“Microsoft Corp largely missed the mobile market in the last decade, its recently departed chief executive officer said Tuesday,” Lisa Fleisher reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Speaking at the Saïd Business School in Oxford, U.K., Steve Ballmer, who stepped down from Microsoft one month ago, admitted that he would re-do the last ten years if he could,” Fleisher reports. “‘We would have a stronger position in the phone market today if I could re-do the last 10 years,’ he said. The answer, he said, is to pick up and try to catch the next wave.”
“‘I’m a very interested board member,’ he said of the company he joined in 1980 and headed since 2000. ‘I own 4% of Microsoft,’ he said. ‘I care a lot about my child, and my investment, and therefore the investment of the other owners of our company,'” Fleisher reports. “Mr. Ballmer said he sees technology playing a major role in two areas in the future: bringing the next billion people into the consumer economy, and disrupting entire fields that are still slow to change, healthcare and education.”
“One student asked what it was like to be incredibly wealthy and powerful,” Fleisher reports. “Mr. Ballmer said that he usually would have punted on a question like that. But now that he’s retired? He felt free to say what he really felt: ‘I can play just about any golf course I want.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
Ballmer T. Clown would need to go back longer than just ten years.
Steve Jobs was already handing Gates and him their asses well before 2004.
Sniff. Okay, we admit it:
We miss the big dumb monkey already!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dominick P.” for the heads up.]
“…disrupting entire fields that are still slow to change…”
Hmmmm… Slow to change?
Like, uhhhhh… Microsoft?
They redefine the concept of calcification.
Does anyone have his email? I want to send him a link to the YouTube of him laughing at the iPhone and loving his strategy. It never gets old.
SteveB@microsoft.com
his kids already sent him that link.
…on their iPhones.
ballmertclown@ringlingbrothers.com
Like, like, like….all 3 posts above! His kids are probably over 18 now and buy whatever phone they want (don’t have to obey his old rule of no Apple products in the house). Can you imaging them seeing their father running around sweating and screaming on YouTube? They must be scarred for life unless of course he does that at home on Thanksgiving or something.
Was that the “Sad Business School” where he was talking? It fits.
Yeah I wish I invested more money in AAPL ten years ago also
We would all do things differently if we could turn the clock back ten years.
If that privilege were granted to Microsoft’s customers, they would have abandoned Windows when Vista was launched, rather than wait for Windows 8 before seeing the light.
Hindsight is 20/20.
Microsoft would like the last 14 years back to not make a sales guy the CEO. Sales guys generally don’t have a vision for the future. If they ask for something new it’s because the competition is already selling it and by then you’re too late.
Now Ballmer’s skating to where the puck will be?
More like curling to where the stone was. – And falling.
If only he was still running Microsoft . . . sigh.
Now Ballmer’s skating to where the puck will be?
More like curling to where the stone was, and falling.
Skating to where the puck was ten years ago.
He and MS had 10 years to own the tablet PC but they failed.
Even after SJ had shown them the iPad they still managed to pour $900m down the pan with their first attempt.
However the cash cow that is Government a locked in to MS Office so they fail with complete immunity
A do-over for mobile phones? What would they have called their flagship phone: Zune Sr.
ZunEToon
Zone.
yeah, try to catch the next wave.
Meanwhile, Apple is busy preparing the next wave.
As the old saying goes, “he who laughs first laughs last.” Good luck in your retirement and God’s speed.
If they ever do a Microsoft movie, I want Stevie B. to be played by Jeffrey Tambor. The guy played the “bumbling buffoon businessman” role perfectly with George Bluth, Sr. He’s a great fit for Ballmer T. Clown.
Is he available for hire for kids birthday parties? I mean he is a professional clown right?
That would put a whole other level of “creepy” on the clown gig. haha
Now I want to remake the E-trade baby commercial with Balmer in the background. Can’t you just see him with his tongue sticking out. Eeeeeee!
He’s the scary clown. You don’t want him at kid’s parties. Now S&M, bondage parties? He’s a hit at those.
You guys are right. Forget the Clown parties, S&M is the way to go with Baldy!
“Missed?”
How about ridiculed it and watched it get gobbled up by Apple?
A do-over? Wouldn’t we all. Talk to Marty McFly.
Even if Ballmer did get a do-over, but could not keep the knowledge he has now how the market turned out, he’d still flunk out. I’d love to go back in time with that Sports Almanac and advance knowledge of stocks too and make a fortune. The point is that would be easy and not deserved. You missed it because you’re a misfit and didn’t have the talent in the first place. Now he’d like to cheat and get it right. Sorry Uncle Fester, the right people got the credit the first time.
Why does MDN sometimes refer to Ballmer as the luckiest dorm assignment ever??
Roommate of Gates at Harvard.
Thx, did not know that (was before my birth then).
Well, no wonder he got the CEO position, can you imagine somebody THAT weird becoming CEO in a big company like MS with his “own merits”, no way in hell..
That’s the philosophy of MS: catch a wave! Not making waves…
That beach clown fell off his surf board before he got in the water.
Uncle Fester was hit with a tsunami! There is no next wave.
Perhaps we should be more circumspect in our comments about Ballmer. 10 years from now, it may very be that people will talk the same way about Cook. It’s not as though Apple has had any amazing breakthrough success or revolutionary product since Jobs resigned. The objective observer might correctly surmise that Apple today is just cashing in the checks from app store sales instead of busting their butts on insanely great new products that users truly love using. The flat interface fad and the late slow buggy software releases have not given Apple users much to cheer about. At least Apple still makes nice hardware.
“Apple is operating exactly as it did under Steve Jobs: Disruptive innovation happens sporadically and then each product is refined in quest of perfection.
• iPhone was released 5 years, 7 months, and 19 days after iPod.
• iPad was released 2 years, 9 months, and 5 days after iPhone.
• Tim Cook has been Apple CEO for 2 years, 6 months, and 9
days.”
Enough said.
You seem to have missed quite a few products between your selective iOS product examples.
I want HannahS to add a comment here that includes the word ‘moribund’. How cool would that be.
Apple tends to do most of its innovating in stealth mode…then goes BOOM!
I’ve softened on Ballmer considerably since his company hit the iceberg. He never really did get it, the big dumb clown. At least he was vastly entertaining with his slapstick and profoundly prescient “developers” rap. He has a lovely wife and family, and his ban on iPhones in the house is gone now they’re grown. (Connie always had two, one for show and one hidden, like Paladin with his Colt strapped down and the Derringer under the belt.)
The true villain was always Bill Gates, who engineered the rise of an empire that would conquer the world, with all its attendant collateral damage, and exited once he saw the writing on the wall, leaving his clueless “buddy” Steve to ride the toboggan down into hell.
They were heavily entrenched and motivated in the smart phone mobile and tablet market. Eight years later, Apple got it right. Now they try to forget that.
Microsoft missed mobile? Really?
– I never noticed! Ba ha ha ha
And he hasn’t changed:
‘Catch the next wave’
To compete with Apple you need to CREATE the next wave. Good try though
Notice how he mentioned ‘healthcare’ regarding disrupting markets? Ballmer must have been reading some MDN rumor posts about people guessing what Apple’s iWatch may accomplish!
Of course when Apple comes out with he killer iWatch, Gates and Ballmer will reply, “meh, we could have done that.”
What a douche.
The Brown Zune was his masterpiece.
“We would have a stronger position in the phone market today if I could re-do the last 10 years”
Now that Ballmer knows what he knows now, he wishes he could go back and do what Apple did with the iPhone.
You know, like Samsung did.