>"Microsoft is PC company, nothing more, as demand for PCs shifts to mobile."
I doubt Forbes serves its website from an iPhone.
B2C is a small portion of Microsoft's business (though massive on an absolute scale). From the days of their agreement with IBM, Microsoft has always been grounded in B2B relationships. The fact that the author can mention Dell, Nokia, and HP indicates a strength that companies to which they are often compared such as Google and Apple, lack - Michael Dell's B2B relationship with Microsoft helped make him a billionaire.
Under Balmer's tenure, Microsoft has become a stable mature company which has consistently realizes massive profits through established long term relationships with their customers. Microsoft started paying dividends a long time ago. It's not a growth stock.
Balmer remains CEO because he is not beholden to Wall Street. He's second only to Gates as a shareholder. They can look long term in a way that other companies cannot and direct Microsoft accordingly - because Balmer's job isn't at risk based on some two bit analyst's opinions.
I'll agree there's a strange blind-spot in much tech reporting on Microsoft. It consistently misses Microsoft's stable, mature and solidly profitable B2B business. Even if worse came to worst, they could sail off into that land IBM pioneered, remaining happily profitable for decades to come.
But at the same time, Ballmer has made some horrible blunders. The XBox was nearly strangled by their obsession with beating Sony out of the gate with the 360. The Zune was a disaster. The years of utter denial regarding WinCE vs the iPhone and Android. Groove. Danger. Skype. The complete lack of a functional ecosystem between their own first-party products. [1] The critically successful Windows Phone being artificially hobbled by bureaucratic concerns [2]. Mismanaging the entire tablet sector for years, only to show up three years late with a confusing compromise...
In short, nothing but their B2B business (and you can lump much of their Windows licensing money in as part of that) has been run well.
[1] XBox Live vs Games for Windows Live, XBox Media Functions vs Windows Media Center, Zune vs XBox Marketplace (and don't get me started on the mess that they created when they tried to finally centralize media under the "Zune" service brand...)
[2] The name is absurd. Why not "Metro"? Why didn't they just put it on a tablet and call it a day? Why are they finally delivering a Metro-ish tablet, but under a different architecture and name and with some obtuse desktop metaphor lurking under the covers?
Saying there were obvious, preventable mistakes is different than saying the entire product is a blunder.
The early release was a mistake. A mistake that cost them billions of dollars and did nothing to help them measurably "win" against Sony. [1]
The nonsense being grafted onto XBox Live and the dashboard in general is also a mistake. [2]
The 360 is an overall success despite those things.
[1] The 360 succeeded largely on the strength of XBox Live and Sony's shooting themselves in the foot over-engineering --and thus overpricing-- the PS3.
[2] Allowing publishers to erode the experience. Muddying up the formerly-clean media experience with largely nonsensical divisions of functionality is a mistake.
There is a counter argument in the book "The Race for a New Game Machine" that makes the case that the early release was a key factor in passing the PS3. If next XBox holds on, it will be money well spent.
I'll certainly take a look at that, but I remain unconvinced thus far.
The PS3 was demonstrably price-bound for its entire first few years on the market. The existence of the 360 or its early lead just didn't seem to matter. And the "needed to launch first" position has a habit of entirely writing off any negative effect of having poisoned gamers against MS Hardware quality. (Which to that point had a spotless reputation.)
Microsoft owns it. They could build a worldwide phone network on top of it. They even have a hardware partner with deep penetration in the developing world.
They may yet blow everyone's doors off with first-class integration of Skype. But given their position in the marketplace, and carrier's dislike of anything that pushes them toward being dumb pipes any faster, color me pessimistic.
They could also seriously upend the market with a skype-only no-phone-plan, PMP/phone that runs off wifi and/or prepaid data. That could justify the price of the Skype purchase as well. And I'm just as pessimistic about that.
I'm not saying they won't ever do anything with it. But they paid a pretty penny and thus far don't seem to have any coherent plan.
I'm pretty sure they have confirmed that Skype will have deep integration in WP8. And look at BBM, iMessage, Google Voice... the carriers may not like these things, but so far they've been unable to stop them.
If Compuserve and AOL had a veto over what browsers people could use, yes, that would be a decent analogue.
It's not that Microsoft needs carrier approval in a technical way. But they absolutely need to be on the carriers' good side in a business sense. If Microsoft is pushing products that will erode carrier profit margin, the carrier stores are not going to push Microsoft's phones.
And Microsoft has had little luck to date selling phones without their help.
The US model of carrier subsidies for mobile phones is not only limited in its geographic scope, it is exceedingly vulnerable to disruption for the same reasons that cable and traditional phone companies carry internet traffic for a flat fee.
I didn't say Google was a better name but here goes.
Bing is physically difficult to speak. And as every fourth grader who has taken math knows, Google actually means something. Bing doesn't mean anything; it doesn't even evoke any thought or emotion.
Based on http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://forbes.co... they don't use Microsoft software either. As for Microsoft's profits, anyone who has read The Innovator's Dilemma can see all of the signs of a late stage great company that has failed to address disruptive innovations. They will continue to have great profit margins as they bleed customers until they wind up with no business left.
As much as this pains me to say it, I don't think Ballmer is the worst by far. The reality is that MS's numbers are still great despite not having the stranglehold over the PC industry that they once had. It's still a very strong company. I don't care for their products, but many people still do.
Ballmer deserves the crap he's gotten for his prior arrogance, but I have not seen that behavior in a long time. I have a hard time criticizing him for his lack of clairvoyance of Apple's success, but who else had it in 2007? Only Google comes to mind.
This story is just out there to get picked up by bloggers and hopefully go viral. I actually think the man deserves more respect.
That's fine, but the problem is that his early mistakes means that Microsoft has been playing catchup, and will continue to play catch up. They've effectively coasted on their existing installed base without innovating. Nothing about the experience of Windows now is any different from what it was in 2000. There is nothing audacious about what Microsoft has attempted to do this century, save for the xbox & the kinect. My life isn't better because of Microsoft.
That despite the fact that Microsoft has had some awesome researchers and projects. They have by and large failed to bring any those tools and products to market (the kinect again being a notable exception).
If you look at the latest Windows Phones (seriously, Apple and Android have virtually identical interfaces - the odd one out is Microsoft) and Windows 8 (yeah, it isn't on the market yet, but they released the beta), that's clearly not true. There was the Ribbon too in Office, which was radical enough a lot of users complained during release. They released the Surface and Surface 2.0 as well, though I don't know how strong their market is. Bing has done some interesting things, particularly with video search and maps. I've just gone through 5/6 divisions, 5/7 if you include Skype.
All of this aside, Microsoft hasn't needed to innovate to the degree of the other big players for a while. Apple needed to innovate in order to secure some set of markets in order to survive. Google wants to innovate since it needs to gather more data to boost its ad business. Amazon wants to be the retailer for everything, and anyone selling anything else (e-books, music, movies - notably) cuts into their profits, so naturally they want to cut into those markets first. Microsoft... had Windows and Office, no real issues there until Apple started to edge in on the consumer market alongside non-PC devices. Even prior to that, Vista was an attempt at innovation that resulted in major screw-up for a ton of reasons, Windows 7 was the fix. Is it really any surprise we're only seeing real innovation (in Windows) now?
I think the main keyword out of your rant is "My life...".
Many small businesses or mom & pop shops may have benefited from Windows+Office (specifically Excel, Word, and Access).
They can also purchase Office 365 and have tight integration with their one and only laptop to run their small business.
Sharepoint Online + Office 2010 are extremely powerful and beneficial for those that don't have their own IT department.
Sure, people can keep pointing out Salesforce, Basecamp, Highrise, some random CRM, some random Time & Expense stuff, shopify and so on but if you can get SP Online + Office 2010 for less than $25/month... that's hard to beat.
They have made a lot of progress on the Sharepoint side which will keep them in the enterprise market for a long time. .Net was released in 2002 and it's become a completely viable alternative to Java which was vital in the long term. Bing is an also ran, but it's still the #2 search engine in the US which IMO is not that bad of a place to be considering where they where in 2000. And Windows 7 was fairly good, heck Vista was fine on decent hardware far better than there old school failures like Windows ME.
With that said, I think they are in for a vary long vary profitable decline but IMO so is Apple. Honestly, that's just what happens to large companies.
I'm curious what progress you think they made in Sharepoint?
Last I heard everyone was ditching it for Dynamics or anything-else-but-Sharepoint. I've never heard a good word said about Sharepoint. Though they seemed good at selling it. But it sounds to me that it invariably turned into a disaster.
I've always regarded Sharepoint as the new Lotus Notes, I'm happy to admit being wrong as my experience with it is a little tainted as I once worked for a company that Sharepoint was often suggested as an alternative to our product.
Sharepoint is a big and growing product for Microsoft.
Dynamics is their attempt to join the ERP, CRM market and so far it's still a niche because they're targetting mid-size to large enterprise but the larger companies typically would either go with Oracle or SAP for ERP and something else for CRM.
In some respect, it is similar to LotusNotes in which you can write little apps backed by a data structure called SharePoint List (or SharePoint Document Library). So when I saw Trello, that's like Sharepoint List. Period. Sharepoint List is the core data structure, everything else seems to be derived from it.
The biggest difference is of course SP is web-based and tightly integrated with Microsoft other products: Office, InfoPath, .NET, Dynamics, Outlook, Exchange, AD, etc.
You can pretty much do/build almost everything (specifically Line of Business type of app) with SP (let's avoid technical discussion regarding whether an implementation of Time Tracking should be backed by RDBMS or not since these days people are using NoSQL anyway).
I have to say that it's not a bad product and there are use-cases where Sharepoint can fit.
Dynamics is Microsoft's line of enterprise business applications (CRM, ERP) - products like Dynamics AX (their top-of-the-range ERP) can integrate pretty tightly with SharePoint, they aren't competing products.
"They have made a lot of progress on the Sharepoint side which will keep them in the enterprise market ... it's become a completely viable alternative to Java ..."
Sharepoint appears to be little more than a recreation of the Internet "in the small". First time I saw it I had the same thought as the last time I saw it: "WTF do we need _this_ for? We already share files; we already have FTP; we already have the Internet. WTF???"
I mostly try to avoid Sharepoint, but I see it used all over the place.
IMO, It is mostly just a mix of document repository (SVN) and custom website with permissions linked to active directory. However, organizations that can't roll their own intranet site worth a damm can often setup a SharePoint site that meets most of their needs. It supports customization through both plugins and custom code which is how MS get's their long term lock-in. For companies that can maintain say a talented Ruby on Rail's team there is little benefit but where the 'programming team' mostly slings excel macro's SharePoint can still get stuff done.
It's a slippery road to re-implement Sharepoint capabilities using Rails.
It's a typical buy vs build scenario. From my understanding, it's not difficult to integrate other enterprise apps to Sharepoint and make a dashboard.
You can probably do that with a bunch of Rails people but if the platform provides a decent "Portal" capabilities out of the box with minimum modification, why build from scratch?
The alternative is to install MediaWiki, WordPress, some sort of CMS perhaps, some sort of Portal (LifeRay?), some sort of document management system that supports versioning and decent web UI, integrate a bunch of services using custom web-app. That's a lot of infrastructure to deal with.
To be fair, it is a FTP with permissions and a decent user interface, and plays nice with a Microsoft ecosystem.
Whether that is worth what Microsoft is selling Sharepoint for, well, that depends on the buyer. It also has the "nobody was fired for buying IBM" point (and Microsoft does have decent support).
I still haven't seen an Open Source Sharepoint "killer", though I might not know of it (I had good hopes for Alfresco).
You could say the same thing about the release of OSX. MS is playing catch up in the mobile sector, a place they never dominated. They still OWN pc marketshare.
Now make me stop defending these guys, I'm getting heartburn.
Ballmer certainly deserves more respect. Microsoft is still growing and making significantly more money at higher margins than nearly every other company on the planet.
This article was published in a week where the CEO of a major corporation admitted that he was completely wrong when he called concerns about his bank a "tempest in a teapot" just 4 weeks ago. He called his own company "sloppy" and "stupid" on national television.
Shouldn't MS's numbers be base lined against Apple's?
Clearly the industry has had that kind of growth in it, Apple did it. While MS is printing money like no one's business, the growth seems to have stopped where as they are a very rich company, a very talented company, with tons of resources, why haven't they grown?
It's hard to say Ballmer is bad, the numbers to speak for themselves. At the same time, if you maybe spun Xbox out and let it run as a small nimble company, maybe it'd be dominating, not carving off a third. Same with windows mobile and maybe even bing. There does seem to be some level of market share they can win with incredible expense (what they spend to win that market share has to be way more than the competition) and then the machinery of MS sort of bogs it down and it's a far smaller number than "Windows Everywhere" would have you believe they are capable of, it's not a leader in the market. You have to wonder about the future, I don't think they're in trouble but the tides can turn rapidly. What's the end game for Windows 8 tablet? 15% market share? 10%? What's acceptable? Moreover, it just seems like bad news is coming out about it and it's going up against iPad. Short of the DoJ leveling some sort of charges on Apple, I don't see windows8 tablets getting out of the blocks, let alone "Windows Everywhere." And then the flip side, what would they have Apple do? Allow IE on iPad? Is that going to change any thing?
I have a hard time criticizing him for his lack of clairvoyance of Apple's success, but who else had it in 2007?
Ballmer has done a lot to copy Apple in the past decade: Zune, Win7 UI, WinPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if they repackaged their old tablets in a sleeker Apple-esque style (which would be funny, because MS was genuinely first to that market) In general you get a very 'me too' feeling out their products in the past decade. (plus Azure and bing, which didnt copy Apple but other companies)
This article is actually phenomenally ignorant of what it means to run an entity such as Microsoft. Ballmer is no gem, but the author suggests he failed because he didn't re-invent an inherited, gigantic behemoth constructed in the eyes of Gates, who hung around for years in a non-official capacity. Oh, and he lost to Apple.
Could he have done better? I guess. Could he have done worse? I'm sure.
I don't understand how anyone could have thought Ballmer was anything other than Gates choosing his friend to fill the job. He's always been completely out of touch with technology. He's completely a Suit and not a Geek, to put the stereotypes to work. What's worse is he's an egotistical suit that thinks he can just will the technology industry to follow his (Microsoft's) lead. He doesn't even want to understand technology or the end users' needs. He rode Gates' and Allen's coattails and he's comfortable in his riches. He has no motivation to attempt innovation and he's stuck in his comfort zone. Billions in residual revenue from Windows and Office upgrades? Good enough for him apparently.
They need a CEO with a strong openness principle and willing to listen two great advisors: a designer with strong UI/UX experience, and an engineer who knows how to implement those designs.
Summary: Drop Ballmer, get some Apple design sense, and keep shit open. That is how you'll move the industry forward with Microsoft leading the way.
Windows 7 is pretty good in my opinion. I only run a linux box right now, but when I need Office/Photoshop/Games, I'm much more likely to go with Windows than Mac.
What's wrong with windows as of Windows 7? As far as I can see, not very much. It seemed quite stable for the limited time I used it. It's good to look at. It gets the job done. What more do I need?
I'm sure Windows 8 will be a decent move up from here. A better choice for worst CEO would have been the former RIM CEO or the current Nokia one. I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE THEY DITCHED MEEGO IN FAVOUR OF WINDOWS PHONE!!! AARRGGGG!
1) The start menu is just terrible, 2012 and they haven't imposed a method to avoid it being a jumbled mess. Worst part, even if i reorganize it to be more gnome 2 like, next time an app updates it fubars it again. The only thing that makes it remotely usable is the search bar.
2) Explorer's file copy capabilities are really bad, get 3-4 transfers going to your NAS, a USB key, whatever and it crawls to a halt.
3) Explorer just completely goes to hell if you lose connection to a network drive. I have my home NAS mapped as a network drive, take the laptop somewhere else, tell it to resume, "oh no i have a folder on by NAS open when it went to sleep", now I have to wait 20 minutes while it decides it can't find the network drive, nor will explorer do anything while it waits. Also the using the "file upload" window in chrome is useless when the NAS drive isn't available, it literally crashes chrome on my laptop since chrome times out waiting for windows to decide the drive is unavailable, i have to use drag+drop to attach files to gmail.
4) Mouse scroll wheel only works on the window with focus, luckily there is an addon that fixes this called WizMouse
5) No virtual desktops.
6) No native mounting of iso files, seriously I have to install some third party program that installs a fake CD-ROM drive to access the file system of an iso?
I think that covers my major gripes, my only major gripe of linux, and why I stopped using it as my primary OS, is just terrible management of multiple displays, especially in multiple orientations.
I agree, but for what it's worth I've seen much better performance with Win 8, both the Developer Preview and Consumer Preview. They file copy user experience is also about 15,000x better as you can see here:
If you are someone who invests in learning how to use your tools, nothing. Technically, I think they've done a great job in fixing the issues of Windows past.
It is still a system for experts though. Just the other day I used Windows (7) for the first time since Windows 2000 was all the rage and found it to be an incredibly confusing experience. I almost felt like I had never touched a computer before.
Since this article seems to be directed at consumers, most people there are not experts, and that is where Windows is failing.
I was pleasantly surprised by Windows 7, and it doesn't make me physically ill to use or support like Vista did. It's like a cleaner, stable XP.
But that's the problem, really. I didn't love XP - in fact I feel like I remember the inflection point sometime after SP2 where people were starting to say, 'XP isn't that bad any more - it's gotten pretty solid and isn't too much of a pain.'
That's not really attractive.
Innovating on UI is probably what they should be doing - because all three major operating systems are powerful enough when not intentionally crippled, but Windows 8 is pretty repulsive.
I've been a windows user for a long time. Windows evolution is too damn slow and too profit driven. Being a Microsoft customer, feels like being subjected to a painfully slow usability experiment. Now they bring forward WinRT and Metro UI but I expected that with Win7 or even earlier. Whats wrong with win7 ? Its just a (more) stable win xp with a new theme and a new price. If I had a business, I would be scared to let Microsoft control me by the b*lls.
And there are people still using XP because they say 7 is a horrorshow. I've worked (in the last year!) with some salesmen at my company who still ask to be moved back to DOS because they can't figure out Windows.
Opinions are a funny thing: they're not always logical.
People are mostly still using XP because they said Vista was a horror show, and the upgrade path from XP to 7 is either extremely difficult or impossible.
You misread the versions. Windows Vista to Windows 7 takes about 5 clicks, yes.
But there is no direct upgrade process at all from XP to 7. It's possible to go XP -> Vista -> 7, but no sane person would buy a copy of Vista just to do that. Here are Microsoft's official instructions for upgrading from XP to 7.
First you export all your files and settings from XP. Then you install Windows 7, which is actually a fresh OS install and not an upgrade. Then you reinstall your programs and import your files and settings back in.
I've tried out the consumer preview as well. Can't say anything about how it performs because I tried it on VM but it had some obvious flaws that affected usability. I don't think we should judge them before the final release though. (or maybe we should wait till SP1 :D)
I submit Robert Nardelli for the Worst CEO Hall of Fame. CEO of Home Depot, drove customer experience at the store to the ground all in the name of profits, stock price was unchanged during his tenure (and his tenure saw the biggest run up in home prices in American history). CEO of Chrysler, drove it to bankruptcy.
How can anyone can seriously consider this article where the reporter constantly compares shares prices now to.. the height of the tech bubble of 2000 ?
How about comparing profits ? Oh wait.. didn't Balmer double that..
Well said. I am no fan of Balmer, but using stock prices to my comparisons from one period to another is usually foolish. It's one thing to say that the price of a stock has plummeted in a short period (SHLD being a good example from the article) is indicative of poor leadership; it's another thing entirely to compare stock prices where they currently stand to when they were priced for perfection.
this article is poorly written, microsoft is still a very profitable company with tons of cash in the bank and though ballmer hasn't innovated much over the past few years, they haven't fallen as much as the author likes to suggest (unless you're talking about stock price which is moot anyway since microsoft's a value company now). it takes different ceo's to steer a company through different times. surely you don't think companies are at the top forever do you? DEC anyone?
for the record, i am not a fan of (developers developers developers) ballmer or microsoft, but this article just pure stinks. competition has heated up and this is after all the technology sector where even things like social media can lead the industry.
How many new CEOs get more than 1-2 quarters before they're judged? Why is Elop treated differently? Over 4 quarters of disastrous results after an equally disastrous abandonment of his suppliers customers and products.
Elop can legitimately be described as a disastrous CEO and should have been dismissed as soon as he uttered "burning platform". Even the similarly disastrous Apotheker who manned HP got less than a year and wasn't as bad by the numbers or employee sentiment.
I don't agree that Steve Ballmer should be in that list. Historically he has been responsible for Microsoft's massive expansion while Gates wanted to keep his company 'lean and mean', so in a way Ballmer is responsible for MS doing so much R&D, although he doesn't have the same ability as Gates to make his researchers focus on successful future products.
OTOH the one CEO that I would put at the #1 spot is Stephen Elop, of Nokia. Nokia had a great OS, API and developer ecosystem and Elop gave all that away. Despite what the media is happy to report the Symbian OS is a perfect fit for mobile technology, touchscreen or not; a RTOS kernel (just like any kernel, as the Mach Kernel used in iOS) only needs the adequate drivers to handle multi-touch screens. There was no valid reason for giving all that to Accenture. Nokia is making a great range of devices, but now all developers will be coding for Android, thanks to Mr Elop.
I am disappointed that there was not more direct information regarding the links between Ballmer and the directions the mentioned technologies have taken.
I can't help but think that there are other factors besides a single individual regarding Zune, Vista, CE, and so on. Can it really be true that one individual is responsible for every one of those going the wrong way?
Microsoft is still a valuable company and continues to be in millions of homes, businesses and schools around the world. Keeping a foothold in that market seems like a success, to me. Losing stock value is one aspect of the measurement of successes of a company, but is it truly the reflection of a single individual?
In corporate culture, the CEO is, fairly or not, a proxy for the company, and thus, the individual held responsible for the success or failure of the corporate entity.
No different from firing the manager or head coach of a sports team (which may inherit a losing streak due to pure luck or regression to a mean from a spectacular run of winning seasons).
On the sidebar is a couple of Warren Buffet stories and if his next 3 years are like his last three[1], he might make the list. Microsoft doesn't look so bad compared to his fund.
What a load of crap. All these CEOs are guilty for low stock values? I doubt. Cisco, for example makes top notch networking gear, and it's only so much they can achieve there - I've had my Linksys routers for years now and I doubt I'll have to change them anytime soon. I don't think they can revolutionize the market any further. And that is not CEO's fault - they merely stick to what they are good in. Why is that wrong?
I think that's nonsense. I don't like Ballmer, either, but nowhere have I seen any evidence that he's hurting Microsoft because of it. Look at NASDAG:MSFT, and you'll see that Microsoft is actually an incredibly stable company. This is very likely to change in the future, of course, but this has little to do with Ballmer, per se, and more with the fact that its flagship (i.e. Windows) is becoming less necessary for a lot of people.
Its kind of disturbing to see speculative articles like these make a quick huge wave and creates some kind of impact. Most of the logic behind picking these 5 are based on the stock price, on the other hand if some well known wall st person makes a stock pick, price shoots up. I think this article is little over the limit.
What happened to Cisco? Aside from crazy acquisitions, and their long-time strategy of having employees leave, build a company, sell to Cisco for a high price, work for earn out, then do it again, and again, what did Cisco do to fall from where it was to where it is now?
As a thought experiment, imagine the change in Microsoft's market cap if tomorrow they announced that Steve Ballmer was stepping down and Bill Gates was returning as CEO. The result, at least in my mental model, doesn't reflect well on Steve.
Aaand we revert to the usual correlation/cause confusion that usually surrounds leadership discussion. For all you know, Microsoft could have been much worse off without Ballmer. Fate and the actions of the collective other will always have this kind of unpredictable, mountain-moving power, and foolish men will always try to attribute it to something they can measure. Nothing is this simple.
Not exactly Forbes but a "motivational speaker" and a blogger. No doubt he has the experience of running a company the size of MSFT and crippled by anti-trust settlements on both sides of the Atlantic
By the way, Microsoft is still growing all while investing in xBox, Bing and Microsoft Research (PE of around 11 and valued north of $250 Billion.) They have returned tens of billions to shareholders via dividends and still have almost $50 Billion in reserve. This blogger should send his resume and ideas to the board of top companies if he can do better as CEO.
Microsoft is about to make a cool and predictable $25 Billion in profit this year. 25,000,000,000.00 in just one year. Not sure what will happen 5-10 years from now (no one really does) but it's a great achievement for a "dead" company.
There's little doubt that Ballmer has been a mediocre CEO in terms of innovating or at least properly catching the latest technology waves.
However, the Forbes articles ignores several important issues.
1) Ballmer has tripled the sales, and doubled the profits in the last ten years at Microsoft, while paying out $100 billion in dividends (and MSFT still has $60b in cash). This with a company that was already the most profitable tech company (2002). That is not a terrible performance, specifically because...
2) Had Microsoft gone with someone else, it's just as possible they could have ended up like HP, Dell or Yahoo. Microsoft is not in that boat however, and Ballmer has not destroyed the company. The article mentions Windows, but ignores server + tools, which has grown tremendously and is very profitable. Consumer Windows is not their lead profit machine any longer.
It's far more likely that someone would implode a company that is on top of the mountain, than that they would figure out how to create the first trillion dollar company. It's worth keeping that in mind: the only way Ballmer could have apparently succeeded by the article's qualification, is by creating a trillion dollar company out of a price per share ($60) that was derived from the greatest stock market bubble in world history.
There is a limit to how much money you can make at any given time in the global business eco-system. Microsoft had nowhere to go stock market wise, sideways from a stock market bubble price would have been a helluva accomplishment (just ask Intel or Cisco).
Everybody touts Apple today, but the most likely best-case outcome for their company is sideways (5% annual growth) for the next decade. Once you hit the top of the mountain, it becomes nearly impossible to keep soaring.
I doubt Forbes serves its website from an iPhone.
B2C is a small portion of Microsoft's business (though massive on an absolute scale). From the days of their agreement with IBM, Microsoft has always been grounded in B2B relationships. The fact that the author can mention Dell, Nokia, and HP indicates a strength that companies to which they are often compared such as Google and Apple, lack - Michael Dell's B2B relationship with Microsoft helped make him a billionaire.
Under Balmer's tenure, Microsoft has become a stable mature company which has consistently realizes massive profits through established long term relationships with their customers. Microsoft started paying dividends a long time ago. It's not a growth stock.
Balmer remains CEO because he is not beholden to Wall Street. He's second only to Gates as a shareholder. They can look long term in a way that other companies cannot and direct Microsoft accordingly - because Balmer's job isn't at risk based on some two bit analyst's opinions.