View From Above » Steve Ballmer

Elop Continues to Tilt at Windmills

Ron Miller — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 18:29:17 +0000

You have to give Nokia CEO Stephen Elop credit. Some lesser CEOs might just curl up in a corner and wait for the merciful end, but not Elop. He continues to fight and defend his strategy even while his company’s stock price plunges, rumors (which he vehemently denies) fly about takeovers and the market moves along — as his company desperately develops a new line of Windows phones.

In fact, Elop reminds a lot of his former boss at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, full of foolish optimism against all odds, never willing to give an inch to the mess his company is in.

Instead, Elop, in a speech this week to the World Mobile Congress tried to paint his chief competitors as a Hobson’s choice for cell phone buyers, trapped on one side by the evil closed Apple, and on the other by Google, a pretender that says it’s open when it’s loaded with proprietary code.

Fine, who can blame the man for trying to take down the competition a peg or two. After all, when his company’s Windows phones finally do hit the market late this year (assuming they meet their targets, that is), he wants to soften the market and have a place for his company’s phone to land.

And IDC is actually predicting that once Nokia phones running Windows Phone 7 do hit the streets, Nokia could make the Microsoft OS Number 2 in the world by 2015. That’s a bold prediction, especially given the sorry state of the Windows phone OS market today, but it has to at least encourage Elop that his strategy could work.

If you want to see the reality that Elop and Nokia face, however, check out the latest comScore marketshare statistics released last week, which showed Microsoft actually losing market share between January and April this year — not exactly the trend you hope to see when you release a new OS as Microsoft did late last year.

I’m not sure what makes Elop or IDC believe that slapping a Nokia label on a phone running Windows Phone 7 will suddenly magically make the market want it. Even if Nokia makes phones that are much, much better than the current offerings from HTC and Samsung, I’m not convinced it’s going to make much difference. Elop admits that in order for Nokia to succeed it has to cover a number of price-points across a range of markets from the sophisticated smart phone markets in the U.S. and EU to more practical phones for the Asian market.

Even now, as he attempts to put down his formidable competitors at Apple and Google, he is probably 18 months away from covering all of those markets and no amount of rhetoric is going to change that.

Elop might even believe in his strategy — he has little choice but to plow ahead — but while he makes speeches, more people across his range of markets are making other phone choices, and it’s going to be a very hard sell for Nokia to get them back.

I’m not ready to write them off just yet, but I will say, even under the best of circumstances, it’s going to take a long time for them to right their ship and restore their stock prices — IDC’s optimism not withstanding — and I’m wondering how long it will take before investors run out of patience.

Photo by jjjj56cp–thanks for 66+K views in my 1st year! on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Microsoft’s Mixed Cloud Message

Ron Miller — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:54:35 +0000

You have to give Microsoft credit for one thing: they understand the future is in the Cloud and they want you to know it. They are almost literally screaming it from the rooftops just in case you aren’t clear. It’s in their speeches, press conferences and ads, but I still can’t help but feel there is a mixed message coming from Redmond.

When I was at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany a couple of weeks ago, I saw that dual personality on full display. Microsoft held a high-profile press conference where they were touting their cloud credentials with all the enthusiasm they could muster. Yet at the same time, I couldn’t help noticing it was always tied to their desktop mainstays Windows and Office.

Even though Microsoft clearly recognizes the value of cloud services, it seems incapable of weaning itself from its desktop darlings. Sure, you can use the cloud to accomplish all sorts of interesting things. Just don’t forget that it all comes back to Windows and Office.

Meanwhile, Forbes Magazine reports on a recent speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to oil and gas executives in which he predicted that Microsoft’s Kinect gaming tool would have a big role in Microsoft’s cloud computing platform in the future. Blogger Christopher Helman wrote:

“…Ballmer explained that the Kinect technology could eventually help bring oil reservoir engineers together from all over the world to study and manipulate a 3-d rendering of an oilfield. The sensors, said Ballmer, will eventually be integrated into PCs and smartphones and powered by the cloud-based Windows Azure platform. “

That sounds great, but when given the opportunity to demonstrate that kind of round-trip potential today between the cloud and connected devices (leaving Kinect out of it for now), Microsoft failed to do it. A case in point is the new Windows Intune system due out later this month.

It’s an interesting new cloud service aimed at IT Pros that lets you monitor your company’s Windows PCs from a web console. For instance, if a PC on the system needs an update (such as a Windows patch), you can distribute the update and the machine is updated via the cloud without having to be connected to the network.

So far so good, but even though it lets you receive email alerts when the system detects a problem, it lacks a Windows Phone 7 app that mimics the web console. It seems this would be a perfect scenario to connect the desktop, web and smart phone via the Cloud, but they didn’t take advantage.

And even as they tout the Cloud, some of their blog posts seem to question its value. Take for example, the Success is a Marathon, Not a Sprint piece posted by Tom Rizzo on the Why Microsoft blog last month. While seeming to support the cloud, and of course Microsoft’s approach to it, the post recycles many standard cloud fears.

I’m not sure how you can be all in with the Cloud while reciting tired arguments against it (even if it’s to build up a case for your cloud services). If you need further proof of Microsoft’s cloud angst, look to the fact that the man hired to be the company’s chief cloud architect, Ray Ozzie, quit long before the Cloud strategy had a chance to develop fully.

I know I’m confused by all of this. Seems that Microsoft wants it every which way. They want to say they are in the cloud all the way, while protecting their lucrative desktop market. As long as they play it this way, they will be telling two stories and they can’t be surprised when that creates confusion in the marketplace.

Is Microsoft Really Committed to the Cloud?

Ron Miller — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:58:52 +0000

Is Microsoft really fully committed to the cloud as CEO Steve Ballmer has continually said over the last year to anyone who will listen? Looking at the spate of recent departures, it’s hard to know, but given their core desktop business, I find it hard to believe that it is.

Joe Wilcox writing in Beta News on Thursday suggested the public departure–what he referred to as a “public execution”–of Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools division, was mostly due to Muglia’s failure to embrace the cloud. Wilcox wrote:

“The public nature of Muglia’s departure also communicates to Wall Street just how serious Ballmer is about the cloud and transforming the server business to embrace it — the same way Allard’s and Bach’s departures showed renewed commitment to transform the mobile business.”

But does it? I’m not so sure Wilcox is right on this one and I say this for a couple of reasons. First of all, let’s look at the departure of Ray Ozzie, who announced he was leaving last October. Ozzie, after all, was the man Ballmer hired to develop and nurture a cloud strategy at Microsoft. When he left, it seemed to me that his parting email was a shot across the bow to Microsoft that perhaps it wasn’t embracing the cloud as much as public statements had suggested.

The email was full of juicy quotes, but one of my favorites was this one directed squarely at the heart of Microsoft’s problem:

“Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT. Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use. Complexity introduces security challenges. Complexity causes administrator frustration.”

This doesn’t sound to me like he sees a rosy cloud-mobile future for Microsoft. Quite the opposite. Instead, it sounds like he sees a company that refuses to shed its client-server roots and take the necessary steps to make the transition it absolutely needs to make to survive in what Ozzie refers to as the next-generation “post-PC world.”

Wilcox could be right about Ballmer consolidating his power, but I don’t think it’s about because he wants to execute his big cloud-mobile vision and these executives stood in the way. Instead of being a visionary, I see a leader in disarray, one who reacts to the changing landscape around him, rather than trying to develop and control it.

The bottom line is that Microsoft won’t abandon Windows and Office on the desktop and as such, it’s committed to this increasingly complex desktop software Ozzie warned about. By contrast, if you look at the recently launched Mac App store, you see smaller apps that do one or two things well along side word processors and other traditional desktop software.

Microsoft is going to be a formidable company for the foreseeable future, regardless of what they do just by the sheer momentum they have from the Windows/Office tandem, but it’s going to take a lot more than lip service and some executive turnover to transform the company.

It’s going to take clear vision, and I’m not convinced Ballmer is the man who has what it takes, his recent power plays not withstanding.