“As you likely know, Steve Ballmer is stepping down under a cloud at Microsoft, and I too think he is getting a raw deal. What you don’t know is that I feel I’m partially responsible. It goes back to a meeting in the late 1990s,” Rob Enderle writes for ITBusinessEdge. “In 1999, I actually thought of Steve Ballmer as a friend (I still do actually; but I may be delusional). I’d had a private meeting with him and a few other analysts to talk about how he was going to fit into his president’s role. He was looking for advice and providing insight on what he planned to do as he phased into becoming CEO. Then a couple of years later, I met with a very different Steve Ballmer. He was angry and combative. I wondered where both my friend and what would have been a far more successful plan had gone.”
“Two things came out of the meeting with Steve in 1999: One that he executed on and falls into the success column for his time at Microsoft, and one that he didn’t execute on and goes to the core of why he appears to be leaving the CEO job as a failure,” Enderle writes. “The purpose was to pick our brains on what he needed to do. During the process we got a sense of what he planned to do and it was an impressive plan… The other aspect of the talk that stuck with me was how Steve was going to meet with the top employees in the company to collaboratively make Microsoft better. This clearly didn’t happen and I think the pointed feedback he got may have driven a wedge between him and the employees. Over the next few years, rather than getting closer to the employees, he had been isolated from them and failures like Zune and Vista, which could have easily been anticipated and avoided, resulted.”
Enderle writes, “Over the decade, Steve became more and more isolated and the product failures started to mount. The relationship with Intel, which had been rocky, worsened. All of this eventually led to Steve’s early retirement. I believe, had he remained connected to the folks that worked for and with him, we would have seen a different, better outcome… This is really a shame because I still see the unrealized potential in Steve that I saw in 1999, and even though I saw the problem progress, I was completely ineffective in addressing it. You see, I did eventually see that Steve was failing but couldn’t come up with an effective way to prevent the failure. Every time I tried, I just made Steve angrier. This is why, in the end, I view Steve’s early retirement as one of my own greatest failures.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “May?” Try “am.”
Wow, Rob’s delusions of grandeur are grandiose indeed!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Wingsy” for the heads up.]
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“The purpose was to pick our brains on what he needed to do…”
slim pickin’s.
Not only that – “EARLY RETIREMENT”???
How about 8 years overdue!
Yes Ron, you being the all-knowing infallible master of the universe, it is ALL YOUR FAULT.
Rob, I understand your pain.
What with you being all-knowing, infallible, and the master of the PC universe, it leaves me with now doubt.
IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT.
I only can hope your ego can survive this.
I continue to be amazed at why anyone listens to Enderle…
Some of us still listen to this fool because we always end with a big laugh that lasts for hours. Smile and laughter are goog to health.
“It’s all about me!” Says Enderle.
Rob, I am truly sorry to disagree with you, but this is not your failure it is mine.
In 1997, before you ever met with Steve Balmer, I read one of your excretions you laughingly called an opinion column and I failed you. I did not sit down right then as I intended to write you to tell you that your ability to analyze facts, or even to distinguish a fact from your own opinion, was delusional even then. It was obvious that you were deluding even yourself, your editors, your clients, and your readers by claiming to be the principal Analyst of the “Enderle Group” which was composed of you, yourself, and your ego, unless you you were one of those truly rare multiple-personalities, which, I now see, may actually be close to the truth.
Had I written these things in 1997, it is indeed possible, you would have been cured of your delusional condition, not been invited to meet with the equally delusional Steve Balmer (a sufferer of severe delusions of competence), and not have given him such poor, incompetent advice as you so delusionally think you may have. In any case, as you can see, it IS MY FAULT for NOT writing you that critical letter, lo these many years ago.
So I will be a man and take the failure of Microsoft upon my broad shoulders, relieving you of that weighty burden, so you may rest easy and proceed to seek the psychiatric help you so desperately need.
Enderle is one sick puppy.
One sick carbuncle.
What have you got against puppies?
Lol I just saw one of the tags for this article is “Uncle Fester”; still my favorite MDN nickname/picture of all time.
I think the tags are funnier than the article and that was hilarious!
Since when does a CEO go to the media for ideas on how to run his company???
Not just media, but a media-analyst. The worst of the bunch.
Ballmer may have been humoring Enderle in his own private little joke but failed to realize what a joke HE was.
“. . . I view Steve’s early retirement as one of my own greatest failures.”
No, Rob, opening your mouth along with writing articles that put forth your opinions has Steve’s early retirement beat by a mile!
Unbelievable.
I’ll second that.
Is he auditioning for the CEO position? Nahhhh? Is he?
Msft failed because its success didn’t depend on innate talent and good products, but upon copying/stealing/buying the products of others. When that well ran dry, the company had no future other than reaping the benefits of its Windows and Office franchises.
If not for Apple’s thorough job of patenting iOS and iPhone, today Microsoft would be doing the same things to Apple that Samsung and Google do to it.
That approach sounds vaguely familiar…Samsung? Yeah, two peas in a pod.
No fat bloated billionaire is every getting an ounce of sympathy from me, especially one whose failures are a result of his own hubris. Uncle Fester overstayed his welcome by 14 years, getting fat at the expense of employees and coworkers he stepped on and backstabbed on his way to the buffet table.
Enderle is a few pixels short of a full screen dump. Is there no beginning to his talent?
=:~)
Rarely can I say this, but this article was actually nauseating.
OMG! Hahahahaha….this guys so full of himself… As if he had the ability to actually save Ballmer and Microsoft! LOL…. Best Enderle delusional article EVER!
I wonder what Dvorhack will come up with.
Well, now we know why Ballmer failed.
He asked for advice from people like Enderle. WTF?!?
I am the great and powerful Rob Enderle and all CEOs owe any success they may have to my great and powerful vision of what they should do and how they should do it. I must now go self-flagellate because, for some reason, I could not get Steve Ballmer to listen to me. He had some kind of bug up his ass, which may have crawled inside one day when I was kissing it (his ass, not the bug).
“KNEEL BEFORE ROB”! lol
Poor bug!
What an awful endeavour…
Rob, we have seen your problems and have a solution…. This may anger you and may drive a wedge further between us and you. But the solution is to switch to Apple. Embrace the clarity of design. Embrace Steve’s true vision of computing that harken to the garage days that included Woz. Sometimes it become hard to see the solution and embrace it. But, let go of the past, of the dysfunction of Microsoft and come to synergy of technology with clarity of thought. Yes, Rob… We consider you a friend and hope you will see our advice and embrace it. Let not time pass, you have a chance to save your name in history. Join the solution Rob, join us with Apple and we can save the world and your dismal reputation. 😁
Eeeeek!
eh…sounds nice but please leave him off our turf,
far away-ee-ay.
let him play somewhere else, not in our sandbox…
Enderle says, “I may be delusional.”
Dear Rob,
There’s no “may” to it. You are totally delusional. So much so that your cognitive dissonance circuits blew out years ago!
I’ve never been able to find a way to express to Rob Enderle just what a loser he was becoming… which is why I consider Rob Enderle’s continued suckiness to be my own greatest failure.
What the hell is this? One day Rob gets up and says, I think I will write an article about how important I am???
Go back to sleep Enderle….forever if possible. I doubt even your mom thinks you are important.
Ballmer failed because windows and office are unnecessarily complex and hard to use. There is no excuse for this in 2013. As soon as normal people, who just want to get stuff done, had a chance to vote with their dollars they did. Hence the popularity of iPad, iPhone and Android. I would hope that in the coming few years CEOs, and CFOs will tell their CIOs “why can’t it just work”. Then MS is in REAL trouble. Right at this moment 80% of “office workers” (the building, not software) have a viable alternative for 100% of their work. I really feel like Microsoft is holding back massive increases in productivity of the American workforce.
What senseless egotistical drivel, nothing new to see. A total total waste of time from a wannabe.
“…and failures like Zune and Vista, which could have easily been anticipated and avoided…”
Really, Rob? Really?
Here’s what YOU had to say about the Zune at the time (2006, BBC interview):
“It is a flanking move, Microsoft is trying to encompass Apple and turn them into a bit player. The strategy is brilliant…”
And here’s just one example (there are too many to list) of what you said about Vista:
“If the reaction of the PDC developers is any measure, this will be bigger than Windows 95 was, and if Apple and the Linux community can’t make the hard decisions needed to address this competitive threat the negative impact on both of them will cover a broad range and will be unavoidable.”
Rob, I’d call you a douchebag, so many do, but even a douchebag serves a useful purpose. You have none. Except to entertain us with your hilariously unintentional jackassery. Actually, keep it up!
@bubbles, thanks for a great comment. Really nails it.
Never heard of this guy before. I assumed he must have been the CEO of a massive worldwide company at some point reading the summary of his article above, but now I realise he is actually delusional. Glad MDN iCal’ed his article about 2013 being the year of the Blackberry!
This is Onion…no, no – Kaufmanesque satirical brilliance!
…It *is* a joke, right?