Microsoft’s board should fire Steve Balmer

Posted by Mauricio Longo in General on Jun 10th, 2010 | 2 comments

Microsoft’s board of directors should fire Steve Balmer, the company’s CEO.  Anyone with a bit of touch with reality and that has been following what is happening in the tech world over the past couple of years cannot think differently after watching Balmer’s interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the D8 conference.

When discussing tablet computers and specifically the iPad, Balmer dismissed the explosive sales of the iPad mentioning that eventually there would be a number of devices “…that are light and don’t have a keyboard and will run Windows”.  Microsoft has been trying to get the tablet PC right for over ten years and I think that if you sum all the unit sales from all companies selling Windows based tablet’s they might not equal two months of iPad sales.

Of course one expects that the CEO of a company to show some confidence that his company won’t have a problem in competing with others, but Balmer can’t seem to get the tone right.  He comes across as a person who has been living in another planet and isn’t aware that Apple has significantly changed the rules of the game for tablets.

The fact is that perhaps he really hasn’t got a clue if you take smartphones as an example.  LG, Samsung  and Nokia which aren’t software companies had no trouble coming up with phones which tried to approximate the iPhone’s very successful interface, while 3 years later Microsoft is still struggling to get somewhere with its mobile phone OS.

While discussing the future, Balmer was categoric that the future would be dominated by PCs, not lighter, simpler computing devices such as the iPad.  While PCs do dominate right now, after only two months 91% of the people that got an iPad is satisfied with the device and a large number of people seem to be using less and less their regular computers in favor of the iPad.

On this Balmer states “The bulk of the market is going to stay with general-purpose devices.”  By general-purpose devices he means PCs.  A funny aspect of this is that to minimize the impact of having a kind of device for which Microsoft is not ready growing in the market, Balmer labels the iPad as a PC.  So, perhaps he is right… PCs will be used by the bulk of the market, but they will be iPad-like PCs.

Through out the interview, Balmer is not convincing.  He knows that Microsoft is in a very bad position to compete in the smartphone and tablet markets, which are growing very fast, but he acts as if the company was handling very well these areas, which it very clearly isn’t.

In contrast to Balmer’s position on what devices will be used by the bulk of the market in the future, you have a recent statement by SAP’s Chairman, Hasso Plattner, that “Apple’s iPad tablet computer will shape the way business is conducted”.   Mr. Plattner said that eight out of twelve customer representatives he met at the company’s Sapphire fair in May were using an iPad.

If Microsoft’s board isn’t going to change its CEO then at the very need they need to get him some coaching on how show confidence without looking like the village fool.

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2 Responses to “ “Microsoft’s board should fire Steve Balmer”

  1. Michael Campbell says:
    June 11, 2010 at 12:26 pm

    I think I would feel more strongly about agreeing with you, but as a consequence of Ballmer’s lack of leadership, Microsoft just isn’t relevant. In other words, …, who cares if he stays or goes?

  2. Ben says:
    July 17, 2010 at 11:50 pm

    Ballmer is the worst. Microsoft has got to get rid of him. Microsoft is in the same position as Apple when they were led by Gil Amelio. They’re just floundering around.

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