow and not failing. That comes from a time when people installed software once very three years. Times have changed. Now companies deliver software via the cloud and can add or roll back new features every day.
2. He almost missed the Internet. The Internet rose during Gates time as CEO, and he actually wasn't an Internet visionary. He entered the browser market long after Netscape, for example. His efforts to catch up and crush Netscape led Microsoft into an epic antitrust judgement and 10 years of oversight by the Department of Justice. Ultimately Microsoft’s Internet products (browsers, web servers to development tools) did well and grabbed lots of market share. But Microsoft and Gates didn’t lead here, they followed, and almost disastrously so.
3. Speaking of the Internet, there’s Bing. Bing is a fine service, but Microsoft will never beat Google by being a me-too search site. New leadership needs to figure that out.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Prezactly. :-)
Gates has always been vastly overrated. He got where he is by slimy business dealings not technical genius.
did he solve those things?
lol
And in the early '80s Microsoft fell well behind Lotus 1-2-3 in electronic spread sheet sales, the software programs that really moved PCs into common business usage. Took them at least ten years to catch up in that application.
He entered networking market with Windows for Workgroups. That was 3.11, and the year was about 1992. He only supported Novell's Netware shares, and Windows' own, inefficient SMB shares. TCP was not developed by MS until Windows 95, and even then they heavily borrowed from BSD.
MS did see value in networking at the workplace. TCP/IP was not necessary for that because workplaces were small, and I don't recall Netware ever needing TCP/IP; they had their own IPX. Because of that Windows did not lead in networking - it was merely filling the needs that became blatantly obvious to any observer. Even that was done slowly.
BG never was in favor of Internet - this was against his ideas that he expressed in his book. He claimed "information under your fingertips," but that information was supposed to be purchased by every customer, and it should come on a CD. Microsoft produced Encarta, which was one of such CDs. There were answering services at Compuserve and other early BBS-like systems. Today one does not need such products, because a quick Google search will tell you more about care and feeding of anteaters, or of any other exotic critter, than you will ever find on a carefully balanced and proofread CD. BG was afraid of anything that he personally could not control; he sat idly on Internet interfaces (which is TCP/IP) for way too long.
gotta watch these Indians , they are taking over .
India is overflowing , spilling out into the entire world .
Anyone been to India ? Then you know what concerns me .
RE: And in the early ‘80s Microsoft fell well behind Lotus 1-2-3 in electronic spread sheet sales
Microsoft killed the 1-2-3 product with Excel, now the spreadsheet standard that almost everyone is using.
Microsoft also killed WordPerfect with MS- Word, now the word processing standard that almost everyone is using.
Need I mention Powerpoint, which almost everyone uses for slide shows?
As for networking, what ever happened to the once popular Novel Netware? Microsoft killed them too.
MS ripped off everything everyone else did.
Bill Gates should be EXILED to his”Garage”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> The most common use for IE is to download a Mozilla variant.
Well, yes — now.
But back then, IE 5 was a good browser; don’t you remember? It wasn’t that long ago.
I still use WordPerfect.
Darn cocky about it too.
Unless you have to use some web-based apps that were designed using MS proprietary standards that were designed to only work in IE6 and have since been modified to “work” in newer versions of IE.
Does no one remember the fake error messages windows would generate if it detected you were running DR-DOS?
Does no one remember what microsoft did once they'd driven netscape out of the market? How long did IE 5 hang around with practically no work or improvements being done to it. How long did it take them to finally incorporate TABS into their crappy browsers? People who talk about microsoft innovations have short memories.
I hate microsoft because their software is a bunch of bug ridden virus magnets, and because of all the huge roadblocks microsoft has created over the years to hinder interoperability.
Who's talking about IE 6?
I mentioned IE 5; which was pretty good compared to the other browsers of its time. That's all.
Probably.written by a Microsoft shareholder. Translation: "Bill, you are doing a wonderful job solving world poverty - now get off the Microsoft Board, and concentrate on your new job (and leave Microsoft alone)"
This then is America!
The land God blesses with everything
And no Effel Tower: no Taj Mahal;
No Alps; No Andes;
No native hut; nor Royal Palace -
Can rival her awesome beauty,
Her diverse population, her monolithic majesty.
America the Free!
America the mighty!
America the beautiful!
Charlie Daniels - My Beautiful America
All those up and coming ‘dragons’ ....stand in line
They never paid the costs . Soon , we will take this country back and restore Her to Her rightful place in this world and screw all these progressive scum .
Have you met Gates?
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