Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Will Retire in the Next Year

Not soon enough. His announcement generated a $2 pop in the stock. I heard on CNBC that Ballmer made $600M as a result of his quit announcement. That was due to his stock value increase. They didn't say if he realized that gain. I'd bet he didn't but it is funny to imaging.

MSFT is down 39% since Steve took over but it recently had some good recovery. Announcement of Surface tablets, windows 8 and a new XBOX has created a surge in stock. I bought in at $26.50 last December and held to April and sold it making enough to buy my Surface Pro kit. It was my plan and it worked out. recently I bought back in at $31.60 hoping to hold for a return to recent highs with the XBOX. Now I may sell on this announcement since I'm up about $500 in a month.

The next big question is who will now run the company? Will Microsoft end up like HP?
 
It is definitely a question I can't wait to hear the answer to. Who will take over?
 
I have been saying Ballmer needs to go for a long time.

Unlike Don, I don't have a ton of optimism about MS. Surface and Surface Pro have cost the company hundreds of millions , maybe even a billion dollars. Windows Vista, 7 and 8 have been critical misses and they have barely moved the needle on their far from competitive 5% of the mobile market.

Yeah, they have "sold" a lot of Windows because just about anything without Apples name on it in the desktop market is sold with it already bundled into the cost of the PC.




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Don't know how Windows 7 can be called a miss. :confused: Almost universally liked as far as I can tell.

MS is in the same boat a Apple right now IMO. What is the next big 'thing'?

MS seems to be too slow to react to market changes. They pretty much missed out on the tablet craze, non-player in phones.
 
John- I'm not really hoping MS has a great sales year on the Surface Products. I'm completely passive on the issue. Unlike my main interest in Apple, I just was interested in owning a Surface Pro since the day it was announced. The more I add to it the more I'm loving it. It does everything I throw at it. Yet I still love my ipad too but for completely different uses. The Surface Pro gives me my office on the road, much the same as my old Dell laptop but Surface is far more compact and state of the art. The ipad on the other hand gives me access to Apple apps and many of those are really fun and easy to use. The Thunderbolt gives me access to Android World. I like having the whole pie and eating it too. :)

PS- I did sell out my MS stock and realized a quick $575 since August 6th buying it. Meanwhile, I bought a few more shares of Apple on Friday's pull back. I'm doing very well with Apple trades these past few years and expectations are that it plus a few others will make me rich before I hit 70. Hopefully I live long enough to see it. ;) I may buy back in MSFT again as twice this year it has moved enough to pocket some easy money. When the Ballmer Is Gone excitement is over the stock may fall back again. Then we'll see what happens with the new CEO. If Bill takes the reins, I'd buy as much as I could get. The stock will then really pop. Right now he is just on the interview committee.
 
Don:

I think Gates is done, and I'm not sure how relevant he would be since he isn't staying in touch with the tech world as he used to. I think he's been passed up by younger, brighter stars such as Sergey Brin + Larry Page at Google, and Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.

Why does every tech discussion have to be about your stock purchases and how great of a trader you are? It's a non sequitor to the discussion at hand.
 
Hopefully MS will find another visionary to lead it back. MS is not really suffering, it is making tons of money, just that it seems stagnant.
 
Who leads a company is more about the business profitability and more related to shareholder impact than the technical aspects of the products. These leaders are more about the business of tech industry than about details of the workings of the products. Who and when they retire is hardly technical. I would hope that by exposing more of how we can gain benefit from these tech companies, in addition to owning and using the products, all of us can benefit. Of course, anyone is free to participate as he wishes. Satelliteguys offers a wide variety of discussion topics. You have the option to read what you want and ignore the rest including ignore any poster you want. I have never been secretive about my interests in any company and why.

No doubt Google execs are bright and very capable too. But, like Zuckerburg I don't believe either of them is a candidate to leave their companies and work for Microsoft. And Zuckerberg has yet to prove himself as the guy to take his company to the next level. He is just on the way after a rocky start for the first year . My only interest in Bill Gates is that he has the track record and the experience to do what CEO's do. He can lead and find the tech people who will turn the company around. View it like when Steve Jobs came back to Apple. This is more about leadership than knowing about what fascinates gamers or even get an engineer like John Kotches excited about Microsoft again. If the CEO can do that, more guys like John Kotches will come on board. But you need not worry, I doubt Melissa will let Bill go back to work. :)
 
Don:

I wasn't coming close to suggesting that the younger giants take over as CEO of Microsoft. So where you got that from I don't know.

They are the Bill Gates types of the current generation. They get the internet and Mobile. Microsoft has shown that they don't.

I don't think that Bill Gates as a figurehead is a particularly great idea as he isn't the inspiration to the 20 and 30 something's that he was/is to the 40+ crowd.

Mobile, distributed and cloud computing (in all its various incarnations) is where the action is and MS is way too late to the game.




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The leader of MS does not need to be the technical expert. It needs to be someone that sees the big picture, what direction things are going and spot the best talent and companies to recruit/buy. Jobs did not build the iPhone, he had a vision of what it should be and got the right engineers together and did not settle until it was just like he wanted it to be.
 
But you need not worry, I doubt Melissa will let Bill go back to work.

I had a brain block. I meant Melinda. :D

And considering I wrote that, I guess I didn't understand what you were suggesting with Your comment that, you said: "I think he's been passed up by younger, brighter stars such as Sergey Brin + Larry Page at Google, and Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook."

I wouldn't be so quick to state Bill Gates doesn't get the internet: Do you recall who coined the phrase: "Information at your fingertips." Bill Gates understood the internet long before your new leaders were out of grade school. I agree that Microsoft doesn't demonstrate these days it gets cloud and mobile. But, are you blaming that on Bill Gates? The whole point here is that Microsoft has had a non visionary in charge and that was and still is Ballmer. I've often referred to him as a "dickhead." Bill Gates has been out of the limelight with Microsoft for too many years to have the respect from your 20-30's crowd for sure. But, if he comes back and performs as before, I think he could move the company back again. I'm damn certain his return will trigger acceptance on Wall Street, more than anyone else. And if a year from now we begin to see new movement in innovative OS for mobile, a competitive OS that maybe works very well with voice recognition, new security measures that solves those problems, The company could be back in the running to be a 30% of mobile along with 30% Apple and 30% Android. I doubt MS will ever show the profits that Apple generate but certainly keep up with Google. Google is still too fragile a company, and little stuff can cause it to lose market cap fast, then in a year gain it back. MS is very stable but no real growth. A guy like Bill could change that. Because he is not only a great technical mind, but also a great business head and knows how to sell and market the products.
 
Don:

You need to go back to where MS had to give away to get any traction with it. They didn't see it coming.

You also clearly aren't aware of the ages of the players involved. Page and Brin are 40 and were in college/grad school as the internet was morphing from public to private.

The Google search engine was available on Stanford's University Network in nascent form when the web was a mere 10 million web pages in size. This was 1996. I started using Google in either 1998 or 1999 and it was vastly superior to Yahoo and Alta Vista, I never used MSN search so I don't know how good (or bad) it was.

In 2009 MS launched Bing and in 2011 Google demonstrated that MS was using Google's engine for at least some of it's searches.

Unless MS has some hidden visionary talent they need to go hunting and quickly.

They aren't going away, but their dominance is going to be substantially diminished as the disruptive mobile technologies cut away at their core business.


Yeah Zuckerberg was in grade school at the time, he hasn't even reached 30.



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You need to go back to where MS had to give away to get any traction with it. They didn't see it coming.

Microsoft under Gates was a ruthless competitor. They got slapped down a couple times by various governments. Yes they took over the internet by hard wiring in IE to windows. They also grabbed Office by changing Windows to break the competition... Bill Gate's MS was going to win at all costs, and if they get some fine in the future after taking over the market segment, they did not care.
 
I see MS repeating history of Steve Jobs at Apple when he came back, but if Bill and Melinda say no, then I see MS repeating history of HP. I don't care how young and brilliant you think Google execs and Zuckerberg are. Breaking up the company into smaller pieces is another option. I will also predict Jim Cramer will suggest that in the coming weeks.
 
http://www.dailytech.com/Microsofts...Didnt+Plan+to+Retire+So+Soon/article33238.htm

Rumors of Ballmer being forced out, perhaps by Gates...

In addition, many suspect that Microsoft Chairman and Co-Founder Bill Gates was in favor of moving Ballmer's retirement to a sooner date. While one source said Gates didn't "instigate" it, he wasn't exactly as supportive of Ballmer as usual.

Interesting statistic:

All Things D added some figures that surely hurt Ballmer's case. The day before Ballmer took over as CEO in 1999, Microsoft’s market capitalization was $600 billion USD. On the day before he announced his retirement, it was under $270 billion USD.

Ouch destroying $330 Billion dollars in market value! Of course 1999 was also the tech bubble, but MS never seemed to have recovered under Ballmer...
 
Unless monumental change occurs MS will not see that market cap again.

Unless some really big stuff comes from Apple I don't expect them to get into the market cap they enjoyed a year ago either.



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