WOOHOOOOOOOOOO

:omg::omg::omg::eek::eek::eek::eek::neckbeard::neckbeard::neckbeard:

5/?

1 is best 5 means you might be ****canned. I don't think he actually has a review like the rest of us but **** THAT *******

Oh, I thought your comment on the review was a real thing. Either way, yeah, that's news, but I'll wait to cheer until I see who's replacing him.

Microsoft Corporation
NASDAQ: MSFT - Aug 23 12:40pm ET
34.47+2.08‎ (6.42%‎)

Well, they are out of money to spend on buy-backs. I guess they have to keep the stock price up somehow.

Yeah, it could easily go south. But at least there's a chance of drastic organization improvement now. There was none before.

I bet Sinofsky's regretting not keeping his mouth shut.

Maybe if they had gotten rid of Steve Ballmer before he drove everyone interesting out of the company, they wouldn't need to hire Heidrick & Struggles to source someone.

Pretty much.

Bring back Gates!

ps does steve baller like cake or something?

No. Steve Ballmer only likes advertisers.

He used to like developers, but then he read an article in Forbes about how Google attained profitability by packaging and selling their users to other firms instead of offering a compelling platform for third-party developers. He didn't really understand how it all works, but now it's advertisers advertisers advertisers.

Steve Ballmer is, you could say, on Adkins.

TBH he does a lot more than that, and to be fair being the CEO of Microsoft isn't easy. But he's only arrived at a good vision for the company far too late, screwing up too much in the process. I don't really hold that against him, but I do hold his terrible HR decisions against him.

His terrible HR decisions are caused by metrics-based management, which he relied upon because he doesn't understand his own industry well enough to serve in a leadership role unless the performance of his company is predigested for him. "Selling software" is a perfectly good vision for Microsoft, and it probably would have kept working if they had maintained the ability to make software that sells.

Like maybe instead of competing directly against Google in sectors where they can leverage their search and internet advertising monopolies, focus on sectors where Microsoft can leverage its desktop operating system and business productivity monopolies??

gotta catch that cake

I'm going to nod and pretend I know what's going on.

let me break this down for you:

1. steve ballmer likes cake

2. steve ballmer is the ceo of microsoft

3. steve ballmer spent too much time chasing a flying cake and not enough time running microsoft

Bill Gates is doing more important work.

strategic patent acquisitions and establishing a third-world pharmaceutical cartel in order to coerce developing nations into buying microsoft, monsanto, pearsons, glaxosmithkline, and coca-cola products, and to de-nationalize their oil supplies.

Steve Ballmer needs to go. MS has failed to see the maximum potential of most of their recent ventures: Win8, Surface RT, Windows Phone, Xbox One to name a few. Granted Win8 isnt bad, but seriously the inclusion of 'Classic GUI' would have made nearly everyone happy. A simple fix which MS was unwilling implement due to their vision of a common interface between desktop-tablet-phone. The problem is Surface RT or Windows Phone have yet to gain significant traction. Surface RT can't compete with Android Tablets, probably due to the MS's strict hardware requirements which drives the price beyond that of typical android tablets. Just based off Xbox 360 momentum, the Xbox One should have been an easy homerun for MS but they botched the marketing and have nearly leveled the playing field for the Sony.

...& let's not forget funding initiatives that undermine what's left of our public school system. It's OK though because he & Buffett want to pay a higher tax rate than their secretaries.

As a non/semi-technical user, I don't hate Windows 8 as much as I thought I would. I can see where they were going with Metro/Start (essentially re-creating/imaging the Desktop--not merely replacing it) & think that it's a step in the right direction but it curently (the coming updates are a slight improvement) lacks any real customization & there's really no excuse for not being able to create a modern operating system that looks & feels like something designed for the casual user (e.g. touchscreens/smartphones) but also has the complexity that technical users are looking for.

Metro IS fine. If you're a tablet user.

Too bad most Windows 8 installs aren't tablets.

Needless to say, it's manageable, but it's more the issues of things like Metro apps being really terrible at multitasking (Nothing is more fun than Netflix getting backgrounded because I started messing with the desktop on the other monitor), the start search feature broken for /no reason/ (seriously, why categorize, you're not even helping the average consumer here), the hotcorners not working when certain apps are active (did anyone even test this ****?), segregated control panels (luckily being mostly fixed in 8.1), and more.

They made it easier to use for tablet users and sacrificed huge amounts of usability for desktop users. At least OS X's launchpad is a thing you can remove from the dock and forget it exists.

Internet defends Steve Ballmer: but over the last 13 years, Microsoft's revenue has doubled! Too bad their industry has grown exponentially, with at least three major tech upsets that Microsoft completely missed despite having a position in those markets years before anybody else.

Internet defends Windows 8:

Yes it is, ref: my six pages of posts in the Windows 8 thread. Severe specific usability defects, poor design and implementation throughout. Good core idea, incompetent execution.

Not the people who are holding the garrote, a.k.a. developers. Not when the one true blessed path to selling your Windows app not only relies upon it, but also relies upon Microsoft service employees doing their jobs competently. And definitely not with the wave of truly terrible dev tools that came with Windows 8, or the sunsetting of so many very good dev products around the time of release.

lil reminder for the forgetful: after spending 10 years refining and upselling .NET to everybody in the whole industry, in tyool 2013 the only officially-recognized path to writing hardware-accelerated multimedia apps in C# is OpenGL under an open-source, reverse engineered clone of a product they no longer develop, and pretty soon native developers will be in the same situation.

More likely it took them 3 years to figure out how to integrate Metro into Windows as poorly as they did, and by the time they realized that people hated Metro it would have cost them an entire product cycle just to get rid of it again.

iPad has an 81% market share in the US despite its high price. Android Tablets are dominating in China and other developing countries because they're dirt cheap. Surface RT can't compete with either of them in any market because it is garbage that nobody wants.

None of this is a given at all.

First, the Xbox One controversies probably won't have any real effect on sales. Gamers are notoriously whiny, entitled, fickle brats, who never follow through on anything (e.g. 99% of people who claim to boycott EA). If the always-on DRM thing hadn't been the "deal-breaker" issue of the day, it would have been the always-on camera - an Actual Cool Feature that would have been celebrated had it not been revealed at the same time Microsoft was in the news for cooperating with the NSA.

Second, PS3 should have also been an easy homerun for Sony, but they had to ship a year late because of supply issues and it cost them the top of the market. The same exact thing could happen to Xbox One. PS4 and Xbox One are more or less perfect substitutes modulo the network effect, so it's a sure bet that one of them is going to be clearly dominant, but it doesn't really matter to consumers which one pulls ahead.

And it always will, because instead of striking out for a real UX guide and a set of standard usability conventions they decided to go full retard and let every jackass app designer style their user interface with HTML however they want. Pretty hard to offer customization features when you don't provide standard widgets.

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/games/1301761/gamestop-ps4-pre-orders-double-those-of-xbox-one

Granted they aren't releasing the actual pre-orders numbers and even then those can be cancelled. But it's pretty clear that Sony has a lot of hype going for the PS4, mostly thanks to Microsoft's ultra-crappy marketing. Regardless if there has been sales lost or not, it's been a public relations nightmare for MS. I'm sure money was wasted as MS scrambles to re-code things like making Kinect 2.0 optional, and changes to it's DRM/sharing policies.

Neither of those have been hard to do. I work on the team that does licensing, pretty much nothing changed. We just changed the parameters of the policies. We are rushing to ship but none of it has anything to do with anything that's been in the news. Kinect was never strictly required, it was just designed to be ever-present so that developers didn't have to worry about whether or not it was available, so it wouldn't become marginalized and unused.

Prohint: Gamers who post on reddit theorizing about the state of the industry almost always have no idea what they're talking about.

Jon`C is right that none of it's going to matter at launch time. I think it was a mistake to cater to the voices of a few whiny gamers on the internet. Come launch time no one is going to be at Best Buy asking about DRM policies. They're just going to buy the thing so their kid can play Ghosts or whatever launch title they want most.

Every jackass app designer makes their own skinned apps on Android an iOS, too. It's just that Android and iOS actually have style guidelines, whereas MS style guidelines are dispersed amongst several hard to find, poorly written MSDN pages.

http://www.zdnet.com/now-all-windows-developers-have-been-thrown-under-the-bus-7000019912/

Bashing Microsoft is fun and all but I don't really see the issue with 8.1. It's not really a full OS update (like 7 to 8), it's basically a small service pack. And considering they're only distributing it via Windows Store or whatever, it's not even traditional in its release.

Now, if for some reason your program is broken by this update, then that's Microsoft's fault. But I don't see this being as particularly bad as they want to spin it.

Because previously they've distributed DPs through MSDN (a subscription service which exists for exactly this purpose, mind). For Windows 8.1 and forward they aren't doing it anymore. Customers DGAF whose fault it is, they're going to call you anyway, and frankly this is the company that distributed breaking changes with silent failure for the .NET 4.5 runtime so there is literally zero reason to be confident that any app you currently support will work on release day.

Yeah, well, that's Windows for you. I don't know if any of that will change under Terry Myerson. I'm not really holding my breath.

This evening, I read about the Yahoo!'s tumultuous chief executive search, which churned through CEOs that ranged from acerbic to fraudulent, many of whom instituted layoffs. I do not argue that focusing (at the expense of some product lines) might do us well, but as an employee, I am nonetheless concerned by the lack of clarity about what's coming next and the specter that when things get shaken up as MSFT is recast in a new CEO's image, they might get shaken up for the worse.

I have to agree about the "console wars" thing. I really don't think anything people are talking about now will have any effect on who actually pulls ahead. In fact, I think console hardware has little to do with its own success, and has everything to do with their exclusives library.

As far as Microsoft, I recently stumbled an article that explained exactly what Joncy mentioned: That they've pretty much sat on their hands and let their market fall to pieces despite having a leg up on everyone on every front. Apparently they had one of the widest distribution networks and inexpensive R&D, and did little to nothing with it. Remember when surface stuff came out a long time ago, and then they did ****all with it?

The on-going tumultuous chief executive search, since the CEO du jour is the bay area activist shareholder pick. A CEO who spends her time alternately making an ass of herself with raw, eye-watering unchecked privilege, and dumping all of a company's savings into acqui-fires, probably isn't too interested in the long term.

What's worse though?

As bad as it would be for employees, the best thing for shareholders and customers would be dissolution. Windows and Office are clearly holding each other back, enterprise, AD/IIS/MSSQL/Exchange tied to Windows is leaving money on the table, E&D just wants to do its own thing. Many expensive products could also be discontinued without affecting competitive advantage, like Visual C++ and Trident.

Basically what I'm saying is that the whole company is retarded and a horrible shake-up is what it needs. Ballmer's last reorg was like rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.

How are Visual C++ and Trident expensive? IIRC there's not that many people working on them.

Including PMs, SDEs and SDETs, I have a hard time imagining fewer than 100 people are working on Internet Explorer (not including JScript, which is in DevDiv). Visual C++ front-end might be smaller but you have expensive architects there doing essentially nothing, plus you have the STL which is licensed from Dinkumware with at least one senior SDE on integration full-time, plus you have the EDG front-end and however many people they need to maintain it in addition to the Visual C++ one.

Also at $180+ pa total compensation per worker it's pretty hard to argue that any of those products are cheap, even if they're critically understaffed. Considering that they're a pure cost sink and Microsoft makes zero money off of them.

Oh, you said Trident, not IE. I can't give out numbers but your estimate for all of IE is... low. But Trident is a pretty small part of IE.