Ten years of Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer has been chief executive of Microsoft for a decade now - but how have things gone?

By Nicole Kobie, 13 Jan 2010 at 14:20

Microsoft has never really gotten the web, and Ballmer certainly hasn’t done much to change that, falling behind on web apps and more.

Will have time to catch up over the next decade, or as some predict, is this the last year for Ballmer? Only time will tell, but either way, we'll miss the stage performances, if nothing else.

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Unloved - with good reason

Microsoft must remain one of the most unloved coroporations on the planet, and with good reason. It forgets that customers do not buy its products because they want them, but because they want the functionality that they (should) provide. In other words, if I buyt a database, it's bcause I want to administer and use the data in that; and I may (and have) invest large amounts of my time settting it up to be able to produce just the information that I need. Likewise with word processing, or spreadsheets. And just because a company like Microsoft may have a product update cycle, it doesn't mean that I have to have one too. So incompantibility between different versions of software - or worse, of operating systems is a major issue to a non-IT professional like myself. I still use dfatabases which ocnmtain information laded laboriously over 20 years ago; I still want to read spresheets created a decade ago. But often I can't; Microsoft has seemingly abandoned its Works fiornat, so that I can extract information saved in one MS product into a newer one (Word/Excel). And my 20 year old ones only work becuse I can still (just about) run a DOS window in Windows XP. (I can no longer print the graphs since Win98 ended.) Sure I invested in an early generation Windows upgrade, but that soon stopped working in later Windows versions. Oh, and why did the ability to spell check in Outlook Express in languages other than French disappear when I upgraded from Word 2003 to Word 2007? Because MS don't care about providing a service to their customers, that's why. They just want to lock us into a treadmill of upgrades to bloated software, that then - in a vicious circle - means we have to upgrade the hardware too. (Actually, if you look in the NS knowledge base, they tell you to stop using Outlook Express and use MSN instead!!! So why do they ship it with the operating system?)

OK, this is a rant about Microsoft and not specifically anout Mr Ballmer, but it explains why their profits are down. Because technically reasonably savvy people like myself, who have been using PCs since the early 1980s but don't have a vast IT support department in the wings, know that buying Microsoft products is likely to be an expensive option in the longer term. It's probaly no one man: the culture of arrogance and self congratulation about inferior products is probaly too ingrained for any one person to make a difference.

So I have now reached the position of never trusting Microsoft and always expecting its products to fail after 5 years.

By Petrolmaps on Friday Jan 15

Re: Unloved - with good reason

It never ceases to amaze me the number of people who trash microsoft software and their attitude YET still depend on their software.

If you have been having problems for 20 years why use windows ?

I have used a mac to run my business since 1984 and have always been a happy bunny, many people talk about mac fanatics, but they are happy with their software and for the occasions when you really have to use microft rubbish you can always run an emulation program...

don't complain and continue to give idiots like Ballmer your hard earned cash, switch to a better system !!

By whydefu on Tuesday Jan 19