Why ballmer failed

Ballmer can claim some important successes: revenue tripled during his tenure, profits doubled, and the company scored a big success with the Xbox videogame business.

The Windows and Office franchises remain highly profitable, and Microsoft is well-entrenched as a vendor of corporate computing products and services. At the same time, though, repeated forays into mobile phones, tablets and music players have come to grief.

The Surface tablet, aimed at the hugely successful iPad, alienated longtime hardware partners even as it failed to generate significant sales, and a phone partnership with Nokia has thus far yielded little for either company. At the same time, the company has lost billions trying to compete with Google in the Internet search business. The recent reorganization was aimed at reshaping Microsoft - once primarily a purveyor of packaged software - into a company focused on devices and services, essentially mimicking Apple.

Yet most industry watchers felt it was too little, too late, with some calling on the company to back away from the consumer products sector and focus on serving businesses. All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. The Microsoft Zune 16 portable media player, a second-generation of the Zune, was released in November Apple had sold nearly million iPods by the time Microsoft sold its first competing device in The Zune was taken off the market in What has gone wrong?

For starters, Ballmer proved to be the anti-Steve Jobs. He missed every major trend in technology. His innovations alienated people. When he tried something new, like Windows Vista, the public lined up around the block to trade it in. Microsoft missed social networking. It completely misjudged the iPhone and the iPad. But if you actually take a look at the 1. In the case of music, Apple got out early. They were the first to really recognize that you couldn't just think about the device and all the pieces separately.

Credit that to Steve Jobs and Apple. They did a nice job. But it's not like we're at the end of the line of innovation that's going to come in the way people listen to music, watch videos, etc. I'll bet our ads will be less edgy. But my year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll get him to own a Zune. Before Apple released the iPad, there were leaks of something called the Courier from Microsoft.

It was a dual-screen, pen based tablet that had gadget nerds hyperventilating. Ballmer killed it before it was even close to being real. The Courier probably would have been a failure, but at least it was different and exciting. It could have evolved into something that challenged the iPad. Ballmer says Vista was his biggest regret.

I would say that's probably the thing I regret most. And, you know, there are side effects of that when you tie up a big team to do something that doesn't prove out to be as valuable. Ballmer got lucky his initial offer was rejected. And in an impressive recovery from this screwup, he later realized his mistake and walked away — leaving Yahoo to make an even bigger mistake.